UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
BY PATRICIA MILLER OCTOBER 19, 2015
t’s official—with Ross Douthat’s conspiracy-drenched Sunday column, the idea that the synod is somehow a “plot to change Catholicism” has leapt from the far-right Catholic fringe to the conservative Catholic mainstream.
Conservatives have been pushing the idea for months that the synod isn’t just a meeting of bishops to discuss how the church’s teachings on the family can be made more relevant for Catholics, but a Machiavellian plot by Pope Francis and his allies to change church doctrine. As evidence, as per Douthat, they offer the fact that Francis has changed the synod procedures to allow for actual discussion about issues like the pastoral treatment of divorced and remarried Catholics or gay Catholics:
The documents guiding the synod have been written with that in mind. The pope has made appointments to the synod’s ranks with that goal in mind. … The churchmen charged with writing the final synod report have been selected with that goal in mind.
As Douthat himself notes, with the “ranks of Catholic bishops includ[ing] so many Benedict XVI and John Paul II-appointed conservatives,” it would have been fundamentally pointless to hold a purely “democratic” synod in which the majority of the existing bishops drafted the synod document and controlled the discussion and final report.
The result would have been a synod like any of the other synods over the past 35 years: the bishops would assemble and give their pre-written “interventions” affirming current church policy, agree that current church policy was awesome, eat some fabulous meals in Rome, and then go home. (And for the record, conservatives have argued for years that the church isn’t a democracy.)
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.