L’Osservatore Chicago: The snail Church

(POSTED: 12/2/09) Take heart, Bishop Gumbleton, there will be women priests at your canonization in 2109. Even now I hear the trumpets.
We cannot rush these events. Like the snail in the old Father Leonard Feeney couplet, the Church "does the holy/Will of God slowly."
It only took one lifetime -- mine -- to set up Father Damien of Molokai for canonization. Father Damien was a great model to my grandmother who, as I remember, gave me an affecting little pamphlet about his service to the lepers of Molokai as soon as I could read. The description of lipless lepers was a little much for a 7-year-old. While I did not want to emulate him, I was happy to acclaim him saint, as my grandmother did, before the Church got around to it this fall.
The snail Church got around to canonizing St. Joan of Arc even more slowly. It was the 15th century when her army put Charles VII on the throne of France and the English burnt Joan at the stake for her trouble.
Not all the English soldiers were happy at the sight. One is said to have grumbled at the funeral pyre, "We are undone. We have burned a saint." The Church took five centuries to agree. The last Pope Benedict canonized St. Joan of Arc in 1920.
Sometimes the Church is simply not yet ready to be challenged. Nor, I gather, is the general public. Didn't I recently read that 20 percent of our countrymen still believe that the sun goes around the Earth? The Church is not the only latecomer in acknowledging that Galileo -– and Copernicus before him -– were right when they said that the Earth goes around the sun.
In 1632, the Church was under duress from the Protestant Revolution. So the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his Copernican belief and put him under house arrest. Surely it is the pressure that prelates feel today that made a bishop recently refuse to let Bishop Gumbleton speak in his diocese.
Margery Frisbie, a graduate of Mundelein College, has raised lots of kids and written lots of columns. She is the author of several local histories, two graphic histories published in Europe, and An Alley in Chicago, the Life and Legacy of Monsignor John Egan.
Contacts: margeryfrisbie@sbcglobal.net or info@chicagocatholicnews.com
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