Pope Francis is asking the US bishops to listen to the people. Will they?" by Phyllis Zagano, Religion News Service, Washington Post

My Response: If the bishops and Pope Francis listened to the people, the ban against contraception would be lifted, Catholics in second-marriages without annulments would be invited to receive Communion and women priests and married priests would be serving inclusive, egalitarian, empowered communities of faith. The hierarchical structure of Roman Catholicism must be transformed into a circular model of a discipleship of equals in which the celebration of the sacraments and decision-making is the work of the people, not the ordained alone. 

Bridget Mary Meehan

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/pope-francis-is-asking-the-us-bishops-to-listen-to-the-people-will-they/2021/12/03/f02c9e44-548b-11ec-83d2-
d9dab0e23b7e_story.html

(RNS) — "Everybody likes Pope Francis. Except, it seems, U.S. Catholic bishops.
On the other hand, no one seems to like the bishops — they damaged their own credibility with their 2002 “Dallas Charter” on clerical sex abuse, which sanctioned only priests and deacons but left bishops alone.
It was former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, known then, as now, for his own predatory acts, who suggested eliminating bishops from the document.
Once again, today, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops seems bereft of common sense.
Forget the worldwide Synod on Synodality, a listening exercise ordered by Francis, who wants to hear from Catholics and non-Catholics alike about how the church can move forward in the current century. Many American bishops are content to ignore it: Only half of the U.S. bishops have even named someone to run the synod project in their dioceses. That is, half of the U.S. bishops are not interested in what the people of God think.
At its fall meeting last month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved a $28 million budget for a “Eucharistic Congress” in Indianapolis in the middle of July 2024. There is no published USCCB synod budget.
But it is about more than just the money. The Eucharistic Congress is about what priests and bishops control: the sacraments.
Yet the church belongs to its people. Everybody knows that only a priest or bishop can preside at Mass, but the word “liturgy” literally means “people’s work.” And this is the heart of the tension between the USCCB and Francis: whether the Eucharist belongs to the priest or to the people.
Eight years ago, Francis wrote that access to Communion is not a “prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
The USCCB’s focus is on what they can do. The pope’s focus is on what the people can do.
The USCCB seems to want to close doors. The pope wants to open them. .."