Stand Up 4 Vatican 2

Bishop Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham will defend the Church’s teaching on celibacy at a major debate in London two days before the Pope’s visit.

The bishop will be joined by Jack Valero, spokesman for the Cause of Cardinal Newman and the co-ordinator of Catholic Voices, and Fr Stephen Wang, dean of studies at Allen Hall seminary.

The event will take place at the Odeon West End Cinema in Leicester Square, London, and will follow a screening of Irish feature film Conspiracy of Silence, about a priest who wishes to marry.

The motion of the debate will be: “Celibacy should no longer be a compulsory requirement for the Roman Catholic priesthood.”

An article written by Esther Gordon as a result of the Stand up for Vatican II inaugural meeting.  It was written for the Grails's In Touch magazine - a quarterly which is used to keep contact with the widespread membership and to alert people to what is current especially among lay people in the Church.

I stood up for Vatican II on a chilly January night by attending a meeting with the title above. I believe that meeting was important for a number of reasons, not least being that the venue for the meeting had to be changed to the Thistle Hotel, close to Westminster Cathedral in order to accommodate an unexpectedly large group of people who were keen to attend. Interest had been roused by the title of the meeting which had been advertised in the Catholic press. The three speakers, Michael Winter, former priest and Catholic writer, Sister Myra Poole, Notre Dame Sister and campaigner for women’s roles in the Church, and Robert Noel, Catholic spokesperson and journalist, all three spoke movingly about the impact of Vatican II from their different standpoints. They touched on the historical background of both Vatican Councils, the theological innovation in the documentation and the enormous difficulties that had to be overcome. The second half of the meeting was given over to questions and comments from the floor. This was well handled, bearing in mind some strength of feeling.

Trial of Pope Benedict XV1

How do you atone for something terrible, like the Inquisition? Joseph Ratzinger attempted to do just that for the Roman Catholic Church during a grandiose display of Vatican penance — the Day of Pardon on March 12, 2000, a ritual presided over by Pope John Paul II and meant to purify two millenniums of church history. In the presence of a wooden crucifix that had survived every siege of Rome since the 15th century, high-ranking Cardinals and bishops stood up to confess to sins against indigenous peoples, women, Jews, cultural minorities and other Christians and religions. Ratzinger was the appropriate choice to represent the fearsome Holy Office of the Inquisition: the German Cardinal was, at the time, head of its historical successor, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. When his turn came, Ratzinger, the church's premier theologian, intoned a short prayer that said "that even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth."

Alan Wilson, The Guardian

At the close of the Munich Kirchentag, loyal German Catholics showed themselves eager for reform

Sitting in the rain with 100,000 people at the closing service of the recent Munich Kirchentag, I noticed that my free plastic rainhood was surplus stock from the August 2005 Cologne World Youth Day. Then the sun shone, the crowds cheered, and the pope grinned his most benevolently vulpine grin, amidst talk of a Catholic renaissance in Germany. The showers held off five years ago, but it's all over now.