seulement les paragraphes finaux repris sur <Damian Thompson telegraph blog> d'une étude d'un universitaire sérieux Tom GALLAGHER:
en résumé: médiocrité auto-entretenue d'un épiscopat sans vigueur spirituelle ni apostolique, en dehors des efforts louables dans les années 1980-1990 de Mgr Thomas WINNING, qui n'a jamais réussi à entraîner le clergé glaswwegien; fragilité de sa seule force: son prestigieux réseau scolaire, dont toutes les pesanteurs politiques travaillent à couper le financement public.
= à quand de bons évêques imposés par S Ém OUELLET?
A Christian ethical foundation may have shrivelled in a lot of once recognisably devout Scottish communities, but a new moral order shorn of the need for religious belief is nowhere in sight. Individual churches are still more effective in offering a moral vision for coping with some of the acute challenges in Scottish society – drug dependency and other addictions, youngsters unable to find a place in the labour market, children and young people growing up in dysfunctional families and without role models enabling them to avoid harm. Most still belong to the Church of Scotland but tensions between a liberal bureaucracy and evangelicals could soon lead conservatives to conclude that only outside the established Kirk will they be able to effectively preach Christ’s ministry.
It would be wrong to claim that the Catholic Church has never tried to equip itself for the harsh terrain in which it now operates. Glasgow’s archbishop in the final quarter of the last century, Thomas Winning, unfurled a pastoral plan meant to harness the untapped energy of the laity and encourage the most dedicated among them to relieve priests of some of the burden of parish work as well as pioneering new forms of catholic engagement. But it came perhaps 30 years too late and most of his priests preferred to be left in peace.
The main achievement of Catholic Scotland has been the 95-year-old system of state funded Catholic schools which attract many non-Catholic parents and pupils. Supporters say that the emphasis on a moral dimension in the curriculum provides many pupils with a sense of citizenship and is a partial antidote to the consumer and celebrity culture which pervades Scottish popular life.
But many intellectuals were alienated by the decision to break up the centralised Scottish Catholic archives and transfer them from central Edinburgh to distant Aberdeen. It was the vanity project of a recently retired archbishop and Cardinal Keith O’Brien, a man supposedly with a flair for public relations, simply nodded it through.
Just what are pesky archives worth these days? But the affair shows an inability to be a proper guardian of the church’s historical patrimony and, on the part of many (not all) of the bishops in general, it suggests an underlying philistinism. The refusal to dialogue with over 90 historians who protested at the arbitrary nature of the decision shows a dangerously complacent hierarchy.
The Church leadership in Scotland has not learned from painful recent episodes in the life of the Church in Ireland and elsewhere, that a lack of transparency and refusal to permit dialogue only brings in its wake considerable discredit. It remains to be seen whether the peremptory exit of Cardinal O’Brien will lead to narrow retrenchment or else will unlock energies still present in the Church but with less emphasis on figureheads and insistence on stultifying conventions lacking even doctrinal legitimacy. If there is Catholic renewal in Scotland and a willingness to cooperate with those in other faiths who see that cult-like nationalism and secular posturing offer few answers to Scotland’s ills, this personalised church crisis could yet bring a lot of good in its wake.
Tom Gallagher recently completed a book called Divided Scotland: Ethnic Strife and Christian Crisis which Argyll publishing will bring out this summer.
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D'avance, merci !