The Church: One Year Fades Another Begins to Emerge

Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone and the Feast of Three Kings/Epiphany is upon us. For both the religious and secular media it is a time for reflection as well as speculation: what were the key points of the year just past, what looms as the issues of the coming year. (and while some Catholic commentators dismiss New Year’s Day reflections as ‘non-Catholic’ or non-religious…most go with the flow and acknowledge that benchmarks are benchmarks with even the head of Vatican Radio joining the fray).

There are some common themes: the clerical abuse scandal everywhere, Papal trips to Malta, the UK, Spain and the main synagogue in Rome, the on-going eruption over what the Pope did or didn’t say and mean or didn’t mean on the question of condoms, the impact of The Year of The Priest and the ‘crossing the Tiber of Anglicans adhering to Rome. All of these stories speak to a Church wrestling with the world and within itself. It has not been a year where dull was not the apt adjective. It also seems inevitable that the issues raised on the Papal Journeys, with the Clerical Sex Abuse Scandal, about condoms or even Anglicans are issues that will continue to be present in the coming year.

John Allen Jr. at the National Catholic Reporter has his own list of the five most underreported Vatican Stories of the year and it makes for fascinating reading. Two of the stories that make his list concern the Vatican Bank and Anti-Christian terror attacks both of which were in the news as 2010 morphed into 2011. The Pope announced new measures to deal with money laundering and transparency at the Vatican Bank and Christians in Egypt were subjected to yet another terrorist bombing.

One issue the Pope raised frequently during the year was the vital necessity enmeshed within the question of religious freedom: whether in the Mid-East Synod (another one of the ‘underreported stories’), in exchanges with Iran, while preaching in London or Barcelona, or in his annual message for World Day of Peace, as reported in the Catholic Register. And while the attacks on Christians in the Middle East appear to be escalating it is an issue that heats up in a less violent but perhaps as dangerous a way in the growing confrontation with China over religious freedom there.

And as 2011 opened it became clear that the issue would continue to pre-occupy his Holiness. He announced that in August he would host an inter-faith congress in Assisi, an event that will mark the 25^th anniversary of a similar summit hosted by John Paul II.