There will be tension at October’s synod on the family between an emphasis on mercy and a notion of cheap grace, a new US bishop says.
Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego told the National Catholic Reporter that the “theology of mercy is saying is that the essential attribute of God in relation to us – and for us to understand who is God – is that of mercy”.
“And that God is innately merciful and can do no other than to be merciful, because that’s at the core of who God is.”
That understanding of God, Bishop McElroy said, “will be the prism through which so much of the discussion occurs” at the synod.
But the bishop said there will also be a tension at the synod between mercy and a kind of “cheap grace” that “leads to a sense of complacency and not trying to struggle with, wrestle with, the challenge of the Gospel in our lives”.
“I think that is the central dilemma that this synod is going to have to deal with, in terms of diverse opinions,” he said.
“How do you emphasise the mercy of God at every key point and at the same time not let it become a distorted sense of mercy that legitimates and supports complacency?”
Bishop McElroy noted a desire among many US Catholics for the Church to “banish judgmentalism” of people.
Something that may help bishops at the synod in their discussions, Bishop McElroy said, is the theological notion of graduality.
“What that says is that many times, people in their lives cannot embrace the fullness of the Gospel at a given moment,” the bishop said.
“They need to take steps toward it.”
The synod’s special secretary, Archbishop Bruno Forte, last month said: “We want to be a Church” that “does not hurl anathemas, but stays at the side of the people . . . We want to innovate the modes of proclamation, not its content.”
One of several key issues for the synod, he said, will be a discussion of allowing those who have divorced and remarried outside the Church to become “godfathers or godmothers, catechists, extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist”.
Sources