Disparate visions

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster and the most senior British Catholic churchman, on Sunday preached a sermon in his cathedral of Westminster which strongly if implicitly opposes the direction in which the newly-elected Pope Benedict XVI has indicated he wishes to take the Church.

It is a clear sign of the unhappiness of the minority of liberals in the hierarchy with the pronouncements of a Pope who has said he would welcome the Church shrinking in size, so long as it could become purer in doing so.

In the service, broadcast by BBC Radio 4 as one of its regular Sunday morning worship series, both the Cardinal and the Cathedral's administrator, Monsignor Mark Langham, endorsed the spirit and substance of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and of the most liberal of its four main documents, "Gaudium et Spes" (Joy and Hope).
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Read the complete article UK cleric at odds with Pope over direction from Financial Times.

ROME -- Joseph Ratzinger, as a theologian and cardinal, returned to the question often over the years. And now that he is Pope Benedict, his paper trail on the issue provokes skepticism about him among more liberal Roman Catholics.

The question, in his own words: "Is the church really going to get smaller?"

At another point, in an interview published in 1997 in "Salt of the Earth," he explained it this way: "Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the church's history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intense struggle against evil and bring good into the world -- that let God in."

The standard argument is that Benedict "wants a more fervent, orthodox, evangelical church -- even if it drives people away," as a New Yorker headline put it recently.

But as with much around this new pope, the whole story is complicated. He has yet to announce an overall program, having been in office just six weeks, but both critics and supporters alike say that it is unlikely that he would plan to prune back the church intentionally -- or that he could.
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Read the complete article Pope Benedict's idea of a smaller church is layered from startribune.com.