Opened Their Minds

Take a short break from thinking about the synod on the Amazon to reflect on what it means that Pope Francis begins his Apostolic Letter on the Word of God with the thought that the Scriptures should open minds. Not to be confined in a narrow literalness (#9), but to be the source of the work of the Spirit in our time (#10). I could not agree more.

Maybe Francis chose to announce a new Sunday commemoration of the Word of God just now to coincide with last Sunday’s Gospel of the Lazarus and Dives (#13), the lesson of which is to listen to Moses and the prophets. However, he actually links it to St. Jerome’s day, September 30. The new feast is to be celebrated on the third Sunday in Ordinary Time (#3).

This document shifts between the theological and the extremely practical, like calling on homilists⁠—which Francis does imagine as priests, only⁠—to prepare carefully and to speak from their hearts, “not [to] give long, pedantic homilies or wander off into unrelated topics” (#5). Just to make a point, this does not happen with the women preaching for FutureChurch’s weekly video series, Catholic Women Preach. The pope also says lectors or readers should have training (#3) and that the people should listen “attentively” (#7). The theology links “sacred Scripture and Eucharist” in an “unbreakable bond”(#8), and stresses the Spirit (#10, #12).

Do not think I am going to write about every obscure Motu Proprio this pope puts out. How he has the time … But this one has relevance for women, specifically, for lectors and readers.

Francis distinguishes between the “Rite of Installation of Lectors or a similar commissioning of readers (#3).” The latter is us. I am sure of it because this week the Archdiocese of Philadelphia did install lectors: “seminarians and men in formation for the permanent diaconate.” Not the deacons’ wives, nor any of the many women who read the scriptures at masses daily and Sunday.

Reading the document is really disappointing after seeing the headline in LaCroix International: “Pope Francis gives the Word to women: New motu proprio devotes the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time to the Word of God … for both genders.” This exceedingly positive interpretation is based on an interview with Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization. I didn’t know that Paul VI created the Ministry of Lector in 1972 and I was happier not knowing that I am excluded. Nicholas Seneze writes:

For a long time, people in the Church have been demanding that this ministry also be extended to women, especially since many of them regularly do the readings at Mass.

At the 2008 Synod on the Word of God, the bishops thus voted in favor of a proposal along these lines. But Benedict XVI, in his 2010 post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini, rejected the proposal for fear that it would be perceived as an “opening” towards women’s access to the ordained ministry.

As a result, women remained in an uncomfortable in-between, continuing to read during Mass but without any official recognition of the ministry in the Church.

Pope Francis is striving to resolve the issue in his own way by calling for imagination rather than entangling himself in debates he knows are sterile. He is also indicating a way to avoid a possible rut at the upcoming Synod of Bishops assembly for the Amazon, which opens on Oct. 6. The assembly’s working document precisely proposes to “discern the type of official ministry that can be conferred on women.”

So we are back to the Amazon synod, and those of you who expect big breakthroughs might be disappointed to learn that the new ministry you can perform is one you’re already doing.

Opened minds, indeed.