Pearls and Irritations

In Wijngaards’ case, his organisational adversary is the Catholic Church – a worldwide organisation whose mission is to bring healing to the suffering, provide help and protection, and overcome oppression and injustice. Instead, the Church has hunkered down into its fossilised sexual structures. It refuses to budge on issues such as contraception, women’s ordination and clerical celibacy. In its determination to uphold patriarchy and misogyny, it denies Catholics and others the opportunity to live life well in the 21st century.

Wijngaards was a child survivor of several brutal concentration camps in Indonesia during World War II. His strong-minded mother saved him from certain death, as did his parents’ example of using savvy intelligence to navigate great hardship. The spirit of endurance and reason provided a sure foundation for Wijngaards to pursue a life well lived as a priest. Shorn of everything material at an early age, he inherited a legacy of acuity for what matters.

On returning to his native Holland, and at the age of 11, Wijngaards joined the Mill Hill Missionaries and received a solid theological education. He further supplemented his passion for learning with independent studies of Arabic and Enlightenment philosophy. His willingness to explore the wide arc of thought invited unwelcomed sanctioning but proved to be prescient. During these formative years, he also had the opportunity to study theology in Rome during the Second Vatican Council. His peripheral engagement in the council wised him up to the conservative shenanigans of clerics determined to calcify Catholicism.

Wijngaards made the idealistic and pragmatic decision to become a priest for the people. As a missionary in India, he played a key role in the formation of local seminarians and religious, and updated clergy on conciliar teachings. He launched ventures in communication, using the latest technologies, to assist the catechising of burgeoning numbers of people in India seeking baptism. He played a key role in brokering Western funding for a myriad of projects directed to improving the precarious lot of marginal peoples.

As a world player, capable of bridging international interests with grassroots aspirations, it is not surprising that Wijngaards rose to the role of vicar-general. However, the ecclesial preoccupations of Pope John Paul II closed in on Wijngaards’ hope for a better world. The Pope determined that women could never be ordained as priests, signalling further that women should never fully engage in leadership and decision-making. For women in India and elsewhere, that curse has its ongoing result in not only obfuscating service but also obstructing the relief of adversity.

Winjgaards is principled and determined. After 50 years of priestly ministry, he resigned his institutional position in protest at the Pope’s stance on women. Well known to many across the globe, his action attracted much support and some admonition. Meanwhile, Vatican bureaucrats processed his application for laicisation according to its limited worldview that he as a priest – not they – had failed.

Thereafter, he founded the Wijngaards Institute, mainly to promote the ordination of women. Today, the institute endeavours to prompt the Church to engage and adopt a democratic reality of the human condition.

Wijngaards’ memoir is a fascinating historical account of a man whose priesthood spans decades of extraordinary change in the Church and world. It contains a weight of wisdom not just about the importance of bringing reform to the Church but for realising the good life. In his book, Wijngaards crystallises from his vast education and broad experience 10 actions needed for rehabilitating Catholicism. His project is to free the Church of its antiquated beliefs to revive its Christian mandate.

Meanwhile, and despite Pope Francis valiantly attempting to curb the excesses brought about by ultra-right Catholics, the teachings of the Vatican Council are yet to be fulfilled. On the other side of the coin, secular-informed materialism cannot ultimately bring about a satisfying life. As well, we are grappling with a pandemic and a climate crisis. There is no “going back”. We only have a “new normal”. It is a truth that beckons the Church, and in taking that step clergy administrators would be well advised to read and act on the Ten Commandments for Church Reform – link here.