Cardinal Carlo Martini Says Church '200 Years Behind'

Cardinal Martini's body is lying in state in Milan Cathedral

Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini has described the Roman Catholic Church as being "200 years behind" the times. The cardinal died on Friday, aged 85. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has published his last interview, recorded in August, in which he said: "The Church is tired... our prayer rooms are empty."

Martini, once tipped as a future pope, urged the Church to recognize its errors and to embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope.

Thousands of people have been filing past his coffin at Milan's cathedral, where he was archbishop for more than 20 years. The cardinal, who had retired from the post in 2002, suffering from Parkinson's Disease, is to be buried on Monday. Martini, a popular figure with liberal stances on many issues, commanded great respect from both Pope John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI.

The cardinal - a member of the Jesuit religious order - was often critical in his writings and comments on Church teaching. He was a courageous and outspoken figure during the years he headed Europe's largest Catholic diocese. Cardinal Martini gave his last interview to a fellow Jesuit priest, George Sporschill, and to a journalist at the beginning of August when he knew his death was approaching.

The cardinal had returned to Italy from Jerusalem, where he had settled in retirement in 2002 to continue his biblical studies. Catholics lacked confidence in the Church, he said in the interview. "Our culture has grown old, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous."

Unless the Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added. The question, he said, is not whether divorced couples can receive holy communion, but how the Church can help complex family situations.
And the advice he leaves behind to conquer the tiredness of the Church was a "radical transformation, beginning with the Pope and his bishops".
"The child sex scandals oblige us to undertake a journey of transformation," Cardinal Martini says, referring to the child sex abuse that has rocked the Catholic Church in the past few years.

He was not afraid to speak his mind on matters that the Vatican sometimes considered taboo, including the use of condoms to fight Aids and the role of women in the Church.
In 2008, for example, he criticized the Church's prohibition of birth control, saying the stance had likely driven many faithful away, and publicly stated in 2006 that condoms could "in some situations, be a lesser evil".

Cardinal Martini was a renowned academic and biblical scholar, as well as a prolific author of popular books on religion. But it is highly unusual for a leading member of the Catholic hierarchy openly to challenge Church teaching - or rather to criticize the way in which the Church often expresses its teaching with negatives and prohibitions rather than encouragement to believers. I don't believe he was a radical; He was just a guy with a lot of common sense who tried to tell an archaic and no longer feasible institution how to survive in an educated, technological, space age society.

Pope Benedict is now faced with a difficult choice: whether or not to attend Cardinal Martini's funeral in Milan on Monday - which many leading Catholics say would be a powerful affirmation of Church unity. The Pope has rarely awarded red hats to Catholic leaders of any nation who dare to question traditional doctrine.
 The cardinal's last book was entitled ' Speak From The Heart '.