Synod clergy urged to speak without fear

Pope Francis opened the Synod on the Family this week by urging cardinals and bishops boldly to speak their mind without fear or favour. This led to hopes that the gathering will generate the kind of decision-making that was envisaged by the Second Vatican Council.

“Let no one say, ‘This can’t be said, they will think this or that about me’,” he told the synod fathers on Monday morning in the Paul VI hall in the Vatican.

The Pope explained that following the February consistory of cardinals – a precursor to the synod – one cardinal wrote to him to say that those present lacked the courage to speak out for fear that the Pope might think differently. “This is not good,” Francis said. “It is not synodality, because it is necessary to say everything that in the Lord we feel must be said: without regard to station or status, without timidity.” According to Cardinal Donald Wuerl, a member of the synod council, he will spend his time listening rather than making interventions.

While the synod is made up predominantly of presidents of bishops’ conferences and the prefects and presidents of the Roman Curia, each session has started with an address from a lay couple.

On Monday the synod fathers were told that welcoming gay couples in parishes could be seen as a “model of evangelisation”. Ron and Mavis Pirola, who run the Australian Catholic Marriage and Family Council, drew applause when they spoke of friends who welcomed their gay son and his partner one Christmas. Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Jos also affirmed at a press briefing on Wednesday that the Nigerian Church rejects persecution of gays.

Changing the language of the Church on family life has emerged as a theme of the synod, with calls to present teaching less harshly. One intervention at the synod on Tuesday morning said there was a need to “repropose what we know in accessible language.”

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, attending the synod as President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said that the atmosphere in the synod hall was allowing participants to speak more from “pastoral experience” rather than “academic study”.

This was echoed by the Archbishop of Wellington, John Dew, who told The Tablet: “When church teaching is explained in such a way that it says to people they’re intrinsically disordered or they’re living an evil life, people feel they can’t meet the mark.”

A spokesman said that the hotly debated issue of Communion for the divorced and remarried was discussed on Wednesday. He said: “It was emphasised that it is not the sacrament of the perfect, but rather of those who are on the way [and] more space must be allowed for a sacramental rather than a juridical form of logic.”