‘Into the Deepak’: Vatican Conference Gives Forum to Chelsea Clinton, Dr. Oz and Jane Goodall, as Germany’s Catholic Bishops Choose to Ignore Pope Francis
National Catholic Register, 17 May 2021
The eclectic roster of speakers at recent Vatican conferences might help explain why the Church in Germany is moving ahead so determinedly to ignore Pope Francis.
The coordinated protest by priests in Germany last Monday, offering a “blessing for lovers,” which explicitly included same-sex couples, is just the latest indication that a sizable portion of Germany clergy, including bishops, is quite content to ignore directions from Rome.
Pope Francis has indicted plainly himself, and repeatedly through various Curial congregations, that the German “Synodal Path” threatens the unity of the Church, the truths of the faith and good order of canon law. There is no doubt that he wants the Church in Germany to abandon the “Synodal Path” as it is currently structured. It is equally clear that the German leadership, both clerical and lay, simply do not pay him heed.
How to explain that? Herewith one of those unrelated moments, a small detail that, while of no great importance in itself, has some explanatory power.
Last week, Deepak Chopra addressed a Vatican conference on health, hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture. Chopra, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Jane Goodall and Chelsea Clinton, was among dozens of speakers on the broad topic of health in mind, body and soul. Chopra was interviewed by talk-show host and Oprah Winfrey protégé Dr. Mehmet Oz.
In fairness, Vatican conferences are not what they used to be. Serious people pay them less heed than in days gone by, when some of the leading authorities in the world would attend. Things took a decisive turn for the worse in 2016, when the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences hosted Sen. Bernie Sanders — then in a hotly contested race against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination — and President Evo Morales, who sought to bring to Bolivia what the Castros had brought to Cuba and Hugh Chavez to Venezuela. It was politically provocative, but not academically serious.
By those standards, Chopra, the New Age alternative-medicine guru, is an understandable presence at a Vatican conference on health, incongruous as it seems.
More than 10 years ago, when then-Father Robert Barron launched his acclaimed Catholicism series, he began by inviting his viewers to consider Mark 10:32:
“And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.”
“This very telling,” comments Father Barron, now an auxiliary bishops of Los Angeles. “One might be intrigued by a religious teacher. One might be captivated by a spiritual leader. But amazed and afraid? Then we recall that in the Old Testament, awe and fear are two standard responses to God.”
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