ROME
Crux
By Michael O’Loughlin
National reporter October 17, 2015
As 270 Catholic bishops from around the world debate issues related to the family inside the Vatican’s Synod Hall from Oct. 4-25, activists, advocacy groups, and ordinary people with a cause to promote or a question to raise have descended on Rome to be active on the sidelines of the event, representing views across the spectrum. Crux is offering periodic snapshots of this “synod outside the synod,” profiling people and their causes.
ROME — Christian Weisner grew up in Germany in a Catholic family that was profoundly shaped by the Second Vatican Council. In Pope Francis, he sees an opportunity for that historic moment in the Church to be fully realized.
“In many ways, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, who was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 23 years before he became pope, really worked against the Council,” he said. Francis, in contrast, is bringing “the ideas, the principles of the Council, back to Rome, back to our Church.”
It’s that feeling of possibility, Weisner said, that brought him from his home outside Munich to Rome to observe the Synod of Bishops as it deliberates issues important the international movement he helps lead, We Are Church.
The group was formed in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal involving the late Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, who was accused in 1995 of molesting several seminarians. Today, We Are Church says it has members in 20 countries. It promotes admitting women to the priesthood, allowing priests to marry, and upending the Church’s hierarchical structure.
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