Many U.S. Catholic hope for changes that just can't be; The Synod and the American church

 US Catholics express hope, tempered expectations as the synod begins

(RNS) — While church reform advocates are working to manage disappointment among their constituencies, theologians and ministry leaders say that this synod’s agenda could lead to a more participatory, energized church.

Faithful gather in St. Peter’s Basilica during a vigil prayer attended by Pope Francis, left, ahead of the start of the Synod of Bishops 16th General Assembly, at the Vatican, Tuesday Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain

October 2, 2024

(RNS) — Last year in September, it seemed to many U.S. Catholics that the church might be on the precipice of profound transformation.

The Synod of Bishops was about to meet at the Vatican to discuss the results of a multiyear global listening effort. Termed synodality, the process gathered input from laypeople and clergy to promote dialogue and a renewed sense of mission and surfaced thorny topics, including women’s ordination, LGBTQ relationships, clergy sexual abuse and priestly celibacy. 

The assembly allowed groundbreaking, open conversation at the Vatican about LGBTQ people, and the meeting for the first time included laypeople, including women, as voting members alongside bishops. The shifts made U.S. church reform advocates hopeful, and traditionalists fearful, that the synod would prompt significant changes in the church’s approach to gender and sexuality. 

But a year later, as the Vatican begins the final assembly meeting of this synod today (Oct. 2), church reform advocates are watching with more measured expectations and working to manage disappointment among their constituencies. 

After a major pastoral change in Vatican guidance allowing priests to bless gay and other couples not married in the church prompted significant blowback, Pope Francis in February relegated the most contentious issues from the first synod session to study groups that largely operate outside the assembly. He also told CBS News he was not open to the possibility of women deacons, one of many topics that was still expected to be under discussion.

Still, many theologians and ministry leaders say that this synod’s agenda could lead to a more participatory, energized church.

Kate McElwee, the executive director of the U.S.-based advocacy group Women’s Ordination Conference, said that much of last year’s “pregnant hope” had been “dashed” when it was announced that the question of women in ministerial roles would be relegated to a working group with “zero transparency around its membership.”

“Many women are tired of empty words,” McElwee said. Her organization is gearing up for an activist presence in Rome during the synod.

While she sees the Vatican as trying to lower expectations for conversations about women’s ordination, McElwee is still hoping that the Holy Spirit will move the synod toward an “open, honest and discerning conversation around this question infused with urgency.”

Yunuen Trujillo, a lay minister from Los Angeles and author of “LGBTQ Catholics: A Guide to Inclusive Ministry,” said she has heard from many LGBTQ Catholics that they are feeling hopeless. However, Trujillo became more excited about the synod, despite the fact that LGBTQ issues had been relegated to a working group, after reading the working document (instrumentum laboris) for October’s meeting.

For Trujillo, the document’s focus on discerning the gifts of women and laypeople, moving the church away from clericalism, having holistic and integral formation and listening to the lived experiences of people all inspire hope.

“For the conversation on LGBTQ issues to move forward, we first have to have an honest conversation about” misogyny,  Trujillo said.

Carmen Ramos, who works in diaconate formation in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said that when she’s led discussion groups in the synod’s model of “conversations in the spirit,” she has seen the shift produced by listening and praying together.

Ramos said she was most excited to see the instrumentum laboris mention the potential for lay men and women preaching, especially as she already witnesses deacons’ wives receiving preaching formation. Deacons in the church can perform some pastoral duties, including preaching at Mass, performing baptisms and officiating at weddings, but cannot celebrate Mass or hear confessions.

In September, Ramos’ parish participated in St. Phoebe Day — named after a first-century female saint that advocates argue was a deacon — where women offer scriptural reflections during Masses. The initiative is sponsored by Discerning Deacons, an organization advocating for women’s ordination to the diaconate.

“It was so joyful. It was so diverse. People heard stories from women that they would not have heard before,” Ramos said of the Los Angeles parishes that participated.

In a February opinion poll from Pew Research Center, a majority of U.S. Catholics supported both ordaining women priests (64%) and recognizing the marriages of gay and lesbian couples in the church (54%), even though both proposals are more radical than the more incremental proposals of ordaining women deacons and adopting a more welcoming stance toward LGBTQ+ Catholics that had been discussed early in the synod.

Among Catholics who attend Mass weekly, those numbers drop to 4 in 10 support for ordaining women as priests and 1 in 3 support for recognizing gay marriages. But regardless of popular support for changes to the church’s teaching around gender and sexuality, the synodal assembly, which is still mostly made up of bishops, only serves in a consultative role to Francis, who will ultimately guide church teaching himself.

Outside the U.S., those church reform proposals are met with both more support and more opposition in different countries, where the faithful are also wrestling with entirely different issues, including polygamous marriages, than what U.S. advocates have raised.

“Concern for having the church move slowly here so that everyone continues to walk together as church is one of the pope’s main jobs, but that’s frustrating for people who are actively being hurt and unable to have a fuller relationship with God because of the way they’re being treated by the Catholic Church,” said Brian Flanagan, a senior fellow at New Ways Ministry, a Catholic LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. 

Given that there seemed to be little consensus on LGBTQ+ issues at the synod, Flanagan said he would “much rather they say nothing than say something unfortunate or hurtful or harmful.”

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit and advocate for LGBTQ+ Catholics, wrote that as a synod delegate last year, he frequently heard the words “disgusting,” “repulsive,” “unnatural” and “sick” in relation to the community.

Conservative dissidents to Francis’ leadership continue to portray the synod as threatening to bring sinister changes. 

Bishop Joseph Strickland, who was removed from leadership of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, warned that the upcoming synod session “looms as a planned attack on basic teachings of our beautiful Catholic faith.” Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from RNS.

Twenty-one percent of U.S. Catholics view Francis unfavorably, and slightly more than half of that group thinks that Francis represents a major change in direction to the church, according to Pew.

Flanagan emphasized that the true measure for success in Francis’ efforts on synodality is seeing how the teaching will be received and implemented over the coming years. “If this is the last synodal process in the Catholic Church, then Pope Francis will have failed in what he’s trying to do,” the theologian said.

Maureen O’Connell, a professor of Christian ethics at La Salle University in Philadelphia, has taken a leave of absence to organize synodal initiatives in higher education, including a trip for about 150 students, educators and ministers to experience the synod in Rome.

O’Connell said her students have responded enthusiastically to synodality, especially the moments in the synod process where the church has acknowledged past harm.

“They appreciate the attempt of the church, the institutional church, to try to engage the people of God with integrity, and that resonates,” O’Connell said. “Young people are looking for genuineness, and they’re looking for integrity because they have come of age in an era of broad distrust of institutions writ large.”

Shannon Wimp Schmidt, who is the content director of the ecumenical youth ministry collaboration TENx10 and lives in the Chicago area, told RNS that the theological concept of synodality and a relational approach to youth ministry go hand-in-hand.

As Schmidt and her co-workers face high rates of youth disaffiliation, “this idea of synodality, of walking together towards a common destination, of walking together along the way and listening together, is really a focus of what we do.”

Schmidt and Trujillo both called for the synod to produce concrete guidance for parishes and dioceses to implement. The pope would typically release a document after the synod concludes at the end of October.

“Sometimes when we get documents from the church, they tend to be beautiful theology, beautiful visions without necessarily helping all of us apply it to our daily lives,” said Schmidt, adding that Francis has recently been more specific in his guidance.

Schmidt, who is also co-host of the Plaid Skirts and Basic Black podcast, a Black Catholic culture podcast, said she knows that the average person in the pews may be only minimally aware of the synod. She believes the synod will begin to have an impact only when leaders begin to change their ministry. “That’s how ultimately the church will change,” she said.

O’Connell, who has also worked with Discerning Deacons, said that it can be hard for people who are not church insiders to grasp the significance of the procedural changes the synod is discussing.

The idea that “no bishop should be able to make a decision about something in his diocese without first consulting his people” is “a no-brainer for most of the world, but for Roman Catholicism, that is absolutely a seismic shift,” said O’Connell.

Text being prepared for divorced and remarried Catholics

 

Vatican preparing text for divorced and remarried couples, Cardinal Farrell says

By Jonah McKeown

St. Louis, Mo., Apr 25, 2023 / 15:50 pm

The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life is preparing a document that will address divorced and remarried couples at the request of Pope Francis, according to the dicastery’s prefect, Cardinal Kevin Farrell.

Farrell mentioned the in-progress document in a speech delivered in Italian on April 22 that opened a meeting of the dicastery, which promotes the pastoral care of the family and the mission of the lay faithful. Farrell spoke about the importance of providing help and guidance to “those experiencing marital crises of all kinds.”

“On this front, the dicastery is also working on the preparation of a text that will specifically concern — as you wished, Your Holiness — men and women who, having a failed marriage behind them, live in new unions,” Farrell said in his opening address.

Farrell did not say when the document will be released.

The Church teaches that Catholics who are divorced and remarried without an annulment are not to take holy Communion, a teaching reaffirmed by St. John Paul II in the 2005 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio. Pope Francis has said during his pontificate that there may be case-by-case situations where divorced and remarried Catholics can access the Eucharist, including situations where the spouses practice continence within their marriage.

In a recent interview, Pope Francis responded to a question about whether divorced and remarried Catholics could receive the Eucharist by saying: “We cannot reduce a human situation to a prescriptive one.” In the interview, Pope Francis advised looking to what his predecessor Benedict XVI said on the subject of annulments, affirming that “a large part of church marriages are invalid for lack of faith.”

“And think about it: Sometimes [one] goes to a wedding and it seems more like it’s a social reception and not a sacrament,” Pope Francis said. “When young people say ‘forever,’ who knows what they mean [by] ‘forever.’”

And now Cardinal McElroy responds to criticisms of his recent article

 

Cardinal McElroy responds to his critics on sexual sin, the Eucharist, and LGBT and divorced/remarried Catholics

In January, America published an article I wrote on the theme of inclusion in the life of the church. Since that time, the positions I presented have received both substantial support and significant opposition. The majority of those criticizing my article focused on its treatment of the exclusion of those who are divorced and remarried and members of the L.G.B.T. communities from the Eucharist. Criticisms included the assertion that my article challenged an ancient teaching of the church, failed to give due attention to the call to holiness, abandoned any sense of sin in the sexual realm and failed to highlight the essential nature of conversion. Perhaps most consistently, the criticism stated that exclusion from the Eucharist is essentially a doctrinal rather than a pastoral question.

I seek in this article to wrestle with some of these criticisms so that I might contribute to the ongoing dialogue on this sensitive question—which will no doubt continue to be discussed throughout the synodal process. Specifically, I seek here to develop more fully than I did in my initial article some important related questions, namely on the nature of conversion in the moral life of the disciple, the call to holiness, the role of sin, the sacrament of penance, the history of the categorical doctrine of exclusion for sexual sins and the relationship between moral doctrine and pastoral theology.

The report of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the synodal dialogues held in our nation last year pointed to the profound sadness of many, if not most of the people of God about the broad exclusion from the Eucharist of so many striving Catholics who are barred from Communion because they are divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T.

In January, I proposed that three foundational principles of Catholic teaching invited a re-examination of the church’s practice in this area. The first is Pope Francis’ image of the church as a field hospital, which points to the reality that we are all wounded by sin and all equally in need of God’s grace and healing.

The second is the role of conscience in Catholic thought. For every member of the church, it is conscience to which we have the ultimate responsibility and by which we will be judged. For that reason, while Catholic teaching has an essential role in moral decision-making, it is conscience that has the privileged place. As Pope Francis has stated, the church’s role is to form consciences, not replace them. Categorical exclusions of the divorced and remarried and L.G.B.T. persons from the Eucharist do not give due respect to the inner conversations of conscience that people have with their God in discerning moral choice in complex circumstances.

Finally, I proposed that the Eucharist is given to us as a profound grace in our conversion to discipleship. As Pope Francis reminds us, the Eucharist is “not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” To bar disciples from that grace blocks one of the principal pathways Christ has given to them to reform their lives and accept the Gospel ever more fully. For all of these reasons, I proposed that divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T. Catholics who are ardently seeking the grace of God in their lives should not be categorically barred from the Eucharist.

In the weeks since my article was published, some readers have objected that the church cannot accept such a notion of inclusion because the exclusion of remarried women and men or L.G.B.T. persons from the Eucharist flows from the moral tradition in the church that all sexual sins are grave matter. This means that all sexual sins are so gravely evil that they constitute objectively an action that can sever a believer’s relationship with God.

I have attempted to face this objection head-on by drawing attention to both the history and the unique reasoning of the principle that all sexual sins are objectively mortal sins.

For most of the history of the church, various gradations of objective wrong in the evaluation of sexual sins were present in the life of the church. But in the 17th century, with the inclusion in Catholic teaching of the declaration that for all sexual sins there is no parvity of matter (i.e., no circumstances can mitigate the grave evil of a sexual sin), we relegated the sins of sexuality to an ambit in which no other broad type of sin is so absolutely categorized.

In principle, all sexual sins are objective mortal sins within the Catholic moral tradition. This means that all sins that violate the sixth and the ninth commandments are categorically objective mortal sins. There is no such comprehensive classification of mortal sin for any of the other commandments.

In understanding the application of this principle to the reception of Communion, it is vital to recognize that it is the level of objective sinfulness that forms the foundation for the present categorical exclusion of sexually active divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T. Catholics from the Eucharist. So, it is precisely this change in Catholic doctrine—made in the 17th century—that is the foundation for categorically barring L.G.B.T. and divorced/remarried Catholics from the Eucharist. Does the tradition that all sexual sins are objectively mortal make sense within the universe of Catholic moral teaching?

It is automatically an objective mortal sin for a husband and wife to engage in a single act of sexual intercourse utilizing artificial contraception. This means the level of evil present in such an act is objectively sufficient to sever one’s relationship with God.

It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to physically or psychologically abuse your spouse.

It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to exploit your employees.

It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to discriminate against a person because of her gender or ethnicity or religion.

It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to abandon your children.

The moral tradition that all sexual sins are grave matter springs from an abstract, deductivist and truncated notion of the Christian moral life that yields a definition of sin jarringly inconsistent with the larger universe of Catholic moral teaching. This is because it proceeds from the intellect alone. The great French philosopher Henri Bergson pointed to the inadequacy of any such approach to the richness of Catholic faith: “We see that the intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use…. Intuition, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life.”

The call to holiness requires both a conceptual and an intuitive approach leading to an understanding of what discipleship in Jesus Christ means. Discipleship means striving to deepen our faith and our relationship to God, to enflesh the Beatitudes, to build up the kingdom in God’s grace, to be the good Samaritan. The call to holiness is all-encompassing in our lives, embracing our efforts to come closer to God, our sexual lives, our familial lives and our societal lives. It also entails recognizing sin where it lurks in our lives and seeking to root it out. And it means recognizing that each of us in our lives commits profound sins of omission or commission. At such moments we should seek the grace of the sacrament of penance. But such failures should not be the basis for categorical ongoing exclusion from the Eucharist.

It is important to note that the criticisms of my article did not seek to demonstrate that the tradition classifying all sexual sins as objective mortal sin is in fact correct, or that it yields a moral teaching that is consonant with the wider universe of Catholic moral teaching. Instead, critics focused upon the repeated assertion that the exclusion of divorced/remarried and L.G.B.T. Catholics from the Eucharist is a doctrinal, not a pastoral question.

I would answer that Pope Francis is precisely calling us to appreciate the vital interplay between the pastoral and doctrinal aspects of church teaching on questions just such as these.

Seen through a pastoral prism

In his teachings, Pope Francis has framed a substantive pastoral theology at the heart of the life of the church. This pastoral outlook demands that all of the branches of theology attend to the concrete reality of human life and human suffering in a much more substantial way in forming doctrine. It states that the lived experience of human sinfulness and human conversion are vital to understanding the central attribute of God in relation to us, which is mercy. It demands that moral theology proceed from the actual pastoral action of Jesus Christ, which does not first demand a change of life, but begins with an embrace of divine love.

The pastoral theology of Pope Francis requires that the liturgical and sacramental life of the church be formed in compassionate embrace with the often overwhelming life challenges that prevent men and women at some periods in their life from conforming fully with important Gospel challenges. And the pastoral theology of Pope Francis rejects a notion of law that can be blind to the uniqueness of concrete human situations, human suffering and human limitation.

There are three fundamental foundations for this pastoral theology.

The first foundation for the pastoral theology that Pope Francis is pointing to lies in the recognition that the church should mirror the pastoral action of the Lord himself. It is the pattern of Jesus Christ who walked the earth that we are to incorporate into every element of ecclesial life. First, the Lord embraces the person, then he heals them. Then he calls the person to reform. Each of these elements of the saving encounter with the Lord is essential. But their order is also essential. Christ first reveals the overpowering merciful and limitless love of God. Then he moves to heal the particular form of suffering that the person is experiencing. And only then does he call the person specifically to a change in that person’s life.

This pattern must become ever more deeply the model for the church’s proclamation of the faith and healing action in the world. This must be the imitatio Christi for a pastoral church in an age that rejects abstraction, authority and tradition. The clear recognition of sin and the call to change one’s life to conform more fully with the Gospel is essential to Christian conversion and the achievement of true happiness in this world and the next. But that call must be expressed in the tender, compassionate welcome of a church that patiently ministers over time, as Christ did.

The second principle of Pope Francis’ pastoral theology is that the church must be committed to true accompaniment. In “The Joy of the Gospel” (“Evangelii Gaudium”), Pope Francis expresses both the depth of commitment and the openness that must suffuse pastoral life and action in the church. “The Church will have to initiate everyone—priests, religious and laity—into this ‘art of accompaniment’ which teaches us to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other.” The challenge of this is to come to see others as God sees them, incredibly precious souls, individual in nature and identity, yet equally treasured by the Lord.

The final foundation for the pastoral theology that Pope Francis is delineating for the life of the church is the assertion that the church’s identity, teaching and action must be rooted in the life situations that men and women actually experience in the world today. Every disciple encounters certain enormously complex circumstances that consistently prevent him or her from living out the teaching of the church in its fullness. Those who are divorced and remarried or sexually active members of the L.G.B.T. communities are among them. Pastoral theology and accompaniment seek to recapitulate and replicate the saving encounter of Jesus Christ with the saint and the sinner who resides in every human soul, touching every dimension of human existence in the real world, inviting all striving disciples to the eucharistic banquet in this world and the next.

Those who oppose elements of the pastoral mission of Pope Francis frequently argue that doctrine cannot be superseded by the pastoral. It is equally important to recognize that the pastoral cannot be eclipsed by doctrine. For the pastoral ministry of Jesus Christ stands at the heart of any balanced understanding of the church that we are called to be. And pastoral authenticity is as important as philosophical authenticity or authenticity in law in contouring the life of the church to the charter our Lord himself has given to us. Let us pray that in the coming months the Holy Spirit will lead the church in discerning how such a vision of faith and grace can be accomplished.

Correction (March 3): A previous version of this article translated "Evangelii Gaudium" as "The Gospel of Joy," rather than "The Joy of the Gospel."