Pope meets with Japanese bishops
to discuss problems with Neocatechumenals
By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY, Dec. 14 (CNS) -- Japanese bishops, including the president of the bishops' conference, met with Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials on Monday afternoon to discuss the Neocatechumenal Way.
The Dec. 13 meeting with four Japanese bishops had been called by Pope Benedict, said the president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan, Archbishop Leo Jun Ikenaga of Osaka.
He told Catholic News Service that the meeting lasted nearly two hours and included the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and "several other cardinals."
While the archbishop would not comment on the substance of the meeting, he said the bishops would have to have further discussions with the Vatican and the Neocatechumenal Way's co-founder, Kiko Arguello.
The Japanese bishops "have to make a plan to proceed," he said, adding, "We have to proceed slowly."
The meeting came more than a year after the Neocatechumenal Way's Redemptoris Mater seminary in Takamatsu was closed.
Bishop Francis Osamu Mizobe of Takamatsu and the diocesan pastoral council wanted to shut down the seminary because of concerns that the activity of the Way's members was damaging the unity of Japan's small Catholic community.
The Vatican conducted an investigation in 2007, and in 2008, Cardinal Bertone released a letter announcing the seminary would be closed and that many of the seminarians and faculty would be transferred to the Redemptoris Mater seminary in Rome.
According to an April 2009 news release on the Japanese bishops' website, the Neocatechumenal Way disagreed with the closure.
The bishops' concerns with the Way and the seminary were so strong that they traveled to Rome twice in early 2008 after their "ad limina" visit in December 2007.
They met with Vatican officials and the Pope to discuss what Tokyo Archbishop Peter Takeo Okada, then-president of the bishops' conference, said was "a serious problem."
"The powerful sect-like activity of Way members is divisive and confrontational. It has caused sharp, painful division and strife within the Church," the archbishop said Dec. 15, 2007, in an address to the Pope during the bishops' "ad limina" visit, made every five years to report on the status of the dioceses. The archbishop appealed to the Pope for assistance, saying his input "was direly needed."
I have not met any Neo-Catechumenal person, and I've only read about them the news reports over the past five years regarding their problems with certain dioceses like the ones in the Holy Land, in Japan and in Baltimore. Despite those problems, however, they passed the five-year experimental period given to them from 2005-2007 and finally got approval of their Statutes in 2008, which also included some liturgical concessions - such as saying the 'Sunday Mass' on Saturday evening, and their peculiar way of receiving communion (Everyone gets a piece of bread, then they all eat it at the same time, after which a priest goes around with a chalice of wine, from which each one drinks). Apparently, they also have their own 'catechesis' which awaits Vatican approval before they can print it for general distribution.
I am sure that in more than half a century of existence, this movement has done much good in many places around the world. But I have to be wary about any movement that needs to hear Sunday Mass on Saturday and devise its own Communion rite, and be alarmed when important host dioceses have ongoing years-long problems with their presence in the community, as if they were imposing themselves on the diocese, instead of 'co-existing' with the diocesan community as they are supposed to.
The 'disturbance' they cause to the community must be grievous enough for the bishops of Japan to seek papal intervention yet again after the not-unimportant closure of the NC's seminary in Japan the first time they presented their complaints against the NC!
Yet, we don't hear anything remotely similar about Comunione e Liberazione, or about Sant'Egidio, or the Focolari... What does it say about the NCs????
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/12/2010 23:15]