Love, not power, needed for true Christianity, says priest

Published: 2004-11-23

WORCESTER, Mass. (CNS) -- Love, not power, is needed for true Christianity, said a Dominican priest and canon lawyer who has worked with clergy sex abuse victims and their families in the United States and Europe. Father Tom Doyle made the comments at a breakout session during the New England Voice of the Faithful conference Nov. 13 in Worcester. About 800 people attended the conference. The priest, recipient of the organization's first "Priest of Integrity Award" in 2002, urged the audience at a panel discussion on church renewal to stop looking negatively at the structures, to do outreach instead and to speak their mind. "In the communion of saints, there is no us versus them," said fellow panelist Gaile M. Pohlhaus, a member of the theology and religious studies department at Villanova University near Philadelphia. Pohlhaus is active in Voice of the Faithful, or VOTF, a national lay organization formed in 2002 in response to the sex abuse crisis. What tends to polarize people are exclusivity, inclusivity ("We reach out to you, but you must conform to us") and complementarity ("You make up in me what is lacking"), she said. Instead, she said, people must act with mutual love -- for the person next to them and "even the person sitting in a basilica in Rome" -- working together as friends of God and prophets. Another church renewal panelist, Thomas P. O'Neill III, former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and currently chief executive officer of O'Neill and Associates, said million of dollars have properly been paid to victims, but he feels the bishops treated the crisis like a public relations problem. "Return to normal is not working," he said. The closing of parishes in several dioceses has left many Catholics feeling that the church has not listened to them, he said.

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