Have you heard anything about the Synod coming up this Fall?

[hedgehog]

http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/francis-families-give-prayer-help-october-synod

I know the conservative blogs are all a-twitter over this to the point of emphasizing that the pope is infallible only when HE (and it will always be a he, according to them!) speaks Ex Cathedra. On the other hand, those who want change may be very disappointed if change comes too slowly or not at all.


Either way, it looks like rough sailing ahead for St. Peter's barque! Time for some heavy duty prayer!

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

1. In the

Commonweal: Style & Substance - Francis seeks to reconcile factions within Catholicism I linked to a [link: http://www.eppc.org/publications/john-l-allen-jr-paul-vallely-march-2014-faith-angle-forum/ |Ethics and Public Policy Center forum on the papacy] which says in part

The Pope has changed the process of the synod to make it more conversational and less about speech-making. For this synod, he has also pointedly asked that the bishops’ conferences of the world send their elected presidents so that there’s an idea that the people who are going to be in the synod represent the consensus among the bishops in the parts of the world that they come from.

He’s also reconfigured the process, so this is now a play in two acts. There’s going to be a synod in 2014. Then people will go home and ponder what they heard, and they will come back in 2015 for another synod before they make final recommendations to the Pope. So he’s provided this window, this year-long window of time for grassroots consultation to the first round of results.

So procedurally, it clearly does reflect a pope who is committed to shared decision-making to authentic participation, to participation that’s more than notional.

Substantively, a lot of issues are going to be in the mix of this thing, but, obviously, the hot-button issue that a lot of people have their eyeballs on is the question of whether divorced and remarried Catholics — that is, Catholics who divorce and remarry civilly without obtaining an annulment, which is a declaration from a church court that their first marriage was invalid — whether divorced and remarried Catholics are going to be able to participate in the sacraments; that is, whether they can come up for communion and the other sacraments of the Church. Under current church rules, they’re not supposed to.

A bit later, he says

Which makes handicapping how that synod is going to come out difficult to do. If you want the politics of it, my read is that most of the American cardinals are going to be against change; not all of them, most of them. The Europeans, I think, are going to be split about 50/50. The Africans are going to be largely against change; again, not all of them, but that would be the majority. Asians and Latin Americans would be more open to it.

So, you add all that up, I don’t think the synod is going to be able to reach an easy consensus on this question, so my own prediction is that they’re going to have a very interesting debate. They’re going to go home for a year, and it’s going to be debated more. They’ll come back in 2015, and at the end of it, my prediction is they will say, “Holy Father, we cannot reach consensus on this point, and, therefore, it’s up to you.” And so at the end of the day, I think the ball is going to be in Bergoglio’s court.

There's a lot more at that link.