I received the following piece via  email from my friend Robert Blair Kaiser on 12.27.2009. Kaiser is the author of Cardinal Mahony: A Novel, which argues for a people’s Church.  Kaiser says that John Cooney, the author of the following 12.26.2009 piece from the Irish Independent, has a good many Irish priests on his side.

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Church must hold a national synod to solve its problems
John Cooney
With Galway’s Martin Brennan under persistent pressure to fall on his crozier after the resignations of four ‘Murphy’ bishops, the first healing step has been taken to assure victims of clerical sexual abuse that the Catholic Church in Ireland is no longer a safe haven for prelates who have let innocent children suffer at the hands of paedophile priests.
It will be tempting for most Irish Catholics who are still members of the institutional church to feel that a dark and torrential period is being brought to a close and that best practice child protection procedures will now be implemented in parishes and schools in all 26 dioceses. 2009 was the year that bishops became accountable for their misdeeds and inactions.    Efforts will be made to prepare Catholics for the pastoral letter which Pope Benedict XVI will issue in 2010.  Senior churchmen will hype expectations that Benedict will present a charter for the reform of the Irish church. There is much talk of rationalisation and amalgamation of dioceses.    Religion Correspondents will have several months of innocent pleasure playing the speculation game of predicting the names of new bishops. Devout parishioners will eagerly await the announcement from Rome of their new Lordship.
The new buzz words from the church authorities will be the need for them to show leadership. There will be many polished sermons on the age of the laity.  In 2010 the slogans “leadership” and “lay involvement” will be the two cool words in the episcopal and clerical lexicon.
Whether these yet to be announced measures will go far enough to end the alienation, disgust and betrayal felt by pew-Catholics, a la carte Catholics and ex-Catholics is a much more debatable matter.
However, the big drawback is that forty-five years after the Second Vatican Council which defined the Church as ‘the People of God’, there are still no communications structures for real dialogue. Bishops continue to meet in private behind the closed doors at St Patrick’s College Maynooth like the old Soviet Union’s politburo. Priests have no national conference having disbanded from fatigue of being largely iognored by know-all bishops who are still under the illusion that they are the officer corps.
The laity are still regarded by most bishops and clergy as cannon-fodder to take up chores which an ageing and much reduced clergy can no longer supply, such as distribution of communion and the doing of readings at services where a priest is not available even on a Sunday to say Mass.    What may lie ahead is a slimmed-down church which may have joyous lay participation as far as liturgy is concerned but remains essentially under the rules directed by Romeward-looking bishops too afraid to champion the case with Pope Benedict for new forms of ministry allowing married male clergy, and women, married or single, to become priests. Neither Cardinal Brady nor Archbishop Martin support these aspirations which have been favoured for at least twenty years now by the vast majority of Irish Catholics.
The issue of broadening the ministry on grounds of gender and marital status remain out of bounds, according to the Roman, episcopal and clericalist guardians of so-called tradition of the Faith.    On Christmas eve, I was in an exchange of views with Robert Blair Kaiser, who was Time magazine’s special correspondent at Vatican Two and is the author of many books calling for reform of the church from the bottom-up rather than from the top down. Kaiser was not as excited as the Irish media is about the resignations of Bishops Donal Murray, Jim Moriarty, Eamonn Walsh and Ray Field.
“Resignation from the corrupt system is no answer, because that would just leave the corrupt system intact,” Bob said. “The solution, as I have been insisting in my last two books, is for the bishops to have a metanoia, that is that they turn the ecclesiastic pyramid upside down (on its pointy little head), and make their lordly selves into servant bishops of a people’s Church where men and women would have a voice, a vote, and citizenship in a Church owned by them.”
Kaiser’s call for “a citizens church” will find considerable support from Irish priests and laity.  Fr Brian D’Arcy, for instance, has highlighted the need to dismantle “the clerical club culture” and argues that “it’s no longer about tweaking the system”.
According to Brian, the hierarchicval church needs to reform in two essential areas. First, its sadistic misuse of power. Second, its pathetically dysfunctional theology of sex. “Power and sex, it’s as simple as that,” he says.  “We need a complete new way of being Christian, and of living responsible, healthy, human and spiritual lives”.
Rather than waiting for Il Papa in Rome to prescribe how the Irish Church regains credibility and vitality, the initiative needs to come from clergy and forward-minded priests like Fr Kevin Hegarty and Fr Iggy O’Donovan for the holding of a national church synod. Its agenda would deal with issues which Irish Catholics want rather than what Roman civil servants want to impose.
The agenda is vast, almost as large as the chasm between Rome and post-Murphy Irish Church.

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