As I write this the Synod of the Family has just ended: the Synod Fathers have voted – paragraph by paragraph – on the final text of the report which they presented to Pope Francis, and tomorrow afternoon there will be a special Mass of closure of the Synod. In the weeks which follow the Holy Father will reflect on the findings presented to him by the Synod Fathers and, presumably, produce a post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation – the normal fruit of a Synod, as for example St John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio followed the Synod on the Family of the previous year.
There has been a certain amount of trepidation generated by the Synod, particularly as a result of the perceived clash between those defending on the one hand the traditional Catholic position regarding the non-admission of divorced-and-remarried Catholics to Holy Communion, and the other – German speaking – bloc proposing their admission to the Eucharist. It might not be an exaggeration to say that some Catholics are scandalised by the latter position, and perhaps concerned that the Holy Father is in some way sympathetic to their stand. However, as the Catholic writer with aleteia.org Tom Hoopes observes that the apparent “craziness happening at the synod” is in fact a good thing – albeit unsettling – in that it means that the Synod is transparent and that everything is being aired rather than swept under the carpet … to fester. We are witnessing, he continues, the Pope’s personal modus operandi:
Pope Francis is doing things the way he did the Aparecida document, a document the Latin American churches produced in 2007 with then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as editor and shaper.
His process then as now is to make a big funnel, with lots of input on the wide end and him on the other. The document creates a second funnel, with his document at the narrow end and its many applications to specific problems coming out the wide end.
Furthermore, we might be missing a particularly revealing dimension in Church reflection on marriage and family if we reduce it to an orthodoxy-heterodoxy dichotomy; at root the question appears to me more a crisis of hope than a crisis of doctrine. This point has been made by George Weigel in First Things, where he makes the provocative assertion that there are some churchmen who are giving a “tacit blessing” to cohabitation and other arrangements that fall short of the Church’s vision of marriage and family life, and in doing so “are pressing the question of whether the universal call to holiness is, in fact, universal”:
But it’s not easy to interpret in any other way the claim by some members of Synod-2015 that the Church’s teaching on chastity, marriage, and the family is simply too difficult to live out, and therefore some Catholics—perhaps many Catholics—should be exempt from it (and thereby exempt from the universal call to holiness). Those given this pass by their local bishops may, it seems live with the Church’s tacit blessing in relationships long considered obstacles to moral and spiritual health. The exempt may receive the sacraments without being fully in communion with the Church in their manner of life. They may continue for an indeterminate period of time in what amounts to a kind of de facto personal schism that effectively detaches them from the global communion of Catholicism. They may, in sum, live as if the universal call to holiness were not universal, but something for the saints alone.
A very similar point was made by Cardinal Sarah of Guinea in his presentation to the Synod in which he spoke of the temptation of yielding to Western secularism: ‘Recognizing the so-called “realities of life” as a locus theologicus means giving up hope in the transforming power of faith and the Gospel.’ The loss of evangelical nerve in the Church in the affluent West contrasts with a “poor Church” which is “a joyously evangelical and prophetic sign of contradiction to worldliness”. And then in a very striking display of nerve, the courageous African cardinal went on to speak of the two movements – both of demonic origin – which are dividing the world between them: “on the one hand, the idolatry of Western freedom; on the other, Islamic fundamentalism: atheistic secularism versus religious fanaticism. To use a slogan, we find ourselves between ‘gender ideology and ISIS’.” Cardinal Sarah appealed to the Synod for a “luminous act of courage” in clearly declaring God’s will for marriage in the face of these twin ideologies which seek to destroy it: on the one hand “the secularized West through quick and easy divorce, abortion, homosexual unions, euthanasia etc. (cf. Gender theory, the ‘Femen’, the LGBT lobby, IPPF …)” and on the other hand, “the pseudo-family of ideologized Islam which legitimizes polygamy, female subservience, sexual slavery, child marriage etc. (cf. Al Qaeda, Isis, Boko Haram …).”
It is hard to imagine a clearer declaration of the historical crisis the twenty-first century has entered. In the words of Cardinal Sarah, “What Nazi-Fascism and Communism were in the twentieth century, Western homosexual and abortion Ideologies and Islamic Fanaticism are today.” (We have included in this month’s Position Papers the text of an address to the Synod from the Romanian doctor Dr Anca-Maria Cernea; her “warning to the Synod” mirrors the tone and content of Cardinal Sarah’s address.)
In his brief speech to conclude the Synod, Pope Francis used the word “mercy” no less than nine times, showing how deeply the Holy Father is inspired by a charism of mercy. One line at the end of his speech sums up how the successor of Peter truly speaks the truth in love: “When the Church has to recall an unrecognized truth, or a betrayed good, she always does so impelled by merciful love, so that men may have life and have it abundantly (cf. Jn 10:10).”