In September 2019, returning from a visit to Africa, Pope Francis reflected on the flight home to Rome on the tensions that were tearing at the unity of the Church. Threat of schism “I pray that there will be no schism,” the Pope told the Vatican press corps, “but I am not afraid.” Since then, Read more
The Vatican doctrine office is preparing a document on the subject of women in leadership roles in the Catholic Church. The initiative seeks to respond to women’s longstanding demands to have a greater say in Church life. Church reform The Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith says the new document will form its contribution Read more
Two recent events frame the many discussions within the Church reform movement, while many of its constituent groups continue to engage with the international Synod on Synodality. Pope Francis suddenly announced in a major interview with an American television network that ordaining women deacons, a long-held aspiration of the movement for women’s equality in the Read more
Conventional wisdom holds that it takes a century for an ecumenical council to flower and bear fruit. Altering customs and thought habits, especially when linked to faith, takes a long time. Simply getting the word out of a council’s teaching and its implications can take decades. Then, there are people and institutions for which new Read more
The Catholic Church is open to everyone, including the LGBTQ+ community, Pope Francis affirms. The Church has a duty to accompany gay people on a personal path of spirituality, providing that accompaniment is within the framework of the Catholic Church rules, he told reporters on the plane returning to Rome from World Youth Day (WYD) Read more
Thomas Halik, the Czech Catholic priest and former Soviet dissident, has told Europe’s bishops and lay leaders not to fear that “some forms of the Church are dying”, encouraging them to courageously undertake a synodal journey marked by “openness to the future, and receptivity to God’s challenges in the signs of the times”. The 74-year-old Read more
The Catholic Church may be at a turning point in its history, believes Danièle Hervieu-Léger, a leading French sociologist on religion. To survive in secularized Western societies, the institution will have to reform itself, she says. In a new book with fellow sociologist Jean-Louis Schlegel that came out this past spring, “Vers l’implosion? Entretiens sur Read more
A group of 500 young Catholics in Ireland have sent a jointly signed letter to the Synod Steering Committee. The Committee is responsible for gathering and summarising responses to questionnaires for the Irish Synodal Pathway. The young Catholics wrote that they love the Church’s teaching, but their voices have not been heard. The process leading Read more
The Vatican has warned the German Catholic Church of the potential for a schism if it pursues new moral or doctrinal norms during its Synodal Way process. Members of the Synodal Way, a group made up of equal numbers of German bishops and lay Catholics, meet regularly. In February, they called on the Catholic Church Read more
In 2001, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was a rapporteur for the summit of bishops at the Vatican — and he did not like what he saw. The Catholic Church had adopted a top-to-bottom approach that stripped local churches of any decision-making power, and the synod of bishops was reduced to nothing more than a stamp of Read more