Wine
is the sacerdotal drink of liturgical worship. So assessing the quality of the
International Synod on the Family’s three weeks old vin ordinaire of October 2015 and its vintage produce of 2014
depends on whether a gentleman sees his glass half full or half empty; but if a
lady wishes to partake, there is no cup provided for her at the all-male table.
This
gender analogy helps explain former president Mary McAleese’s complaint that
the menu offered by the synodal fathers to Pope Francis in their final report
on Saturday October 24 ‘produced nothing new’, a view reinforced by The Observer’s news report the following
day that ‘Vatican synod holds its line on gay couples but offers new hope to
Catholic divorcees. Bishops confirm Catholic teaching on the ‘intrinsic
disorder’ of homosexuality’.
Over
66 pages and 94 paragraphs of the final report secured the necessary
two-thirds, 177-vote majority with voting sheets showing that the three
articles dealing with the divorced and remarried were the most contentious.
While St. Pope John Paul II’s teaching on marriage in the 1981 encyclical Familiaris Consortio, was reaffirmed,
the final report omitted the critical sentence forbidding Communion for the
divorced and remarried.
The
Irish Church’s two representatives, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh and
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, tried to soften Dr McAleese’s displeasure
by insisting that the cocktail did highlight the role of women in rearing
children, but did not contest her charge that ‘the old boys club’ was sticking
to its traditional policy of not admitting the women into the Lord’s vineyard
and was still implicitly insisting that women should stay at home, preferably
in subordinate silence. Archbishop Eamon Martin said that - without in any way
changing the church’s teaching on homosexuality - reaching out to gay people in
their families and to gay people themselves was now a pastoral imperative, not
just an extra. 1. See Synod on the family produced nothing new, says McAleese, Irish Times, October 27, 2015.
Archbishops of Armagh and Dublin defend Synod document, Irish Times, October 24, 2015.
Closer
to McAleese than the Martins was the liberal minded lay group, We Are Church
Ireland, whose spokesman Brendan Butler hoped that Pope Francis will exercise
his authoritative role later this year in favour of those who remain
marginalised at the peripheries of the Catholic Church, particularly ‘gay and
lesbian people, the divorced and remarried and the position and the recognition
of the dignity of women.’
However,
English, American and continental Europe connoisseurs concurred with the two
Martins. Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster and Bishop Peter Doyle of
Northampton said that despite the many difficulties which arose during the
three weeks of plenary sessions and circuli
minori, Pope Francis remains positive about a new pastoral framework.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington DC summed up a new pastoral course for
Catholicism set by the Synod, in which he reportedly played a key role, as
being: ‘What does the gospel really say here?’
Catholic
Church Reform International, (CCRI), noted approvingly that the Synod ended in
‘a win for the progressive camp’ with the report’s emphasis on ‘the role of
discernment and individual conscience in dealing with difficult family
situations, especially the vexing issue of whether civilly remarried Catholics
can receive Communion.’ CCRI noted that
the three paragraphs dealing with the question of admitting divorced couples to
Communion: ‘barely reached the two-thirds majority needed to pass, but
conservatives couldn't muster enough votes to shoot them down. While the
document doesn't chart any specific path to receiving Communion as originally
sought by the liberals, it opens the door to case-by-case exceptions. The
most controversial paragraph 85 supporting a case-by-case approach when dealing
with remarriage since not everyone bears the same responsibility for the
preceding divorce - only cleared by a single vote.’ This became embodied in the
new buzz concept of the Synod, known as ‘the internal forum’, involving
diocesan priests finding pastoral ways to enable divorcees, the remarried and
cohabitating couples to receive the sacraments ‘to discern the extent to which
the ‘external forum’ ideal of church law applies to their subjective
situations’. Diarmuid Martin said that
the Synod had ‘very clearly’ attempted to arrive at a consensus, adding: ‘It
shows that doors that seem to be closed can be opened and that there is a way forward...
It keeps saying that each situation has to be examined individually...but it
gives the idea that there is an internal forum where individual cases can be
dealt with, in discussions with the priest or the bishop, again always saying
that this should be based on universal Church law as well.’
In a
plumy but sober voice the BBC opined that: ‘Doctrine towards divorcees has been
softened but there is no change in the church's stance on homosexuality. The
final report reiterates church teaching that homosexuals should not be
discriminated against but said there were ‘absolutely no grounds’ for gay
marriage. Similarly, Gerard O’Connell told readers of the Jesuit Review, America, that the Synod’s approval of
the final document ‘leaves the door open for the Pope to move forward on key
issues.’ Also giving their support to this ‘flexibility’ interpretation were
Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops conference, who
described the report as ‘a real step forward’ in the pastoral care of the
divorced and civilly remarried; and Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn O.P.
of Vienna, who said the report was ‘a call for careful discernment’.
Discernment,
Schonborn explained, would involve:
recognising that the amount of blame
different persons bear for a broken marriage
and the different situations which led
them to remarry vary widely. Therefore, the
consequences in terms of absolution and
Communion vary as well. 2. For an illuminating
analysis of the role of discernment in the Jesuit Pope Francis’s
devotional approach which is rooted in St Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises see ‘Discernment and
the Synod on the Family by Gerry
O’Hanlon S.J. in Doctrine and Life,
September 2015.
However,
the brash twang of the de facto
leader of conservative-minded prelates known as intransigents, Australian
Cardinal, George Pell, warned that the report ‘did not create an opening for
the divorced and civilly remarried to receive Communion’, and he stressed that
discernment had to be based ‘on the full teaching of Pope John Paul II and the
teaching of the church in general.’ Pell, Prefect of the Roman Curia’s
Secretariat for the Economy, was the most prominent among the sizeable group of
intransigents who included two other cardinals heading Curia offices, Marc
Ouellet, French Canadian Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, and Guinean
Robert Sarah, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship, who reportedly
scared members of the Synod by likening gender ideology and ISIS to two
Apocalyptic beasts with ‘demonic origins’. In the ‘No Surrender’ media camp was
journalist David Quinn, who in the Irish
Catholic argued that changing the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility
of marriage – with its accompanying moral judgement that divorcees live in
mortal sin and thus exclude themselves from Eucharist - would be anything but
merciful.
However,
the Pell axis proved to be out of step with Pope Francis’s response at the
Synod’s closing Mass in St Peter’s on Sunday October 25 when the Pontiff,
stressing that ‘today is the time of mercy’, said that the Synod had ‘laid bare
the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church's teachings or good intentions, in order to sit on the chair of
Moses and judge with superiority and superficiality difficult cases
and wounded families’, a clear distancing from the Pellites. He
also described the Synod’s discussions as a way to ‘open up broader
horizons, rising above conspiracy theories and blinkered viewpoints’, with the
aim of ‘carefully studying and confronting challenges to the traditional family
‘without burying our heads in the sand.’ His invitation to the bishops to speak
their minds freely has not only made Synods less uno voce but has also enabled him to identify stragglers and
blockers! His carefully chosen reference to ‘conspiracy theories’ was a
calculated denial of a widely-published news story which originated with an
Italian publication, Il Quotidiano Nazionale. The newspaper claimed
that earlier this year Francis privately met a Japanese consultant in the north
Italian city of Pisa who diagnosed a small, non-malignant tumour in his brain,
a report without any factual foundation, according to the Vatican spokesman, Fr
Federico Lombardi S.J.
Personal
stories of prelates who came out of the shadows illuminate more vividly the
vaguer references to ‘challenges’ used in the collective synodal text. For
example, Cardinal Joseph E. Kurtz, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference,
with whom I discussed the Synod while attending the centennial Thomas Merton
conference this summer in his archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky, spoke
eloquently of how his late elder brother, George, born with Downs Syndrome,
lived with him in two rectories and a bishop’s house ‘transforming these abodes
into homes in a way never anticipated.’
In conversation
on the Borgo Pio with Eamon Martin, the Archbishop of Armagh recalled to me how
Merton was cited as one of four representatives of American culture (along with
Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day) during his address to
Congress in Washington and as a first time Synoder was enthused by listening to
so many different experiences. He found particularly moving various
contributions on the plight of refugee and migrant families.
Another
important player, Cardinal Oscar Gracias of Bombay, when interviewed on CNN,
played down differences and claimed that ‘everybody has pulled his head from
the sand’ on contentious issues which were considered closed. But I remain
sceptical that ‘the ostriches’ have gone away. So too apparently is Dr McAleese
who said: ‘It is, worryingly the first Synod to challenge the will of a Pope
and so much more important than the Synod’s report will be the Holy Father’s
written response to it. Whether that is to be a climbdown or a showdown remains
to be seen.’
Brendan
Butler of We Are Church has called on Pope Francis to act and exercise
leadership when his post-Council Exhortation is published, probably when he
opens the Jubilee Year of Mercy on December 8, the feast of the Immaculate
Conception. Mr Butler anticipates that the Pope will show his mettle, citing
the mid-Synod discourse in which the Pontiff said that ‘the Synod journey culminates in listening to the Bishop of Rome called
to speak authoritatively as the Pastor and Teacher of all Christians.’
For all his encouragement of a listening
Church, Francis has remained particularly deaf towards the ordination of women
and acceptance of same sex relationships. In addition to provoking the ire of
Dr McAleese’s stricture that it is ‘bonkers’ not to allow the participation of
women at the Synod, Francis has also baffled Fr Thomas Reese, the American
Jesuit commentator for the National
Catholic Reporter. Fr Reese found himself at the centre of international
attention when he asked at a press briefing why a religious brother,
Herve Janson, the superior general of the Little Brothers of Jesus, was
selected by the International Union of Superiors General to be one of their 10
voting representatives at the Synod. Pointing out that the other nine were
priests, Fr Reese asked why couldn’t a religious sister speak and vote.
‘Theologically and canonically, he (Br Janson) is no different from the
superior of a women's religious order, except for his gender. He is not a
cleric. He is not ordained.’ His
question remains unanswered! – and if I am correct, a proposal early on in the
Synod from Canadian Archbishop Paul Andre Durocher for a consideration of the
admission of women to the diaconate did not materialise in the final report.
Urging the Synod to seek ways to open
up more opportunities for women in church life, Archbishop Durocher suggested
that, ‘where possible, qualified women should be given higher
positions and decision-making authority within church structures and
new opportunities in ministry.’
Having applauded Archbishop Durocher’s
initiative, Bridget Mary Meehan, a bishop in the excommunicated Association of
Roman Catholic Women Priests, described the Synod’s Final Report as ‘a setback’
for Pope Francis’s agenda of inclusiveness and compassion to Catholics on the margins.
‘The sad reality is the Synod, no surprise, was a male only event, even though
women make up half of humanity,’ she added. ‘Francis has spoken about expanding
the roles of women in leadership in the church, but his actions have not
matched his words. One immediate step that Pope Francis could take is to lift
excommunications and punishments toward Catholics who follow their consciences
including women priests and our supporters.’
No such clemency came from Rome for the
220-strong worldwide Roman Catholic Women Priests. Instead, a Cincinnati nun, Sister
Letitia ‘Tish’ Rawles, was excommunicated and dismissed from her religious
order towards the end of the Synod after admitting she had been secretly acting
as a priest since spring. Sr Tish, 67, who is terminally ill, admitted to her
superiors that she has presided over religious services in secret and
ministered to people who lived with her in a Cincinnati nursing care facility.
Furthermore, despite Pope Francis's
professed appreciation of ‘the feminine genius’, women still have not been
granted ‘a proper place in decision-making in the Church’, wrote Baroness Nuala
O'Loan, the former Northern Ireland Ombudsman and member of the House of Lords.
Writing in the Irish Catholic
Baroness O’Loan argued that the Church would be a better place if it enabled
women to play a full role in proper, structured decision making. ‘The problem
seems to be the joining of the decision-making process in the Church to the
fact of ordination. Only the ordained can make decisions, and women cannot be
ordained, she continued. ‘What we need to do as a Church is to separate
decision-making from the issue of who can be ordained. Then we could work out
how to give women a proper place in decision-making in the Church. This would mean
the amendment of Canon Law, and probably the removal of Canon 129, which allows
lay people only to cooperate, not to participate in decision-making. This could
be done. The priesthood could continue to be reserved to men, yet women could
have a full role in decision-making.’
Pope Francis and the bishops also chose
to turn a deaf ear to a pre-Synod plea to accept same sex relationships by a
Polish priest working in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).
At a news conference 43 year old Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa introduced his long-term
partner and claimed that the Catholic Church is ‘full of homosexuals’. Just days after the Synod’s conclusion, Mgr
Charamsa was dismissed from his post. In
their final report the bishops also criticised international bodies
which they said were pushing poor countries to introduce same-sex marriage laws
with the promise of aid.
Now that the bishops have returned to
their dioceses and the Curia continues its work in Rome without their oversight
Pope Francis
is preparing his future magisterial document. He does so after two years and
seven months of his pontificate with his authority and prestige enhanced at the
two Synods; his popularity successfully tested by his pastoral visits to Cuba
and the United States of America, as well as his Motu Proprio speeding up and reducing the costs of church
annulments and the welcome given to his encyclical Laudato Si on the Environment and climate change. He appears to
have given a great degree of respectability to synodality which he calls a
process, as distinct from events. Yet, my view remains that Synods are largely
talking shops among a select elite of male bishops: at best, it is a limited
application of the Second Vatican Council’s call for coresponsibility in the Church;
at worse its secrecy lends itself to undue influence of lobbies and
cliques.
I
recall the late Archbishop Kevin McNamara, then a Maynooth moral theologian,
saying to me over a coffee in the Via della Conciliazione during the 1974 Synod
on Evangelisation that Synods were essentially ‘seminars’ for bishops. To which
I would add, adapting Seamus Mallon’s dictum about the Hillsborough Agreement
being Sunningdale for slow learners in the Northern Ireland peace process, that
Synods tend to be ‘seminars for slow learning bishops. ’ More recently, the new
technological age of the internet and twitter enables bishops to inform and
consult their clergy and laity through questionnaires of their proceedings, and
Archbishop Eamon Martin has said that the Synod report represents an ideal
preparation for the World Meeting of Families in Dublin in 2018, a meeting
which Pope Francis is expected to attend.
Both
Archbishop Eamon Martin and Michael Kelly, the editor of the Irish Catholic, have written of two
Synods, the first the Synod of Faith in which the discussions of the Bishops
are concerned with better presentation of unchanged doctrine’, the second is
the Synod portrayed in the secular media as a Summit power struggle between those
who advocate changing teachings on birth control, homosexuality, acceptance of
divorce, the abolition of clerical celibacy and the ordination of women against
the defenders of orthodoxy and the status quo. Their critiques ignore the fact
that among the Catholic laity a pro-change majority is paramount.
As I
have previously argued, it is only by convening a Third Vatican Council that
Pope Francis in communion with the world’s bishops can resolve these
unquestioned questions. Interestingly, December 8th will be the
fiftieth anniversary of the closure of Vatican Two. A significant statement
from Pope Francis can be anticipated, but as Archbishop Diarmuid Martin
suggested, the Pope is unlikely to go much further than the bishops’ final
report.
Perhaps,
it is timely to recall that a Belgian peritus
at the Council, Canon Heylen, quipped
of conservative theologians who were imposed by Cardinal Ottaviani on a
sub-commission on Family Life: ‘They obey the Pope when the Pope obeys them’! 3.
Quoted by Xavier Rynne, The Fourth
Session, p. 313.
Pope Francis should be under no illusion
that the Pellites will not have gone away. He could do worse than bring the
Mary McAleeses, Nuala O’Loans and Bridget Mary Meehans into the synodal
hall.
