US-European split opens up

TWO AMERICAN bishops have criticised last month’s Synod on the Family for sending out mixed messages, while European bishops looked forward to involving laity in the discussions begun there, write Michael Sean Winters and Christa Pongraz-Lippitt.

Speaking after a lecture sponsored by the conservative magazine First Things, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, who did not attend the synod, said: “I was very disturbed by what happened. I think confusion is of the devil, and I think the public image that came across was of confusion.”

Then he added: “Now, I don’t think that was the real thing there,” and said he was anxious to hear from fellow American archbishop, Joseph Kurtz, who had attended the sessions. Chaput, with whom Pope Francis may stay if he attends part of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia next year, later challenged news reports of his comments for failing to note how he qualified his remarks. He did not retract them. A spokesman said the comments referred to the midterm relatio document.

Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence voiced similar concerns in an article in his diocesan newspaper, in which he wrote that in trying to accommodate the needs of the age, “as Pope Francis suggests”, the Church risked losing its prophetic voice. He added:?“The concept of having a representative body of the Church voting on doctrinal applications and pastoral solutions strikes me as being rather Protestant.”

However, the president of the German bishops’ conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, noted a fresh openness to change within the Church. He told the German weekly Die Zeit: “The doors are open – wider than they have ever been since the Second Vatican Council.” Marx, one of the Pope’s group of nine advisers, said it was Francis’ wish that lay Catholics take part in the reform process.

Meanwhile Cardinal André Vingt-Trois of Paris wrote to priests and deacons to ask parishes in his diocese to form “synodal teams” of lay people to continue the discussion launched by Pope Francis at the synod and report back to him the results of their deliberations.
(See Tina Beattie, page 6.)