Pope Francis is urging media to be cautious in their reports about the Amazon synod final report.
They should not pay “undue attention to aspects of the assembly’s final report addressing Church discipline while ignoring the assembly’s “diagnoses” of four major aspects of life in the Pan-Amazonian region.
These concern the region’s cultural, social, pastoral and ecological issues, Francis told media in his remarks at the closing of the synod last Saturday.
Although small disciplinary things are significant, focusing on them won’t help society take care of the four main concerns the synod has spent time diagnosing, he explained.
“There is always a group of elite Christians who like to take up this kind of diagnosis [in relation to discipline] as if they were universal, however small, or in this kind of more inter-ecclesiastical disciplinary resolutions.”
Francis said there is a danger, of the elite only looking to see “what they decided on this disciplinary issue, what they decided on another, making of the world who won this game, lost this…
“No, we all win with the diagnoses we made and as far as we arrive in the pastoral and inter-ecclesiastical issues, but don’t get locked in on that.”
Francis continued, saying “Thinking today about these Catholic and Christian elites sometimes, but especially Catholics who want to go to the little things and forget the big things, I remembered a phrase from Péguy …
“… ‘Because they don’t have the courage to be with the world, they believe they are with God.
‘Because they don’t have the courage to compromise on man’s options, on man’s life options, they believe they are fighting for God.
‘Because they don’t love anyone, they believe they love God,’” Francis said.
Francis’s remarks were met with long applause from the Vatican synod hall.
The Amazon synod’s final report was presented at the seession, and voted on paragraph by paragraph by the 185 synod members.
Francis said based on a request in the final report, he will re-open the Church’s study of the possibility of women deacons.
He will also re-open his 2016 commission on the study of the possibility of having a female diaconate.
This may involve adding new members and having study group operate within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he said.
Francis said he would like to write a post-synodal exhortation on the Amazon synod “before the end of the year so that not much time passes,”.
“It all depends on the time you have to think,” he added.
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