105.Synod on the Family: World Responses

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. [Acts 2:42, NRSV]

Inside a Synod

Synods are the periodic meetings of the world’s bishops. In his early weeks in office, Pope Francis had said he valued these meetings and wanted to make greater use of them. He sees synods as “one of the fruits of the Second Vatican Council” and a structure “at the service of the mission and communion of the church, as an expression of collegiality.”

Concerning the Synod on the Family, coming up this October with an Extraordinary General Assembly, Pope Francis clearly intends to see the Church engage in a kind of two year process of reflecting on the pastoral reality of marriage and family life today and to map out some appropriate pastoral responses.

Themed the pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelisation, the accent of this Synod is its pastoral slant. The Holy Father has consistently shown a keen interest in a renewed teaching about marriage and the family, in line with what he is constantly concerned about, which is a renewed pastoral care that is intelligent, courageous and full of love.

The invitation deriving from this for all the Church is to listen to the problems and expectations of many families today.

Evidently, the present Pope may be said to have a triple good sense:

that however conflicted Catholics may be about church teachings and administration, they are passionate about the Church;
that people in the pews are really concerned about many things and bishops around the world ought to learn to recognize and tap this immense energy;
that the most important part of a communication is listening.

What the Vatican did was to distribute to dioceses around the world a set of questions on issues related to family life that included controversial issues like birth control, same-sex marriage, and divorce and remarriage. The Synod Secretary, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri directed bishops around the world to distribute the questionnaire concerning Catholics’ views on controversial issues like birth control, same-sex marriage, and divorce and remarriage “as widely as possible to deaneries and parishes so that input from local sources can be received.” What is at once remarkable is that Baldisseri did not just ask the bishops to respond with their views, but to hear and respond with the views of their people. He wanted the bishops to gather information from the “grass roots” of the faithful. The answers to those questions are to inform the agenda of the October Synod of Bishops on families in Rome.

Following his own advice, the cardinal chaired a forum in April this year on struggles facing Catholic families around the world. Held at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, this forum was titled “Listening to the Family: Uncertainty and Expectations,” and was open to all. The Gregorian, the first university founded by the Jesuit order, even offered babysitting services for families who wanted to attend together. It was an event in which organizers intended to see scholars and married couples “join together in an exercise of listening to the reality of marriage and family, to start a reflection ‘from the base’ that can provide the tools for a theoretical and interdisciplinary reflection.”

Some people had been dismayed by the survey “instrument” itself, which consisted of a long list of complicated, over-theorised questions. The sentence construction and the structure of the questions were also not very helpful to ordinary people. In fact, many have found the questions more than a trifle offensive as they noticed that they were designed to get the sort of answers which the Curia desired to hear. In a few cases, dioceses or other groups have proactively rephrased the questions to render them more useful and these have generally been found helpful.

All said, the importance of this Vatican exercise is that some attempt was made in this electronic era to actually involve a large number of people. The people as a whole are pleased that Rome is trying to get a real sense of what is going on in the world and what ordinary Christians are thinking. There is a sense of an important step having been made towards getting a real understanding of the “sensus fidelium“. People may be forgiven for thinking that under Pope Francis, they are witnessing a stronger element of Vatican II spirit of openness and a clearer vision of a more open Church.

However, to ask whether Pope Francis is going to change doctrines is to seriously miss the importance of what is going on. The hugely important thing he has already done after one year in office is to encourage the Church to question and discuss. For example, before this Pope came on the scene, have you ever seen Catholics publicly discussing, without judgmental language, cohabitation before marriage as a pastoral reality? Pope Francis wants to start with the official church leadership, the clergy and the religious, whose rigidity has for too long held the Church hostage to what Cardinal Carlo Martini before his death had described as life-choking old ways. Like Pope John XXIII who inaugurated the Second Vatican Council fifty years ago, Pope Francis has once again opened the Church windows so that, as Bishop Manfred Scheuer of Innsbruck said, “the pope has brought about a change in atmosphere. One can breathe easier.” To Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, “Francis is encouraging, reviving and renewing the church.”

And the pope goes even further yet; he is not afraid to consult the laity. To the youth in Argentina during the WYD last year, his resounding message to them was to go and get involved, and not be afraid to make mistakes. This is the one trait of singular importance that we see in Pope Francis, that is, to not be afraid to get things messy. Just as he encourages others to take risk, the Pope has shown himself to be quite fearless in taking risk, so long as he can better preach the gospel in actions, and not be unduly burdened by bureaucracy.

Unity does not mean uniformity. Real unity is harmony in diversity. Talk, discuss, consult, get involved, encourage and allow others to get involved – of course things may get messy that way. Management may also be more difficult and certainly less comfortable. But, for whatever else you may be accused of if you are willing to be truly consultative, you will be less liable to be labelled amongst the self-absorbed, self-referential, and egoistic “I am the one to decide”.

Furthermore, doctrines may or may not change – and that, in a way, is not even all that important – but laws and pastoral practices might. That’s what comes of an openness to consultation, genuine discussion that involves listening as well as talking, and all of us working together.

That is the better underlying message we see in the distribution of the questionnaire from the Vatican in preparation for the October Synod. At the very least, the Pope is, in the first place, making all the baptized co-responsible for matters marital and familial. The laity across the globe can be forgiven for getting the sense that this pope is giving us a bit of our church back. In the second place, what the pope is doing is, at the very least, implicitly admitting that for what the ordained really do not know and are quite unable to define, they really should go and consult the laity who, through life experiences and studies, do know. Let’s take an exaggerated case to make the point. As Luc De Fleurquin, a canon law professor in Louvain, himself a member of the ordained, once said, “I once sat in an international canon law congress in Rome, and felt really weird to see a bunch of old celibates giving the legal definition of what constitutes a consummation of marriage without ever once asking the married couples about it!” To make church rules and regulations on marriage and family without consulting the laity – themselves the ministers of marriage and family life – is not only to run the risk of being irrelevant, it would reflect a deficient management style that could be quite archaic and ineffective, self-referential and irresponsible. For way too long, the modus operandi in the Catholic Church has been one of top-down telling the people what to think and how to act.

The real power in any domain of the world, be it religious, social-economic, or military and political, lies in the power of the individuals to withdraw their consent. Religious leaders gifted in political manouvring who have anchored themselves well in prestigious ecclesiastical positions, know that “enlightening” the laity, or “enabling” and “empowering” them or, worse, “consulting” them, would cost the leaders their “political” and “managerial” control. Pope Francis obviously thinks differently. Initiating the synod-questionnaire himself, Pope Francis wants as broad a spectrum of world opinion as possible. Bishops across the world can feel at ease that there shall be freedom to discuss hitherto untouchable topics and not be singled out for public reprimand and humiliation. By the distribution of the synod preparatory questionnaire, Pope Francis has even thrown open the discussion to all in the global church, evincing a wish to tap the sensus fidelium. But it is up to the bishops’ conferences and individual bishops to mobilize every local church to respond.

That said, we need to stress that unlike the Anglican synodal process, where the house of the laity carries one-third of the votes, this Catholic Synod at the Roman level is entirely clerical. Still, the laity have a sense of something novel this time round because the one at the helm is Pope Francis. And so, in this particular synodal process, we see a structured attempt to listen to the experience of Catholic life which every diocese and priest has been invited to do. Listening to the people ought to be the ordinary job of the clergy anyhow. And now, with this Vatican questionnaire, it has become an additional, extra-ordinary duty.

But how has your local church responded to Pope Francis’ invitation? Was there any discussion at all in your diocese? Was the laity consulted? Was the questionnaire ever distributed to the laity?

Quite a number of responses to the questionnaire have been posted on the web and therefore deposited in the public domain. The various reactions make for interesting study and reflection ahead of the closely watched October Synod.

You may like to check out the following list.

The Ambivalent American Bishops

We have come to appreciate the Americans as being a very efficient but also a very pragmatic nation of people. Over the years, they have consistently proven themselves to be far and away the most efficient in reproducing official Vatican documents, translating them and offering reflections and study-packages on them. From the web, we have read from American lay Catholics that when a bishop wants input from the faithful, he is clear and most efficient about it. For instance, when there is a survey about a diocesan pastoral plan, there will be lots about that plan on the diocesan website where the “Donate” link is prominently carried on the main page. But, on the Vatican survey on family life, nothing might be found if the diocese has no interest to conduct the survey. There might also be no parish announcements and nothing in the diocesan newspaper. The bishop’s blog on the website may not even mention anything about the Vatican questionnaire.

According to the National Catholic Reporter research, a few, but precious few, dioceses have responded actively to the Vatican call to survey and report. But, fewer than half of all U.S. dioceses have information about the synod on their websites. Many readers emailed NCR, expressing disappointment that they were not given an opportunity to participate in the consultation.

There is an ambivalence on the part of the American hierarchy, a majority of whom appears to have no interest in the opinions of the laity. They probably thought they already knew what those opinions were and did not wish to give them the light of day. Indeed, it is common knowledge that on the question of how absolute is the prohibition of contraception, “that train left the station long ago”. American Catholics, and Catholics worldwide, have made up their minds and the sensus fidelium clearly suggests the rejection of church teaching on the subject. It is easy to see where the battle line is drawn: to the rigid hierarchy, the sense of the faithful has little value other than to echo the teaching of the official magisterium. It is a sad commentary, to say the least, to have to note that, on the one hand, we are now hearing as never before indisputable manifestations of the sense of the faithful, and yet on the other hand, there is the continued excuse to ignore, dismiss and attack them as mere public opinion, tainted as they must be by pernicious signs of secular relativism or some “intrinsic evil”.

The American laity themselves should not be too puzzled over the fact that the US bishops’ national organization, the USCCB, has shown little interest in promoting in an effective way the Questionnaire in contrast to some major European bishops’ conferences.

Some writers have alleged that “two out of three bishops/dioceses are already saying that they’re not really interested in surveys or discussions, unless of course the surveys say what the bishops want to hear, no more and no less.”

So far, the American bishops have shown that to survey or not to survey falls clearly within their power and control. We are not at all unaware of this tragic situation, but are only afraid that a bishop or priest deaf to the voice of his parishioners is also likely to be only talking to himself. Having entered the twenty-first century, the church cannot possibly be dragged back into an earlier time where silence and status quo were the order of the day.

Could the ambivalence of the American bishops have something to do with their sullen hostility against the Pope over the latter’s focus on the poor on which the American church is experiencing political and ideological differences with the Obama administration? Is it not the public perception that the official Catholic Church in America is politically aligned to the Republican party? Might it not also have something to do with the Pope’s insistence upon the clergy to climb down from their scandalous lifestyle and ideological high horses and begin to walk the path of genuine pastoral ministry in imitation of Christ? Whatever your views may be, one perhaps cannot help getting the impression that in the supposedly richest and most efficient nation, the official Catholic leaders continue to play politics instead of embarking on genuine pastoral work. Ideology continues to trump honest work of evangelisation and pastoral care.

The Push for Change by the German Bishops

If the Americans have been ambivalent towards the synod questionnaire, the Europeans are anything but.

In fact, some European conferences of bishops are aggressively pushing for change.

Survey results made public by national bishops’ conferences of Germany and Switzerland, for example, show a clear divergence between what the church teaches on marriage, sexuality and family life and what Catholics personally believe.

The common perception about these bishops is that they have come out very strongly for change on many church prohibitions such as co-habitation, the use of condoms, and the reception of communion by the divorced and remarried, and so on.

The German Bishops’ Conference is fully cognizant of the views of the majority of the German faithful that the church’s teaching on moral sexuality is “repressive” and “remote from life.” The collective vision of the bishops, grounded as it is in a strong pastoral sense rather than a legalistic mindset, points to an acceptance that the time has finally come to face the pastoral reality, that they need to “struggle to find fair, responsible and life-serving solutions in the spirit of Jesus Christ”, and that “it is not helpful to keep on repeating prohibitions or reservations”.

Media reports give a clear indication that these bishops embrace a strong fighting spirit to push for change.

For example, they are adamant that if the Church under Pope Francis is really going to act like it is truly pastorally-minded, then the bishops must see that declaring a second marriage after a divorce a perpetual mortal sin, and under no circumstances allowing remarried divorcees ever to receive the Sacraments, is going to be helpful neither to the suffering couples nor to the sagging credibility of the pastors of souls.

Meanwhile, twenty moral theologians of the German National Ethics Council came together to respond to the questionnaire and their responses were congruent with the responses of the majority of the faithful in Germany. These responses reveal a huge discrepancy between the church’s teaching on sexual morality and what the German Catholics actually practise. The responses moreover confirm what many German priests have long since experienced in their daily practice as priests.

The latest news item worthy of note in this regard concerns Pope Francis’ invitation to Cardinal Walter Kasper to address the extraordinary consistory, comprising some 150 cardinals and the Pope, on 20 February 2014. In a two-hour lecture, Kasper discussed marriage and family life, devoting the last section to “the problem of the divorced and remarried.”

There, he asked pointedly: “Is it not perhaps an exploitation of the person” when a person who has been divorced and remarried is excluded from receiving Communion?
He then suggested that for “the smaller segment of the divorced and remarried,” perhaps they could be admitted to “the sacrament of penance, and then of Communion.”

To be sure, none too subtle exchange of conflicted views between cardinals has dotted the cyber space. This is the stuff that makes for an anxious wait for the Synod in October.

The Refusal to Disclose by the British Bishops

In the case of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, even though the questionnaire was distributed to the laity and posted on the web, the responses from the laity were withheld by the bishops. This refusal to publish its summary of the responses to the lineamenta consultation has blighted discussion on family life issues that need to be talked about.

Concerning that refusal to make the laity’s responses public, while countries like Switzerland and Germany chose to be transparent, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster had this to say:

We were asked quite clearly – I don’t know about the bishops’ conference of Germany – not to make our formal response to the Holy See public and I agreed to that because I said if every bishops’ conference makes its response public, then it limits the space in which the synod process can operate. But we will reflect on the questions we have heard to see exactly what the challenges are for parishes because this is not a process in my mind directed towards synods of bishops. It’s also telling us what the challenge is Sunday by Sunday.

From the perspective of the laity, what Nichols said cannot be left without an appropriate response.

1. He was fundamentally reinforcing the managerial model of church. But this is not in any real sense a management of, for or by the people; instead, it is very much a business-as-usual management without, versus or against the people. Just imagine, first they do a survey of your experience and your views, and then they declare that they are not bound to tell you the result of the survey because it is none of your business. But why, you may ask? Oh, they say, because they are not answerable to you! Because they have agreed amongst themselves that they will not disclose to you what you individually said but will only disclose the information amongst themselves for further discussion as to what to do with you lot. This is merely restating their penchant for secrecy and control. It is the perfect anti-thesis of transparency and they have a water-tight excuse for doing it this way: Because they have agreed, before hand, amongst themselves, so to do.

2. It always comes round to the same familiar clericalist assertion: “We are the ones to decide.”

3. The clergy, however lacking in qualification and experience, may decide cases affecting the laity under the canon law of the church. By contrast, the laity, however qualified and experienced, may not decide cases affecting the clergy. To you, “they” are untouchable. So even when they empanel a collegial tribunal of three judges to hear marriage nullity cases, for example, you cannot have two lay persons in it, lest the two “lay” should decide against the one “ordained”. Why? Because canon law says so. Why does canon law say so? Because the administrators of the law were the ones who drafted the law: the executive is the legislator and the judiciary. The arrogant slogan – “We are the ones to decide” – is accurate and true to the hilt, legally, social-economic-religiously, and thus politically, within the Church! After a while, it is referred to as “tradition”. Leave it “long” enough on the regulation books, you might begin to call it “sacred” tradition as well. It is over and against the laity. And, there never was any input from the laity. Theologically, to be so vehemently against the laity is to be against the Body of Christ; so, actually, the system is against Christ. Group interest wins. It always does, until the Body rises in revolution, or God raises up a revolutionary figure amongst the “leaders” who begins to do something right, introduce some balance to the insanely ugly imbalance, disturb the status quo, get things “messy”, and let in some light.

Meanwhile, Marriage Care has published its response based on its experience in England and Wales. Suggesting a close resonance with the general picture, it said: “Nearly all couples attending our marriage preparation courses are already cohabiting and many have children.” And yet, “couples coming to our marriage preparation courses want and expect their marriages to last a lifetime.” This response points us to two realities worthy of note.

First, it bears out many other research findings – that the great majority of couples who cohabit are not making an ideological statement of opposition to marriage. Even among the unmarried, a lifelong happy marriage remains a widespread aspiration.
Second, while the successful navigation of long-term loving sexual relationships is never easy, yet it lies at the heart of most people’s quest for happiness. This must behove the faith community to pause before condemning as sinful those who are doing their best in difficult circumstances.

A Change of Hearts on the Part of the Irish Bishops

Like their British counterparts, the Irish bishops had initially decided not to publish the results of their survey. They later changed their minds and issued a public statement, main points of which are:

Challenging Irish families are “problems arising from severe financial hardship, unemployment and emigration, domestic violence, neglect and other forms of abuse, infidelity” and limited state support for marriage and the family.
Some respondents seeing church teaching “as disconnected from real-life experience.”
“Many … expressed particular difficulties with the teachings on extra-marital sex and cohabitation by unmarried couples, divorce and remarriage, family planning, assisted human reproduction, homosexuality. The church’s teaching in these sensitive areas is often not experienced as realistic, compassionate, or life-enhancing.”
The bishops have a responsibility “to present faithfully the church’s teaching on marriage and the family in a positive and engaging way, whilst showing compassion and mercy towards those who are finding difficulty in accepting or living it.”
They encourage “all the faithful to engage in continued dialogue and discussions in these critical areas” and announced that the Irish Bishops’ Council for Marriage and the Family will host a conference on the family and marriage June 14.

The Hard-Hitting Japanese Bishops

The Japanese bishops, in ways pleasantly surprising, have stated pretty bluntly that the Vatican mindset does not fit the Asian church.

Publicly responding to the Vatican questionnaire, Japan’s bishops bluntly stated a number of points in their 15-page response, of which the following are indicative:

That church teachings are not known in their country.
That Vatican’s Europe-centric view hampers evangelization in Asian countries where Catholics represent a small minority of the population.
That the church “often falls short” by “presenting a high threshold for entry and lacking hospitality and practical kindness”.
That it is “necessary to go beyond merely saying to men and women who do not follow Church norms that they are separated from the community and actively provide them with opportunities to encounter the Christian community.”
That, concerning the church’s teachings prohibiting artificial contraception, “contemporary Catholics are either indifferent to or unaware of the teaching of the Church.”
That, concerning the so-called natural methods of birth control, while there have been “some attempts to introduce such practices as the Billings Method, but few people know about it. For the most part, the Church in Japan is not obsessed with sexual matters.”
That in developing a pastoral orientation, it is “important to recall that the only time in the gospels that Jesus clearly encounters someone in a situation of cohabitation outside of marriage (the Samaritan woman at the well) he does not focus on it. Instead, he respectfully deals with the woman and turns her into a missionary.”
That a “realistic response to the situation people actually face is essential,” and that “simplification of the legal proceedings will be the salvation of those who are suffering.”

Canadian Bishops Keeping Synod Survey Results Private

According to The Catholic Register, of the 73 Canadian dioceses, 4 do not have websites, and 13 of the 69 dioceses that have websites had posted the Vatican’s questions online.

From the comments made by the Conference general secretary Msgr. Patrick Power, the slant of the Canadian report is clearly that firstly, the teaching is fine and, secondly, it’s just that the laity don’t understand the teaching, so that thirdly, the challenge is not to reconsider the teaching, but to teach it better. That seems to be the gist of the proposed pastoral care. Lay readers would be tempted to ask [1] whether the Church would review aspects of its discipline in certain areas; and [2] whether the Church would begin to be more pastoral in its approach to people who suffer from failed marriages and broken homes.

Lay leaders have also proactively taken the matter into their own hands. For example, some Canadian Catholics sought ways to submit their views even without the express invitation of the bishops’ conference. Betty Anne Brown Davidson, national president of the Catholic Women’s League of Canada, urged members to make their views known.

“When I first heard about this Extraordinary Synod on the Family, I immediately got in touch with our standing committee chair for Christian family life and I said, ‘Let’s get this document and let’s give input to our bishops through the [bishops’ conference], whether they want it or not.’ We live the reality of family life.”

Theologian Catherine Clifford of St. Paul University in Ottawa observed that this synod has posed a challenge to the way things have been done since Pope Paul VI began calling periodic synods on specific questions.

“We haven’t cultivated very well within the church what I have called the habits of dialogue. Just as an example, when Pope Francis and the Synod of Bishops asked bishops to consult as widely as possible at the level of deaneries and parishes, we have so little experience of that. We don’t have effective structures for carrying out that or creating space for those kinds of conversations.”

Asian Laity Not Consulted

By and large, the laity in Asia are left out of the consultation by their local church leaders. If you know otherwise, our coffee-corner is open to receive your input. Please do let us know.

Meanwhile, one gets the sense that come October, the bishops are going into the synod hall ready to do battle, as the conservative-minded bishops go head to head with those who are more pastoral-minded and are keen to see the Church tap into Jesus’ new wine. It may well be a battle over what kind of wine-skin is suitable for use in these contemporary times. The fault lines are pretty well drawn. Slight movements in age-old tectonic plates will have great seismic consequences on the life and pastoral ministry of the Church. What is at stake may depend on your perspective – legal, doctrinal, or pastoral. From our perspective, what is at stake is people’s “abundant” life promised by the Johannine Jesus. Pastoral care is our focus, which is the focus declared by Pope Francis in calling for this Synod. As they enter the Synod hall, will the ordained leaders caste off their ideological cloaks and begin to walk the path of genuine pastoral care that Pope Francis, in imitation of Christ, has initiated?

You are most welcome to respond to this post. Email your comments to jeffangiegoh@gmail.com. You can also be dialogue partners in this Ephphatha Coffee-Corner Ministry by sending us questions for discussion.

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