Seeing Scarlet

It's Monday midmorning in Oz and I've already gotten several e.mails blaring this headline from the Sydney Morning Herald: "Clergy irate over Pell inquiry into college."

I was told the other day that this was coming -- it's just the tip of the iceberg of fury Down Under.

That said, away we go.....

An inquiry into Sydney's leading Catholic theological college has fuelled disquiet over the leadership style of the Sydney Archbishop, Cardinal George Pell, and the future of religious university education in Australia.

Sydney priest, Father John Crothers, has protested that clergy had been kept in the dark over a review of the future academic and financial viability of the Catholic Institute of Sydney whose prime job is to educate candidates for the priesthood.

Cardinal Pell, who is the institute's chancellor, has appointed a committee to consider the institute's "inability" to serve the church's seminarians, examine student numbers and tackle its growing operational deficits.

The review comes at a time when two conservative universities are preparing to open their doors in Sydney and the archdiocese has defended its multimillion dollar funding support for one of these, the Perth-based University of Notre Dame.

The inquiry is to examine the desirability and cost of educating lay students at the institute in view of options available elsewhere.

Basically, as has been outlined to me by several sources in Australia and elsewhere over the last several days, Pell sees the Catholic Institute of Sydney as out of accord with his ecclesiology, so he'll either have CIS shook up and remade in his own image or, alternatively, he'll strip it and make Notre Dame the George Pell Catholic Institute of Sydney and send the sems there, etc. The seminarians can already take classes at the new Notre Dame campus in Sydney and have them count for proper credit.

Either way, Pell wins.

As for NDA's future plans, one church-watcher says, "It will include a law and medicine school, which has the secularists and liberal Catholics in the media turning cartwheels...."

Throw into the mix some rumblings among the suffragan bishops of New South Wales, and you've got the makings of World War III. Cartwheels all around.

I've got my eye all over this one. Stay tuned.

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