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I was talking recently about the Synod with a very experienced parish priest.
He said that if the bishops thought we were all waiting with bated breath for their decision regarding the divorced remarried receiving Communion, then they really do live in cloud cuckoo-land.
Nowadays divorced Catholics don’t just hang around waiting for a bevy of bishops to decide. They follow their consciences and do what they think is right, especially if they have talked to a sensible, pastoral priest.
Sure, many have understandably walked away from the church, but many have stayed having made their own decisions about going to Communion – the internal forum solution.
So really it’s irrelevant what the Synod decided.
Even on the gay issue sensible Catholics already understand that talk about people being ‘intrinsically disordered’ is not only utterly insensitive; it is also ‘intrinsically’ un-Christ-like and evangelically ‘disordered’!
But that doesn’t mean the Synod was a failure. It was a success because it recovered something of the church’s Catholicity.
Genuine Catholicism implies a universal, multi-ethnic, non-sectarian church, a community of many parts and differing views.
My major criticism of the two popes before Francis is that they were essentially ‘uncatholic’; they promoted a narrow, ‘pure’, sectarian church, the antithesis of Catholicity.
That’s why they loved outfits like the Neo-Catechuminate and Opus Dei; they are sectarian in structure and intention.
But the bishop of Rome, as Francis likes to be called, encouraged the synod to be genuinely Catholic and, unlike his predecessors, called on participants to express views that differed from his own.
For the first time since Paul VI revived the Synod in 1965, this gathering was actually free. Bishops could speak their minds and weren’t constantly second-guessing the pope. Continue reading
- Paul Collins is a Canberra-based historian, author and broadcaster. See his webpage at www.paulcollinscatholicwriter.com.au
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