David QuinnChurch will have to think about how to present its teachings on the family, writes David Quinn
It was as if the bishops in question had Mary McAleese in mind when they said in their group discussion at the ongoing Synod on the Family in Rome that bishops, too, are from families.
Mary McAleese, not for the first time, had complained that the synod is being led by ‘celibate males’ who could therefore know little or nothing about the family.
The bishops in question were part of the French language group led by Bishop Maurice Piat and Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher.
Their summary of their first week discussions said: “We are first and foremost people of families. We have parents, brothers and sisters, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, cousins, nephews and nieces.
The families of which we are speaking are not strangers to us, they form part of our lives, they live among us.”
It is true that the experience of raising your own children is very different from dealing with children who are your nieces and nephews. Nonetheless, it is a caricature to present bishops as if they have dropped down out of nowhere and have never themselves been part of a family and are not part of an extended family until the day they die.
That is a side-bar comment. The synod itself is now half-way through. Essentially, it is advising the Pope on how best the Church can respond to the myriad realities of family life today. This subject is so immense it is actually too much to expect that the 300 participants at the synod can meaningfully comment on every aspect of the family during the three weeks allotted to them (even adding on the time spent at last year’s Extraordinary Synod on the Family).
The synod members have divided up into a number of language groups, each of which has a ‘moderator’ who facilitates discussion and a ‘relator’ who helps to sum things up.
Ireland has two representatives at the synod, namely the two Archbishop Martins, Eamon and Diarmuid. Eamon Martin is a moderator of one of the English-language groups and Diarmuid Martin is a relator of one of the other groups.
At the end of last week, summaries of the various group discussions that took place during the first week of the three-week synod were made public. One thing that is obvious is that there is a certain amount of frustration at the task the participants have been set.
Interview
In an interview with Catholic News Service, Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto, explained that the synod members have basically been asked to edit the working document of the synod (the ‘Instrumentum Laboris’). He said, “this is a very difficult thing to do under the time pressures”. Archbishop Eamon Martin’s group said something similar.
Above and beyond this, the participants are trying to find a way of presenting the Church’s teaching on the family to a world where one region (Africa) faces the challenge of polygamy, while another part (the ‘West’) faces the challenge of same-sex marriage, and then translating this into good pastoral practice.
A key message from several groups was to be careful not to give in to despair in the face of all the challenges the family faces.
The group led by Cardinal Thomas Collins and Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia believes that the Instrumentum Laboris “engenders a subtle hopelessness” which “leads to a spirit of compromise with certain sinful patterns of life”.
It said this could cause “the reduction of Christian truths about marriage and sexuality to a set of beautiful ideals” which people in the real world can hardly be expected to live up to. Instead, it went on: “The work of this synod needs to show much more confidence in the Word of God, the transformative power of grace, and the ability of people to actually live what the Church believes.”
Several of the groups were also concerned to make sure that the Church continued to make clear that marriage can only be between one man and one woman.
One of the Italian-language groups said that most of its members, “registered the demand to use formula which leave no doubt from the outset that the one model of family corresponding to the teaching of the Church is that founded on the marriage between a man and a woman”.
In addition, a number of the groups were concerned with the growing prevalence of ‘gender ideology’, which is now also appearing in Irish primary schools.
Gender ideology says that our ‘gender’ is separate from the sex of our bodies. Therefore someone who is physically male does not have to declare themselves to be of the male ‘gender’. They could instead declare themselves to be ‘female’, or choose from dozens of other genders which we are led to believe exist.
The French language group led by Piat and Durocher, said: “By seeking to impose a point of view which nullifies the relation between sexual [gender] identity and the sexual being which we are in our bodies, it [gender ideology] breaks up the family, parenthood, human love and its noble and humanising grandeur.”
Concern about gender ideology was strongest in the Italian, French and North American groups. Perhaps that is because in those parts of the world, gender ideology – which basically treats the fact that God created us male and female as redundant and irrelevant – is furthest advanced. But the bishops of Britain and Ireland are going to have to pay it more attention soon because its grip on schools in Britain and Ireland is getting stronger.
It is difficult to know what the outcome of this synod will be. Some fear it is going to lead to changes in doctrine, but Pope Francis has said it will not do that.
Others are concerned that even if it does not do so, it will cause the Church to water down the presentation of its teaching on the family so much that, as the Collins/Chaput group has said, it will implicitly tell people that those teachings rest on an almost impossible-to-achieve ideal.
Perhaps the best we can realistically hope for is that the Church will be forced to think seriously about how to present the teachings on the family in a better, more convincing way and combine this with better pastoral practice on the ground.