UNITED STATES
Hamilton and Griffin on Rights
The Synod on the Family is now beginning its third and final week at the Vatican – does it matter?
Most reporting has focused on 13 dissident prelates, including Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and Archbishop Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, who complained in a leaked letter to Pope Francis that the synod procedures seemed “designed to facilitate predetermined results” on the issue of “Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried” – the “Plot to Change Catholicism,” Ross Douthat calls it at the Times.
Meanwhile, judging from the reports of small groups and the interventions (three-minute speeches to the plenary), participants have mostly been toiling on amendments (so-called modi) to make the synodal work plan sing. This would seem to be a lost cause.
Churchspeak and a Phrase Unspoken
In all the synod’s waffly churchspeak, as Australian Archbishop Mark Coleridge calls it, one phrase remains unspoken – the sexual abuse of children by clergy.
Why is this?
Billions of dollars have been spent on the problem in the United States, where more than 6,427 clerics are accused of sexually assaulting more than 17,259 victims. Government inquiries are being conducted in Australia and Northern Ireland, and in the Republic of Ireland, church attendance has plunged in the wake of the Ryan, Murphy, and Cloyne reports. The installation of a tainted Chilean bishop caused a near-riot, and serious questions have been raised about the Pope’s own performance in Argentina. Francis has removed three U.S. bishops for criminal mismanagement of abuse cases (1, 2&3), and he has named a Pontifical Commission to advise him on the whole mess.
Yet the many thousands of damaged and destroyed families behind those headlines merit no attention whatsoever at the 14th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops: The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and the Contemporary World.
The one honorable exception is Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, who said in his little-noticed intervention, “We know only too well the horrific impact of sins and crimes of abuse in the Church family: the betrayal of trust, the violation of dignity, the shame – both public and private, the anger and alienation, the wound that never seems to heal.”
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