Rebels against the Vatican

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33066, 6 November 1972, Page 17

Rebels against the Vatican

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) ROME, November 5. Italy’s largest Roman Catholic rebel movement, which is trying to start an “evangelical insurrection’’ in the Italian Church, has opened its first national assembly in the teeth of opposition from the Vatican and the Italian bishops.

The November 7, 1971, Movement, which groups about 400 radical Left-wing laymen, priests and theologians, is meeting at a Protestant college in Rome to approve its statutes and policies made since its formation, i in April. Among the draft policies are proposals to set up rebel Church communities throughout Italy, to investigate and denounce the relationship of the Church hierarchy to political and economic power, and agitation for the abolition of Italy’s 1929 Concordat with the Vatican.

More than 200 members and sympathisers, most of them priests and ex-priests, are attending the three-day assembly of the theological institute of the Waldensian Church, a tiny Protestant sect founded 350 years before Luther.

Proposed policies also include participation of members in Left-wing political and trade union organisations, from which Italian priests are barred by the Concordat, and working for the break-up of Italy’s monolithic Christian Democrat Party, which groups Roman Catholics of all classes.

They include a recommendation that members should be ready to renounce their priesthood, if they find this is necessary in order to make “a really evangelical use of their role” in their communities, and that the movement should work for participation of Roman Catholic communities in the election of bishops and encourage laymen ano priests to criticise Papal documents and compare them with Church practice. COUNTER TO SYNOD The movement, which has already had several clashes with the Vatican, was started to protest against the Italian Church hierarchy and the alleged failure of the Church to tackle the problems of war, injustice and the crisis in the priesthood. It takes its name from the day after the closing of the 1971 world synod of bishops, which met at the Vatican to discuss these problems but made few concrete proposals.