Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba has been removed as a Bishop by the Pope. The reason? He suggested that the Vatican’s teachings on the ordination of women and married men should be open to discussion. In turn, Morris accused the Vatican of ruling Bishops by fear and conducting an Inquisition. See here and here.
The ever interesting Mark Silk at Spiritual Politics argues that the question whether the Pope may properly close off such discussions is debated even by conservatives within the church and properly so. Aside from the human costs of the Vatican’s use of fear tactics, it seems to me that a dictatorship that tries to minimize the extent to which its errors might be questioned seriously undermines the possibility of appropriate doctrinal development in reading the signs of the times.
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