Bishops to Gather for Synod Among Unrest in Catholic Church

By Joe Little
RTE News
October 3, 2014

http://www.rte.ie/blogs/news-blog/2014/10/03/bishops-to-gather-for-synod-among-unrest-in-catholic-church/

During next Sunday’s Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis will open an Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Catholic family and its future.

Already preparations for the gathering have made waves, with last year’s unprecedented circulation online of a Vatican questionnaire designed to gauge what Catholics think of Church teaching on issues like contraception, abortion, and homosexual unions.

But all continents will be represented and issues far from removed from the western mindset will also be discussed.

The fortnight-long Synod is shaping up to be the most open consultation of its kind since Pope Paul VI introduced such gatherings almost 50 years ago after the Second Vatican Council.

That once-in-a-century Council requested Popes – who are Bishops of Rome – to rule more collegially – or in more authentic partnership - with their fellow bishops.

Almost 3,000 bishops attended the Council, where they were dubbed its fathers.

But it’s often said that when most of the fathers returned to their dioceses and monasteries, the Vatican II project of re-orienting the Church towards the modern world ran out of steam.

Instead, the elite group of fathers who administered the Church, the powerful cardinals and Archbishops of the Roman Curia, reasserted control.

They ensured that the Synods of Bishops called by Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI were highly choreographed affairs.

Not surprisingly, they failed to arrest the Church’s downward spiral.

For example, the sex abuse and financial scandals of recent decades careered for too long out of control despite, or perhaps partly because of, the steady production-line of over-deferential advice from Synods.

But this morning in the Vatican, the man appointed by Pope Francis to run this month’s Synod signalled an end to those old ways.

At the first briefing for journalists covering the meeting, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri said that right from the start of Pope Francis’ pontificate 18 months ago, he has been outlining a pastoral action plan aimed at helping the bishops to walk alongside him in “a Church that is increasingly open and missionary” along the streets of the world.

The Italian Cardinal said the purpose of the Synod is “to discuss a particularly urgent topic”, the pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization” which is the planting of the seeds of the Gospel in the hearts of humans.

He said the gathering would be “using appropriate guidelines for the present time, for the good of the entire Church.”

Pope Francis seems determined to ensure that the Synod fathers engage with each other as 21st Century pastors freed from the shackles of a much-discredited outdated Vatican bureaucracy.

253 people will attend – nearly all of them bishops, but Francis has also invited 14 married couples.

One is of mixed religion: a Muslim husband and Catholic wife.

Helping to represent the world’s nuns is Irishwoman Sr Margaret Muldoon, a former superior general of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Bordeaux.

This Synod will prepare the ground for next October’s larger Ordinary Synod on the family.

In the intervening year, participants will be asked to consult further with their local churches.

According to Cardinal Baldisseri next year’s gathering will formulate “appropriate pastoral guidelines” in other words advice and directions for priests on how to ‘tend their flocks’.

Next fortnight’s deliberations will be informed by last year’s unprecedented circulation online of a Vatican questionnaire designed to gauge what Catholics think of Church teaching on issues like contraception, abortion, and homosexual unions.

The Synod’s 75-page working paper says the responses reveal that Mother Church’s teaching on contraception and sex before marriage are perceived to be ‘intrusive’.

“A vast majority” said her insistence on the Billings method as the only permissible form of birth control is commonly perceived as “an intrusion in the intimate life of the couple and an encroachment on the autonomy of conscience.”

Last February, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said responses to it in the Dublin Archdiocese revealed that Church teaching on marriage and the family is poorly understood and poorly accepted here – and not just by younger people.

On the eve of the Synod, Gina Menzies, a Catholic theologian and grandmother living in the same diocese, summarizes the alienation of many Catholics here.

“If you have a large family, if you live a stressful life, if you try to bring up your children, if you’re trying to be fair to all the children and you make a decision that having more children would have such an impact on your relationship and on the children who are already there, and you make that decision in good conscience, what kind of a God would condemn anybody for that?”

But Archbishop Martin warns against the danger of the Synod focussing on just one or two issues.

Earlier this week before departing to represent the Irish Church at the Synod he spoke of the “quite strong tradition of family life” he sees throughout his million-strong archdiocese.

Asked by RTE News if this was not testament to the Christian lives people using artificial contraception are living, he responded that he would not associate the love he encounters within the families with any other individual question.

“What I’m trying to say is that this Synod should be …trying to understand…you see there’s a kind of a tendency on our part to say that the Church has a teaching that it imposes on families . I think we should be beginning now to understand, a listening process, not…… on one subject or another.”

Those parents, he explains, whose commitment to their marriage impresses him regularly when they bring their children to him to be confirmed “might not be able to explain our theology of marriage, but they are living it”.

Earlier this week the American Cardinal Leo Raymond Burke, a Vatican-based arch-conservative joined four other like-minded cardinals in launching a pre-emptive strike by publishing a book on what may become one of the Synod’s hot-button issues, communion for the divorced living in second unions.

“Remaining in the Truth of Christ”, defends the Church’s ban on divorced and civilly re-married couples receiving Holy Communion.

“The Church teaches that unless it grants them an annulment, such couples are committing the sin of adultery and disqualify themselves from receiving the Eucharist until they repent and change their ways.

The five authors – all senior Vatican officials – were challenging Cardinal Walter Kasper, a German who Pope Francis has called one of his favourite theologians, who has argued that the Church must find ways of showing mercy to people whose first marriages have failed and who want to remain an integral part of the Church.

Cardinal Burke bluntly told reporters this week that Kasper’s position is “fundamentally flawed,” accused him of “misunderstanding” basic Church teachings and called some of his statements “outrageous”.

“I have to say that I find it amazing that the Cardinal claims to speak for the Pope. The Pope does not have laryngitis. The pope is not mute. The pope can speak for himself,” he said.

A Vatican source said “the Pope is not thrilled” by the sometimes shrill tone of the debate even though he wanted to encourage dialogue. The source said Francis did not want the Synod to be dominated by the “clerical ivory tower types”.

Another persistent voice against change is German Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, the Vatican’s top doctrinal official, who has belittled Kasper’s calls for a more merciful Church.

“God’s mercy does not dispense us from following his commandments or the rules of the Church,” Mueller wrote in a book published earlier this year.

“Five cardinals attacking one” was not setting the tone Archbishop Martin would wish to see at the Synod, he told a news conference in Ireland last Wednesday.

But he insisted, he would not try to prevent any of the protagonists from speaking out.

He said the indissolubility of marriage is part of the Christian tradition but the question was how to bring a degree of mercy to the situation of the divorced and remarried.

“It would be very difficult to have a general decree,” he added, “because [individual] situations are different.”

Meanwhile, Irish Independent and Irish Catholic columnist David Quinn called on the Synod to address the rising divorce rate in Western societies.

He said it’s an indication that the Church has fallen down in its obligation to explain its teaching.

“There’s one thing we should all be able to agree on. We have an unacceptably high rate of divorce in the western world and can we not bring it below the rates of 30% and 40% that we have at present? And what is going on that the divorce rate has gone so high…?

He says if the Church could come up with something constructive on divorce and if it did it properly, it would find a resonance with many people.

The 191 Synod fathers – all of them bishops except for one priest and six members of religious orders – have come from all five continents and Archbishop Martin emphasises that issues far from removed from the western mindset will merit serious discussion.

For instance, how should the Church treat wives in a polygamous marriage when their husband converts to Catholicism “It’s an issue in Africa,” he explains.

Meanwhile, he says, many Latin American priests minister to people who have lived in irregular unions for most of their lives and who then seek to marry on their deathbeds.

And there’s also the custom in some countries of child marriage.

From an Irish perspective, family names on the list of participants illustrate how the Irish diaspora permeates so much of global Catholicism.

One observer is Christopher Meney, director of the Life, Marriage and Family Centre with the Archdiocese of Sydney.

Two others are Steve and Sandra Conway, regional directors of the Retrouvaille program in Southern Africa for couples experiencing difficulty in their marriages.

The Vatican Press Office has promised that Synod fathers will participate at media briefings on each of the Synod’s working days.

Like Archbishop Martin, many insiders are hoping that the tone for the proceedings will not be set by Cardinal Burke’s pugnacious riposte to Cardinal Kasper.