Greg DalyGreg Daly examines the issues most likely to generate debate in the synod’s working document.
However canon lawyers may debate the prudence of Pope Francis’ recent announced plans to streamline the Church’s marriage annulment process, one thing is clear: he has taken off the table one of the most complex issues otherwise bound to devour time at this month’s Synod on the Family.
Section 48 of last year’s Relatio Synodi, the extraordinary synod’s closing document, saw 80% of voting bishops calling for the annulment process to be simplified, backing the statement that “A great number of synod fathers emphasised the need to make the procedure in cases of nullity more accessible and less time-consuming, and, if possible, at no expense.”
Among the proposals put forward were dispensing with obligatory second judgements, introducing administrative procedures under diocesan bishops, and using simpler processes when marriages were clearly null.
While, as this summer’s Instrumentum Laboris – the synod’s working document – put it “there is strong agreement on the opportunity of making annulment procedures for marriage more accessible, less time-consuming and possibly free of charge”, it is clear too that the proposed streamlining measures did not command universal support.
Some, according to the Relatio, opposed the proposals “because they felt that they would not guarantee a reliable judgment”. They may have had in mind how between 1971 and 1983, American marriage tribunals did away with second judgments in cases where it seemed unnecessary, causing concern in Rome that cases which clearly required a second judgment had not needed one; the 1983 Code of Canon Law ended this experiment.
June’s Instrumentum addressed further complexities in this issue, making it clear that regardless of how popular the idea might be among the synod fathers, its sheer complexity meant it was bound to take up a huge amount of time in this year’s ordinary synod.
By tackling this thorny canonical issue in Mit Iudex Dominus Iesus and Mitis et Misericors Iesus, Francis has freed up time for the gathered bishops to listen to the testimony of those who will speak on the many other issues at the synod, and to reflect on and grapple with these issues at length.
The synod agenda, as effectively expressed in the 147-page Instrumentum Laboris, sparked fevered reactions when it was released in June, reviving claims that there was a plot afoot to rig the synod, but looked at properly it reveals what the synod is really about.
For all that it will commonly be referred to as ‘the Synod on the Family’, and recognised as a kind of sequel to last year’s synod, the synod’s official subject matter is not simply the family, but ‘the vocation and mission of the family in the Church and contemporary world’.
Based on last year’s final Relatio on ‘pastoral challenges of the face in the context of evangelisation’, the Instrumentum incorporates and develops that document by the inclusion of arguments and ideas drawn from responses to 46 questions sent to bishops around the world last December together with the Relatio in a combined document called the Lineamenta.
According to Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the synod’s general secretary, after sending out the Lineamenta Rome received 99 submissions from bishops’ conferences and Eastern Catholic Churches, as well as 359 responses from dioceses, parishes, individuals and civic groups.
Pope Francis wants, the cardinal has said, “A dynamic and permanent synod, not as a structured entity but as an action, as osmosis between the centre and the periphery,” and the Instrumentum shows this in practice, fusing the two synods together and drawing on consultations with laity, revealing how, the cardinal says, the intersynodal period has been “a valuable opportunity for listening to what the Spirit says to the Church in the plurality of her components”.
When originally published, the Instrumentum was met with commentary that all too predictably focused on such ‘hot-button’ issues as homosexuality, birth control, cohabitation and marital breakdown.
On the subject of support for homosexual people, it follows the Relatio in reiterating Church teaching that there is no basis even for comparing same-sex unions with God’s plan for marriage and the family, describing as wholly unacceptable situations where financial aid to countries in the developing world is contingent upon the introduction of same-sex marriage laws. It nonetheless maintains, however, that people with homosexual tendencies are entitled to respect and sensitivity, and must be respected in their dignity like everyone else without ever being subject to unjust discrimination.
Indeed, the Instrumentum’s only substantive development on the original Relatio text was a proposal that diocesan pastoral plans should specifically attend to the accompaniment of homosexual people and to families with homosexual members.
How the synod shall build on this shall doubtless be carefully scrutinised; last year Westminster’s Cardinal Vincent Nichols said he felt that the Relatio had not gone far enough in expressing the need to “respect, welcome, and value” homosexual people, and he will hardly have been alone. Germany’s Bishop of Osnabruck, Franz-Josef Bode, for instance, has just last week drawn attention for suggesting that prayers and private blessings could be pastorally useful ways of accompanying gay people.
Certainly, it seems that practical suggestions for how the Church might truly accompany a gay person “who searches for the Lord and has good will”, in the words of Pope Francis, will have to be considered at the synod.
On this, as eminent a figure as Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, lead editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, has recently echoed Pope Benedict’s 2010 Light of the World comments about moral awakenings by pointing out that for a gay person, moving from passing relationships to a stable one is a real improvement and an important step.
Questions of birth control – or birth regulation – will doubtless come under the microscope again, though this time they will surely be informed by comments in Laudato Si’, which criticises those who propose reducing birth rates as a way of addressing the problems of the poor, argues that “demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”, and is especially harsh on those situations when economic assistance to developing countries is made contingent upon the implementation of so-called “reproductive health” policies.
The Instrumentum as it stands follows the Relatio in warning against population declines “due to a mentality against having children and promoted by the world politics of reproductive health”, saying such a decline can lead to a situation “in which the relationship between generations is no longer ensured” and can in time cause “economic impoverishment and a loss of hope in the future”.
Economic factors and a mentality that sees the generation of life as a matter of design contribute to a lower birth rate and a weakened social fabric, according to the Instrumentum, which maintains, in line with Church teaching, that “openness to life is an intrinsic requirement of conjugal love”.
Pope Francis, of course, famously observed in January – just days before praising those who have large families – that good Catholics do not need to be “like rabbits”, so it was far from surprising that the Instrumentum insisted both that Catholics are under no obligation to procreate heedless of consequences and that a fully lived love, unconditionally open to life, “serves as the basis for an appropriate teaching regarding the natural methods for responsible procreation”.
In respect of this, the Instrumentum directs people to 1968’s Humanae Vitae, for many the most controversial achievement of the pontificate of Pope Paul VI, who at the last synod’ s closing Mass was beatified and hailed by Pope Francis as “prophetic”. In directing people to the encyclical, it comments on how it “highlights the need to respect the dignity of the person in morally assessing methods in regulating births”.
Another expected hot-button issue at the coming synod will be co-habitation, addressed in sections 98 to 103 of the Instrumentum, which is devoted to couples who live together without having been married in the eyes of the Church. Some of these will, of course, have had civil marriages, and the Instrumentum recognises that couples often opt for civil marriages or cohabit not through opposition to sacramental marriage, but because of external factors.
Building on the Relatio, the Instrumentum stresses the importance of seeing the good in existing relationships and of encouraging and accompanying couples so they can move to a sacramental union. It expands substantively on what it called “wounded families” – those involving single parents and separated, divorced, and remarried people – devoting the 26 paragraphs from section 104 to 129 to this, whereas the Relatio had covered this topic in just 11 paragraphs.
As expected, the most controversial part of the Instrumentum in the summer was the series of paragraphs grappling with the integration of civilly-divorced-and-remarried people into Christian life, addressing such issues as spiritual communion, how children might cope with parents feeling excluded from the Church, whether or not a one-size-fits-all approach is desirable in these situations, and the possibility of establishing a ‘penitential path’ to the sacraments.
Section 122 of the Instrumentum repeats section 52 of the Relatio – one of three paragraphs in the document that got just 104 votes in the last synod with 74 votes against it, thus preventing it from reaching the two-thirds bar necessary to pass. Explicitly recognising how last year’s synod fathers were divided, the Instrumentum outlines possible ways of tackling the pastoral challenges posed by those who have civilly divorced and remarried.
Section 123 says that “a great number agree that a journey of reconciliation or penance, under the auspices of the local bishops, might be undertaken by those who are divorced and civilly remarried who find themselves in irreversible situations”. It cites Familaris Consortio #, saying that the process may lead to a commitment to spiritual – not sacramental – communion, and a decision to live in continence. It seems that some synod fathers wondered why those who could avail of spiritual communion could not also avail of sacramental confusion, so it seems likely that this issue will be raised again.
Some, the document continues, favoured a “way of penance” accompanied by a priest who might eventually be able suitably to apply “the power of binding and loosing to the situation”, while others thought it important to consider the content of key documents issued in 1994 and 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
How people in difficult situations might be accompanied was another question for the Instrumentum, and given how this year’s synod will take place on the eve of the Holy Year of Mercy, it seems likely that the synod fathers will bear in mind the Pope’s bull of indiction for the year, which states that the Church is called above all to be a credible witness to mercy, and that God’s unceasing mercy “is a spring that will never run dry, no matter how many people draw from it”.
Given the Pope’s calls for the Church to accompany people, rather than to condemn or wash its hands of them, it does seem likely that the synod will focus on working with people, rather than simply pretending problems aren’t there.
Concentration on such ‘hot-button’ issues can, however, give a false impression of what the synod is likely to be about, and as with last year, the synod is surely likely to show how diverse the family’s challenges are around the world. Viewing the Instrumentum through a western prism risks distorting the synod’s reality and masking the Church’s global nature.
The first of the synod’s three parts, ‘Listening to the challenges of the family’, relates most closely to last year’s extraordinary synod. It is this part of the document, which explores the various cultural, socio-economic, ecological and anthropological changes families face, that is most likely to be tackled in light of the Pope’s teachings in Laudato Si’.
The main such challenges, Cardinal Baldisseri says, are “poverty and social exclusion, old age, widowhood, bereavement in the family, disability, migration, the role of women, emotional life and education in sexuality and bioethics”.
Globally this plays itself out in many ways: in the Middle East, fugitive and beleaguered Christian families wonder how to pass the Faith on to their children and where their children’s futures lie – and surely this issue will now be extended to concentrate in no small part on how refugee families can be helped. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, discouraging polygamous traditions is a constant struggle, while in the Philippines, fathers are often responsible for raising families helped by money sent home by wives working in faraway western cities. Other societies have their own difficulties.
The second section, ‘Discernment of the family vocation’, focuses on natural marriage and sacramental fullness, indissolubility as a gift and a duty, family life, union and fruitfulness, and the young and fear of marriage. Recalling how the family is the primary and natural educator of the child, and a potential school of evangelisation, it considers the intimate bond between Church and family, and such issues as prayer, catechesis, faith and the family’s missionary and evangelical potential.
The final part ‘The mission of the family today’, begins with a broad reflection on the family and evangelisation, before more thoroughly considering such other issues as the family as subject of pastoral ministry, nuptial liturgy, renewed language and missionary openness. Noting how future priests are sometimes formed in families, it suggests that seminarians could gain from living with families in order better to understand adult family life.
Calling for the Christian message to be expressed through the family in a language that inspires hope, the Instrumentum stresses a need to use “a style of communication open to dialogue and free from prejudice”, saying that such language is needed “particularly with regard to those Catholics that, in area of marriage and family, do not live, or are unable to live, in full accordance with the teachings of the Church”.
There will be those who’ll crow or be aghast during the course of the synod, but through it all we should hold fast, remembering how Cardinal Baldisseri has described Pope Francis as believing that “the synod is a space in which the Holy Spirit can act, not parliament”. Bismarck famously said that laws and sausages were alike in that we shouldn’t watch while either is made, and those who cannot fathom the synod’s workings should perhaps remember that the Spirit is not likely to fail the Church: God writes straight, as they say, with crooked lines.