Kräutler, a prominent voice for social justice, is disappointed with the Catholic Church's preparations for the second session of the Synod on Synodality.

"The Synod cannot retreat ‘from the evil world' into incense-filled sacristies.

"Trying to attract the masses with pomp and grand liturgical events is the wrong approach" writes Kräutler in a published article for Herder Korrespondenz.

The focus is on internal Church issues

Kräutler argues that the working document focuses primarily on internal Church matters rather than addressing real-world issues like poverty and social injustice.

He expresses concern that the Church risks becoming "preoccupied with itself", especially in the aftermath of the abuse scandals that have rocked its credibility.

"The document recommends listening to people who experience poverty and marginalisation" Kräutler said, "but has the Church only just realised that it is important to listen to these people?"

He says that genuine synodality would require Church leaders to move beyond the "sheltered security of the Church" and into the "abhorred insecurity of the peripheries".

Referencing Vatican II's Gaudium et spes Kräutler writes that, in principle, the Synod's working document is directed more 'ad intra' and not the "joy and hope, grief and fear of people today, especially the poor and oppressed of all kinds".

Call for reforms in Church leadership

Kräutler, who served as bishop in Brazil's Xingu diocese until 2015, called for deeper reforms, particularly the need to remove "barriers to a synodal church".

He noted that certain priests and bishops continue to cling to a traditionalist view of authority which he believes only widens the gap between Church leaders and the laity.

"Church ‘authority' does not elevate anyone above the people. On the contrary, we are here ‘for' the people and travelling ‘with' the people of God" Kräutler said, calling this the true spirit of synodality.

Women's role in the Church

Kräutler also emphasised the critical role women play in the Church, particularly in Amazonian communities where they serve as worship leaders, catechists and religious teachers.

He criticised Pope Francis for removing the topic of women's ordination from the synod's agenda, adding that gender justice in the Church is long overdue.

"If women have been keeping the Church alive in many communities, ‘gender justice' must now also arrive in our Church" Kräutler said, urging that women no longer be denied ordination.

Kräutler has long been an advocate for the rights of indigenous people and environmental protection, particularly in South America.

Source

• Katholisch.de

Current and former lay leaders from 33 countries - many in the Global South - all endorsed and are signatories to a joint statement "Contribution to the First Assembly of the Synod on Synodality".

Lay apostolate group concerns

Australian Cardijn Institute secretary, Stefan Gigacz, says the statement aims to draw Synod participants' attention to several concerns identified by the lay apostolate groups.

These include:

Needing a clear focus on promoting the lay apostolate of lay people

The statement asks for the lay apostolate to be promoted as envisaged in Lumen Gentium §31, Gaudium et Spes §43 and Apostolicam Actuositatem, when the notion of lay apostolate groups was initially developed.

Better representation among participants in the First Assembly of the Synod of international Catholic (lay) Movements

Lay movements were extensively represented in the later Sessions of Vatican II, the statement points out. This was also the case at the Synod on the Laity in 1987. Many were pioneers in promoting the laity and a synodal way of working.

A fresh look at the Apostolicam Actuositatem §26 provisions is necessary

Otherwise known as the "Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity", the §26 provisions clearly call for more representative and participative structures. These involve grassroots lay movements and organisations from local to global level.

The statement addresses a series of longstanding concerns dating back to the Second Vatican Council, Gigacz notes.

"During the Council, the lay apostolate movements also known as Specialised Catholic Action movements, successfully advocated for representative Church structures."

These were to involve lay movements at parish, diocesan, national and international levels, he says.

The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, adopted these proposals in its §26.

"But to the great disappointment of Cardijn and the leaders of the lay movements, these reforms were not implemented when the first Vatican Council of the Laity was established in 1967.

"Today, the current Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life is still not a representative body.
​
"This is surely an issue that needs to be addressed by the Synod on Synodality;" he says.

Regrets and hope

The signatories say in the statement:

"We regretfully observe that the Vatican II teaching on lay apostolate ...

"The role of the lay movements appears not to have been received to the extent that the Council Fathers - and the lay auditors who assisted in the drafting of the Council documents - would have envisaged and desired."

They also say:

"We believe that there is an urgent need for a renewed attention to and reception of the teachings of the Council on lay apostolate.

"We call on participants at the Synod on Synodality to reflect deeply ... [and we hope for] ... much broader representation of international lay movements, communities and organisations at the Second Assembly of the Synod."

Source

• Australian Cardijn Institute

This is good because change is the only constant in life.

If we had planned sharing churches, there would have been a riot.

Instead, we have shown that we can move easily between churches, although everyone is inconvenienced by time, travel, and the disruption of regular patterns.

Palmerston North is a small city, and we are very lucky to have masses in 8 churches on a Sunday between Feilding and Foxton.

In other parts of the diocese and of the church, priests and parishioners travel many kilometres for Mass.

Church as a campervan

In some parts of the world, the priest visits each parish monthly or yearly.

Worse, in some parts of the world, consecrated hosts are delivered by ship to inaccessible islands or parachuted into remote communities.

Perhaps one day, the College of Bishops might address this singularly important question: Is the celebration of the Eucharist central to the life of the Church?

Fire or no fire, what is clear to all of us is that the traditional parish structure of one priest, one parish, and one parishioner group is no longer a reality.

Now we have the "trans-parishioner" who moves between parishes and masses and the "trans-priest" who ministers to multiple communities.

This creates "the trans-parish model", where everyone identifies with more than one parish.

This model is missionary, where the mission is not in the parish office but out on the road. It is a more campervan model than a hotel one where customers book in to stay.

It is a disrupted model that brings its own challenges.

The call to mission is not new, and the Ascension is an example of it.

The angel's jibe, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing here gapping into the sky" could be reframed: "Why are you still standing here gapping into the sky and not about the Master's work," or as Vatican II puts it

"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

"Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of people.

"United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father, and they have welcomed the news of salvation, which is meant for every person.

"That is why this community realises that it is truly linked with humanity and its history by the deepest of bonds.

"Hence this Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the people of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity." (Gaudium et Spes Nos 1- 2)

Look around

The Apostolic Command (Matthew) was not to go and build edifices, safe devotions and introspective worship but to go out and proclaim the good news (Mark).

For too long, baptism (which means immersion or being dipped in water) has been a cultural practice or a private family affair, robbed of its deeper meaning, which is the conversion of the heart and the acceptance of the Vocation to Christianity.

Baptism symbolises conversion and the call; it doesn't replace them.

For many centuries, the Church's liturgy did not have an Ascension Sunday, and it didn't treat it as a special or separate event.

Rather, it always sees it as part of the Easter/Resurrection narrative of revealing the incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God.

When we see Ascension as separate from the larger Easter narrative, it becomes a special moment when we wonder about the Second Coming and forget to look around at the reality of life and the needs that are in front of us all.

So we end up "looking into the sky," wondering about the eternal verities, and forget to look around.

The Easter/Ascension narrative prepares us to become the People of Pentecost, who are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to engage with the world as it is.

• Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).

Kasper, who is the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity's President Emeritus, points to the Second Vatican Council's path in synodal fellowship.

The Church would have a future only if it continued on that path - a path that the German synodal path "had failed to take," he says.

This won't mean acting like bookkeepers, but "in creative loyalty and synodal fellowship by listening to God's Word and to one another together.

"In my and other people's opinion, the German ‘synodal' gives the impression that it can and feels it has to discover a new Church and must push through its own agenda."

As the German way forward has "unfortunately failed", he says he puts all the more hope in the World Synodal Process Pope Francis has launched.

The Catholic Church's future must concentrate on the Gospel Message and the "wounds of the world", not just itself, he says.

The Council should not be seen as a break with tradition but as a "new departure to a more alive and comprehensive understanding of tradition and catholicity".

To do justice to the Council as a whole, it is necessary to go deeply into the Council's texts and editorial history. This is a theologically challenging and demanding undertaking that is still ongoing, Kasper notes.

At the same time, the Council and its documents had meanwhile become a part of church history, he says.

Francis belongs to a post-Council generation who regard the decisions and documents as facts from which it is necessary to think further.

"And that raises the question of the yet undetected future potentials in the Council texts," Kasper points out.

The question of the Church's relationship to the world must be re-examined, he says.

The corresponding Council document "Gaudium et spes" was determined by an "optimistic outlook" of the time, Kasper recalls.

Since then, secularisation and the priestly sexual abuse crisis have led to a massive loss of trust in the Church. They have also made the "crisis of faith in God" more visible. That was something unforeseen at the time of the Council, Kasper says.

In the Western World today, atheism and widespread indifference to the question of God are common.

This means renewing church structures is "irrelevant for the majority of people and is only of interest for church employees", Kasper says.

It also means regarding the question of God, post-conciliar theology must go "deeper than the Council was able to" and look into the "metaphysical homelessness of modern human beings."

The ongoing debates on church reform would benefit from another look at what the Church constitution Lumen Gentium said on the common priesthood of all the faithful, Kasper says.

The Council highlighted the co-responsibility of the laity, but that did not mean that there was "rivalry or opposition" between lay Catholics and priests and bishops, he stresses.

>Source

• The Tablet

It was terrible, also, because of its ecclesial significance, which is a related but different concern, one that strikes at a deeper issue for the nation's bishops.

The commentary from Fordham University's David Gibson, touched on some of the reasons why closing Catholic News Service was ill-advised pastorally.

Gibson observed that CNS is "a counterwitness to the proliferation of ideologically driven Catholic media platforms that are driving the church apart, and regular Catholics around the bend — often right out of Catholicism."

That is surely true.

It is also clear that not enough bishops were alarmed by the prospect that the only remaining wire service specifically focused on news about the Catholic Church in the United States would be the Catholic News Agency, a subsidiary of EWTN.

More bishops need to adopt the posture taken by Bishop Christopher Coyne of Burlington, Vermont, a former chair of the bishops' Committee on Communications.

"In Burlington, we don't want anything to do with CNA because of its affiliation with EWTN and the anti-Francis rhetoric on the network," Coyne told America magazine recently.

Several bishops have indicated to me that it was not clear that the complete closing of CNS was what they were voting for last year during the executive session at their fall assembly in Baltimore, when they chose one of five models presented by Archbishop Timothy Broglio, chair of the bishops' Committee on Priorities and Plans.

They told me that they understood there would be cutbacks, but not a complete suspension of operations.

What is more, there was no real discussion of the proposal except as a necessary budgetary measure.

Here, then, I need to disagree somewhat with the explanation offered by former CNS editor Tony Spence, who told NCR's Brian Fraga, "The culture warrior bishops at the USCCB have always had a certain amount of animus to CNS because it offers straight unbiased reporting.

"Culture warriors don't want straight unbiased reporting.

"They want an echo chamber where everyone has the same opinion."

That is true, but this was not presented to the bishops as a culture war fight and, if it had been, I doubt it would have secured enough votes to pass, or at least it would have generated more opposition.

No, the deeper - and in some ways worse - problem is that the bishops have lost their own commitment to civic engagement, of which the responsibility for providing reliable information is so integral a part.

One hundred years ago, bishops were princes, and they ventured forth into the public square from their episcopal manses as leaders of their flock, powerbrokers of a sort, more akin to a labour leader or a prominent civic leader.

Ironically, after Vatican II called for the church to be an instrument, even a sacrament of the unity of humankind in the world, the bishops lost their footing.

They were not clear what tasks were to be ceded to the laity and what remained in their competence.

The turbulence of the times, especially the focus less and less on issues of economic justice and more on neuralgic issues of pelvic theology that would come to characterize the culture wars, further estranged the bishops from any kind of civic engagement.

Their role was reduced to that of an ethical authority in the public square, and they never grasped the degree to which the church's traditional, personal ethics on sexual matters was difficult to translate into any kind of public ethics, especially in a pluralistic society.

Then came the sexual abuse crisis and many bishops resorted to hiding under their desks.

Now, the bishops largely focus on the internal life of the church. Continue reading

• Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.

In him, God brings his project of love for humanity to fulfillment, establishing his lordship over creatures and sowing the seed of divine life in human history, transforming it from within.

Certainly the Reign of God should not be identified or confused with some earthly or political achievement.

Nor should it be envisioned as a purely interior reality, one that is merely personal and spiritual, or as a promise that concerns only the world to come.

Instead, Christian faith lives by a fascinating and compelling "paradox," a word very dear to the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac.

It is what Jesus, forever joined with our flesh, is accomplishing here and now, opening us up to God the Father, bringing about an ongoing liberation in our lives, for in him the Reign of God has already drawn near (Mark 1:12-15).

At the same time, for as long as we exist in this flesh, God's reign remains a promise, a deep yearning that we carry within us, a cry that arises from a creation still marred by evil, one that suffers and groans until the day of its full liberation (Romans 8:19-24).

Therefore the Reign announced by Jesus is a living and dynamic reality. It invites us to conversion, asking our faith to emerge from the stasis of an individual religiosity or from its reduction to legalism.

It wants our faith to become instead a continuous and restless searching for the Lord and his Word, one that calls us each to cooperate with the work of God in different situations of life and society.

In different ways, often anonymous and silent, even in the history of our failures and our woundedness, the Reign of God is coming true in our hearts and in events happening around us.

Like a small seed hidden in the earth (Matthew 13:31-32), like a bit of yeast that leavens the dough (Matthew 13:24-30), Jesus brings into our life story the signs of the new life he has come to start, asking us to work together with him in this task of salvation.

Every one of us can contribute to realizing the work of the Reign of God on earth, opening up spaces of salvation and liberation, sowing hope, challenging the deadly logics of egoism with the brotherly and sisterly spirit of the Gospel, dedicating ourselves in tenderness and solidarity for the benefit of our neighbors, especially the poorest.

We must never neutralize this social dimension of the Christian faith.

As I mentioned also in Evangelii gaudium, the kerygma or proclamation of the Christian faith itself has a social dimension.

It invites us to build a society where the logic of the Beatitudes and of a fraternal world of solidarity triumphs.

The God Who Is Love, who in Jesus invites us to live out the commandment of sibling love, heals with that same love both our personal and social relationships, calling us to be peacemakers and builders of sisterhood and brotherhood among ourselves:

The Gospel is about the kingdom of God (Luke 4:43); it is about loving God who reigns in our world. To the extent that He reigns within us, the life of society will be a setting for universal fraternity, justice, peace, and dignity. Both Christian preaching and life, then, are meant to have an impact on society (Evangelii gaudium, 180).

In this sense, caring for our Mother Earth and building a society of solidarity as fratelli tutti or siblings all are not only not foreign to our faith; they are a concrete realization of it.

Jesus asks us to work together with him in this task of salvation

This is the foundation of the Church's social teaching

It's not just a simple social extension of Christian faith, but a reality with a theological grounding: God's love for humanity and his plan of love—and of sisterhood and brotherhood—that he accomplishes in human history through Jesus Christ his Son, to whom all believers are intimately united through the Holy Spirit.

I'm grateful to Cardinal Michael Czerny and Fr. Christian Barone, brothers in faith, for their contribution on the subject of brother- and sisterhood.

I'm also grateful that this book, while intended as a guide to the encyclical Fratelli tutti, endeavours to bring to light and make explicit the profound link between the Church's current social teaching and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

This link is not always noticed, at least not at first. I'll try to explain why.

The ecclesial climate of Latin America, in which I was immersed first as a young Jesuit student and then in ministry, had enthusiastically absorbed and taken possession of the theological, ecclesial, and spiritual intuitions of the Council, actualizing and enculturating them.

For the youngest among us, the Council became the horizon of our belief, and of our ways of speaking and acting.

That is, it quickly became our ecclesial and pastoral ecosystem.

But we didn't get into the habit of reciting conciliar decrees, nor did we linger on speculative reflections.

The Council had simply entered our way of being Christian and our way of "being Church"—and as life went on, my intuitions, my perceptions, and my spirituality were quite simply born out of the suggestions from the teachings of Vatican II.

There wasn't much need to quote the Council's documents.

Today, after many decades, we find ourselves in a world—and in a Church—deeply changed, and it's probably necessary to make more explicit the Second Vatican Council's key concepts, its theological and pastoral horizon, its topics, and its methods.

In the first part of their valuable book, Cardinal Michael and Fr. Christian help us with this.

They read and interpret the social teaching I am trying to carry out, bringing to light something a little hidden between the lines—that is, the teaching of the Council as the fundamental basis, and point of departure for the invitation I'm making to the Church and the whole world with this ideal of brotherhood and sisterhood.

It's one of the signs of the times that Vatican II brings to light, and the thing that our world—our common home, in which we're called to live as siblings—most needs.

That's how we should always journey: always together

In this connection, their new book also has the merit of rereading, in today's world, the Council's intuition of an open Church in dialogue with the world.

In the face of the questions and challenges of the modern world, Vatican II tried to respond with the breath of Gaudium et spes; but today as we follow the path marked out by the Council Fathers, we realize that there's a need not only for the Church to be in dialogue with the modern world, but, most of all, for it to put itself at the service of humanity, taking care of creation as well as announcing and working to realize a new universal sisterhood and brotherhood, in which human relations are healed of egoism and violence and are founded instead on reciprocal love, welcome, and solidarity.

The joys and the hopes,

the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age,

especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted,

these are the joys and hopes,

the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

Indeed, nothing genuinely human

fails to raise an echo in their hearts.

For theirs is a community composed of men and women.

United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit

in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father

and they have welcomed the news of salvation

which is meant for every man and woman.

That is why this community realizes

that it is truly linked with humanity

and its history by the deepest of bonds.

(Gaudium et Spes Number 1)

If this is what today's world is asking of us—especially in a society strongly marked by imbalances, injuries, and injustices—we realize that this, too, is in the spirit of the Council, which invites us to read and listen to the signs of human history.

This book also has the merit of offering us a reflection on the methodology of post-conciliar theology—a historical-theological-pastoral methodology, in which human history is the site of God's revelation.

Here theology develops its orientation through reflection, and pastoral ministry incarnates theology in ecclesial and social praxis.

This is why papal teachings always need to be attentive to history, and why they require the contributions of theology.

Finally, this collaboration between a cardinal and a young theologian is itself an example of how study, reflection, and ecclesial experience can be joined, and it also indicates a new method: an official voice and a young voice, together.

That's how we should always journey: the magisterium, theology, pastoral praxis, official leadership. Always together.

Our bonds will be more credible if in the Church we too begin to feel like we are siblings all, fratelli tutti, and to live our respective ministries as a service to the Gospel, the building up of the Reign of God, and the care of our common home.

• Pope Francis
• Translated by Griffin Oleynick
• This article first appeared in Commonweal Magazine
• Adapted from the pope's preface to Fraternità—segno dei tempi: il magistero sociale di Papa Francesco by Cardinal Michael Czerny and Fr. Christian Barone, which will be published in Italy by Libreria Editrice Vaticana on September 30.
• The English-language version, Siblings All, Sign of the Times: The Social Teaching of Pope Francis, will be published by Orbis Books in 2022.

"I wondered if I had made a mistake," he said recently.

After 25 years spent mostly in education and church administration, Chatman had decided to try his hand at being a local church pastor.

He had walked away from a prestigious and comfortable position as the director of youth ministries in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Chicago headquarters to take over a struggling church in a distressed neighborhood in Minneapolis.

Many years earlier, he had served briefly as an associate pastor in Oregon, but this time he was heading his own church.

And it was not an auspicious beginning.

On his way into the building that morning, he couldn't pretend that he hadn't seen the drug dealers doing business on the corner across the street.

"I said to myself, ‘What am I doing here at this stage of my career?'".

"I wasn't even sure how long they would be able to keep paying my salary."

Soon, Chatman changed his perspective.

"I decided that the congregation wasn't the 35 people sitting in the pews," he said.

"The congregation was the 4,000 people who lived in the neighborhood.

Once I reframed it like that, it helped me see that the church needed to be a physical presence on the street."

And what a presence it has become. Redeemer, through its nonprofit community development organization, Redeemer Center for Life, literally owns, if not the street, the entire block the church sits on — and more.

More importantly, it has had an extraordinary impact on the lives of people in the Harrison neighborhood of North Minneapolis, a racially diverse, mostly low-income area near the city's downtown.

A beacon of hope

"We have been able to change the narrative about North Minneapolis within the church, the neighborhood and the larger community," Chatman said.

As the church's website declares, Redeemer is "a beacon of hope in the Harrison neighborhood of North Minneapolis."

Over the years, Redeemer and the Redeemer Center for Life have launched a

• cafe,
• bike repair
• coffee shop,
• 16-unit apartment building,
• another seven apartments over the cafe,
• home that houses Lutheran Volunteer Corps members,
• storefront that has been converted into the Living Room,
• gathering space for everything from health clinics to civic meetings.

The church also has built two single-family homes that were sold as part of an effort to support affordable housing.

"Between Redeemer Church and Redeemer Center for Life, we're responsible for more than $1 million in economic activity in this neighborhood annually," he said.

As for the church itself, worship is livelier and more crowded than it was on Chatman's first Sunday, but the neighborhood continues to be Redeemer's primary focus.

About 90 people now attend Sunday services, and 250 are listed on the church's membership rolls, but Chatman still insists that the congregation is more than just the Sunday faithful.

"There are people in this neighborhood who call this their church who have never been inside the building," he said. Continue reading

• Image: Redeemer Church Advent Newsletter