Oct 26, 2003 / 22:00 pm
Participants at the Summit of the lay organization “Voice of the Faithful” (VOTF) convoked this weekend at Fordham University's Rose Hill Campus, harshly criticized Catholic bishops, but also offered unspecified “cooperation” to face the Church’s current crisis.
VOTF’s Keynote speaker, former priest Eugene Kennedy, a psychologist, opened the meeting with a joke about the vacation plans of each person of the Holy Trinity and said the Holy Spirit option was: “I'd like to go to Rome. I've never been there.”
Kennedy also said that the church hierarchy, by denying sexuality, had lost its understanding of the human person and even true holiness, making scandal possible, and called homosexuals “the scapegoats of the age.” “This is a problem of the official church, in which the people have lost their confidence, not of Catholicism, in which they retain their faith,” he said.
On her turn, Sister Dorothy Ann Kelly, the former president of the College of New Rochelle, accused the bishops of fighting “numerous opportunities to give the laity a greater voice,” from with the Second Vatican Council to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's “Common Ground” initiative.
Sister Kelly also said lay people “have to be ready to sacrifice reputation, friends even, to press our cause” in front of what she called the hierarchy's “continued defensiveness.”