It has become the tradition for Pope Benedict to meet with his former students at Castel Gandolfo during his summer 'holiday'. (Holiday? You must be joking, particularly in 2011.) This year they are to discuss the 'New Evangelisation'. I do hope Father Twomey will attend the meeting, and thus be able to carve out a quiet moment to offer his views (h/t to Protect the Pope) about the current morass in Ireland, which he is convinced will suck the Irish church into extinction unless there is dramatic change, and soon. Basically Fr Twomey, a retired Maynooth professor, (and one that I've followed for several years) maintains that there will be no healing unless all the Irish bishops appointed before 2003, do the decent thing and resign. A vacuum would then be created in which the Pope's hands would be freed to begin afresh. This, maintains Fr Twomey, is the only way forward. . I hope and pray he gets the chance to put the case to his former teacher. It is a slim chance that he will, and sadly still more slender that the Pope, even though he may agree with Twomey, will be prevented, by other forces closer to him in daily curial life, from encouraging the implementation of the wisdom and common sense of his former Irish pupil.
That last sentence expresses the most cynical of views and although it describes possibilities which I know I must take on board, it does not, and it cannot answer, leave alone, defeat,the tenets of our belief about what a Pope is and what he may therefore, against all apparent odds, be capable of doing.
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