Synod process ‘shows Church doesn’t have all the answers’

The process of conducting the questionnaire for the Synod of Bishops on the Family has shown that the Church may have no solution to some problems, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois has told teams in his Paris Archdiocese that helped draw up a joint response to send to Rome.

“We have to accept that insoluble situations exist, and deal with the fact there is not a solution,” he told teams of priests and laity from each parish in the capital that contributed to a report submitted to the archbishop. “Our pastoral task is to deal with this incapacity we find ourselves in … Our mission is to hold people’s hands and help them walk.
“This exterior ‘combat’ unfolding in the synod meetings is in fact the reflection of the interior combat humans are subject to,” the cardinal said.

“What we have been through is very frustrating, necessarily so … but the Pope wanted this process to be a time of spiritual challenge ... when we’re occupied with aspirations, expectations, desires and refusals that are not all compatible,” he said in a presentation focusing more on the consultation process than answers from the Paris Archdiocese.

Vingt-Trois said the consultation revealed a wide variety of views. Many issues reflected the Church’s “trial by fire” in recent decades. “Fifty years ago we thought it was natural that children were baptised, but today that’s not taken for granted,” he said. The dialogue also showed lifelong marriage was no longer a fundamental value. “It doesn’t mean what Jesus said about the indissolubility of marriage means nothing,” he added. “It means that [its application] to situations we face is not automatic.” Catholics have also changed, he said. The Church sometimes spoke as if it had a strong influence on its members, but “for about 80 per cent ... what it says might make an interesting speech but is not a rule to follow”.