This week, hundreds of delegates from around the world began a monthlong meeting as part of Pope Francis’ “Synod on Synodality”—a gathering to discuss the future of the Catholic Church. It could radically change the religion. The group is considering groundbreaking alterations to orthodoxy on same-sex unions and whether or not women can be ordained as priests. The process has changed, too. For the first time, delegates include women.
A synod is a conference for church leaders and lay people to engage in conversation about how to bolster the good of the church. Since the 1960s, delegates from the global church have come together to discuss evolving issues. The current synod is part one of a multi-year process that will culminate in 2024 with Francis’ decisions and includes particularly controversial topics, like celibacy and divorce.
The lead up has been punctuated by conservative concerns about just how liberal this meeting may get. The synod kicks off days after a letter became public in which the pope considered blessing the existence of queer couples and the allowance of female priests.
Pope Francis wrote that while marriage is an “exclusive, stable and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to conceiving children,” pastoral charity is also needed, and may be discretionary. Pastoral prudence, he wrote, “must adequately discern if there are forms of blessing, solicited by one or various persons, that don’t transmit a mistaken concept of marriage.” On female priesthood, the pope asserted that, whereas nobody can publicly contradict the church’s current rules prohibiting women’s ordination, they should study it.
For some, this rhetoric may seem like the bare minimum. But for others, like Americans on the right, it’s scary as hell.
Conservative Catholics across the U.S. have been some of the most vocal globally in pushing against reforms, and fear that the church is changing in a way that doesn’t match scripture or their ideology. One New York City priest, Reverend Gerald Murray, worried publicly that the pope “will authorize things that are not contained in Catholic doctrine or that will contradict it,” like women deacons or blessing gay unions. “We’re not Protestants,” he said.
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, Archbishop Emeritus of St. Louis, a vocal opponent to Pope Francis, was in the group that sent the pope a letter inquiring how he would be responding to these issues at the summit. “It’s unfortunately very clear,” Burke said on Tuesday, “that the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the part of some has as its aim to push forward an agenda that is more political and human than ecclesiastical and divine.” (Burke was not invited to the meeting at the Vatican.)
Pope Francis’ track record on queer and women’s rights is complicated. He formally allowed women to read from the Bible during Mass, but also came out against women becoming ordained. Speaking about queer people in 2013, the pope famously asked, “If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?” He has argued that homosexuality should not be treated as a crime in different countries but clarifies that he still thinks it’s a sin. Francis has framed many of these decisions as instances where localities should turn toward scripture and an evolving discernment as it befits their needs as part of his hope of growing the Catholic Church.
Because of this potential divide between local and global doctrine and application, it is possible that American Catholics may not even see these changes, should they be formally supported by the pope but not adopted by local priests.
As Mother Jones previously reported, American catholicism has splintered as some of the devout entrench themselves in wider conservative politics. Right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon notably have moved in Catholic circles saying Pope Francis should be curtailed. Yiannopoulos, who touts a traditionalist form of Catholicism, has been telling anyone who will listen to him, to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.”
The pope himself seems unfazed by the ire of American Catholics. “They got mad,” he told reporters in late August after a squabble. “But move on, move on.”
Until they start paying tax and stop molesting children all of them can fuck right off.
As someone who is not an only atheist but an anti-theist, I have no love for the Catholic Church and either its ancient, middle-age, or present form. However, I’m also a realist. For the Catholic Church to even be publicly willing to discuss such matters (especially things like LGBTQ issues and female ordainment), well, even I’ll admit that something decent may come from this in the end, even if it’s not all what decent society may want (or demand).
In its history, the Catholic Church has been on of the world’s most renowned institutions for being inflexible in its conservative dogma. Extremely rarely do the even ever discuss openness, especially publicly, to changing doctrine. This is one of those extremely few times. I would be extremely shocked if nothing came from this, especially considering the current pope.
Certainly, there are many tractors that will hold back the more radical of proposed changes, but now is the time where we will see any serious changes were likely to see for a long time within the Catholic Church. I’m excited to see what manages to get done at this synod.
I am sure this is a “be careful what you wish for” moment, but part of me is hoping that the American conservative Catholics are insane enough to try appointing their own Trump-aligned antipope and schism from the church, just so that the more rational Catholics in the US can have their literal “Come to Jesus” realization about how far gone the political right has become.
I firmly believe that there is a scary number of Americans who would get behind such a move. But at this point, I have just about accepted that the political divide in the US will not end peacefully, so if that’s our fate, I’d like to at least have the lines drawn cleanly.
You’re describing every form of Protestantism since Martin Luther.
C’mon…
A bit different; protestantism disagrees with the practice of having a centralized church at all, while other schisms in the Catholic church that took place in the past still maintained the church structure. They just appointed antipopes that were more politically aligned with their ideals.
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Nothing will come from this.
It’s not a “huh, maybe we were doing something wrong, maybe we should change” meeting, it’s a “Oh, the peasants are getting uppity again, quick, say that were graciously considering human rights or something to calm them down” meeting.
It’s the KKK holding a meeting considering on whether to allow black people to join.
We don’t want something decent to come from the Catholic Church, though. It’s the fact that they are so backwards and hateful that is causing them to lose adherents like crazy. This is what needs to continue. Making moves like accepting women and LGBTQ people only helps them stay alive even longer.
Hey Hitler killed Hitler, so call it even?
Nah fuck those robed pedophiles till we strangle the last politician with the last ones entrails.
Wtf. I’m saying that the Catholic Church only makes major changes to dogma once a millennium or so, and I’m pretty interested in what they’re gonna do since it affects the lives of countless billions of people. You can quibble over the fact that you don’t get all you want, and I agree that they’re still a shitty theistic monolithic organization, but I was talking about what benefits a change in their dogma would bring, not fixating on the shortcomings.
I’m not your enemy.
Until the pope can stop his priests and congregation from fucking children, is there any reason to think there will be any positive change?
Like most figures in religion and Catholicism, the pope is a fairweather friend for Catholics. When he’s singing their tune they’re happy to quote him and laud him for his god given thoughts. When he isn’t, well we get exactly the reaction he’s been given: his own people saying he is wrong even though they were claiming he is God’s earthly representative just moments earlier.
I’m not outright saying nothing at all good can come of the effort to make change, as there will be some small minority that actually adhere to it, but I don’t see that happening for the vast majority of Catholics who will continue in their bigotry.
Change over generations will occur moreso, but I think that was coming regardless of his stance. At least that’s what recent history has shown us.
Are you of the belief that the Pope has super powers?
No, but they do
You’re the one demanding the Pope be, at minimum, prescient, and ideally omniscient.
This is a laborious argument that adds nothing to the conversation. You can choose to read my words childishly or you can read them as they are meant. Everyone else was able to parse them, catch up with them.
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It’s a fairly famous quote.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-Denis Diderot
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Right. it just exposes your illiteracy.
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Hey, not knowing something isn’t wrong. It isn’t illiteracy to not have read whatever that is related to, remember the xkcd comic on today’s 10,000. I also only read the quote on lemmy.
Now their response is not the best of course.
Being illiterate is not a moral failing.
Being an asshole though.
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Isn’t that like, part of the vows or something?