Marx and Boris and Synods and Law

When I woke up Thursday morning, I was going to write how sad I was that Cardinal Reinhold Marx of Germany was resigning. When I was making breakfast, I heard on the BBC that Pope Francis had refused his resignation. What! Is that possible only in the church? 

Our good leaders must not resign, which is an excess of repentance, though not according to a laudatory profile of Marx by Christopher Lamb in The Tablet. 

To me, resignation is not taking responsibility for sex abuse, the church’s “systemic failure,” as the Cardinal said in his letter to the Pope. Marx is a close ally of Francis and Francis needs to keep every ally he can. 

The Pope answered in a long letter in Spanish. According to Joshua McElwee in NCR, he said, “the whole of the Catholic Church is ‘in crisis’ because of clergy abuse and said all its members ‘have to take ownership of history, both personally and communally.’” Members of the laity have been doing that for twenty years! One of the theories about Marx’s sudden resignation is that he was trying to shame Cardinal Ranier Woelki into resigning; the Vatican has scheduled an apostolic visitation of his German diocese, a step not taken lightly. Gerard O’Connell in America has a very complete “Explainer” that covers the whole European scene, including an interview with German Jesuit Hans Zollner, a leader in the critical response to sex abuse in Rome. It is astonishing to learn that there are some other churchmen who don’t see that the institution in crisis. 

What I like about Marx’s letter, quoted extensively by Ruth Gledhill in The Tablet, is that he does. He is not afraid to acknowledge a “catastrophe.” 

Francis knows it is, too, largely due to Marx’s interventions over many years. I like this better from his response: “Burying the past does not lead us to anything. Silences, omissions, and giving too much weight to the prestige of the institution only leads to personal and historical failure, and makes us live with the weight of ‘having skeletons in the closet.’ It is urgent to ‘air’ out this reality of the abuses and how the Church acted, and let the Spirit lead us to the desert of desolation, to the cross and to the resurrection.” Let’s hope in the Spirit! 

On to Boris. I am tickled that the Prime Minister of England has such a Russian name, and that his Catholic wedding is roiling the readers of The Tablet. Diarmuid Pepper quotes Canon Paul Gargaro extensively. He says “Johnson’s ‘treatment of women’ leaves a lot to be desired, yet his marriage goes off without a hitch. How hurtful this must be to LGBTQ Catholics, who are told that their relationship is so sinful that it cannot be blessed, even in private.” I don’t want to go into the details, but I do want to extend my sympathy to those unblessed Catholics, and to those, divorced as I am, who find the annulment process problematic. Let’s just favor families and do away with judgment, as it seems possible to do for the rich and famous. 

Then, synods. I will first say that Cardinal Marx was a prime mover of the Synodal Path in Germany, which even to the Pope is tending toward a catastrophe itself. But what is to be expected when opening up consideration of power, sexuality, priesthood, and women in the church? Marx was not afraid to go there, and the laity and clergy now leading the current effort were among the most visible protesting his resignation. And it’s hard not to anticipate the Pope’s synodal process leading to the same frustrations if the people in all the parishes in the world are able to freely express their ideas. 

The rest of this blog I prepared last week, but lost all the citations I usually include. Unofficial surveys by me indicate that few of you follow them up, so I have decided to share what I prepared for EqualwRites with no links.  

In The Table, I left off with very positive expectations on the part of Pope Francis. I also warned you to remember Father O’Loughlin’s warning about synthesis as I summarize the process following the local level.

The official documents are classic group methodology, with dates and goals and responsibilities. This is my understanding of what is aspired to, which is not always what the documents contain. As I said, Francis wants local meetings of all the faithful. Yet despite the hopes of those who see the possibility of the Spirit acting to bring about a church for the 21^st century, even the local phase is all up to the current hierarchy. 

The Diocesan is the first level on the official plans. If the diocesan coordinators are bold enough to have parish meetings, the documents generated go back to them. I am encouraged by the memory of the regional consultation in 1984 in Philadelphia before the development of the USCCB pastoral on women. Maybe that kind of open discussion will happen again. In the synod process, cthe diocesan coordinators are to develop texts based on the local input and send them to the national bishops’ conference. 

In the US, that’s the USCCB, a body that does not now inspire great confidence. Again, I remember the bishops’ first draft of the women’s pastoral in which many real concerns were presented in women’s own voices. The synod process calls for each national conference of bishops to have “a period of discernment” in which it reviews and synthesizes the diocesan texts. What happened to the women’s pastoral is that it stayed with the American bishops and, through three subsequent drafts, the voices of women disappeared and the voices of bishops took over. It finally was just abandoned because it satisfied no one. 

In the case of the synod, at this step the national syntheses are sent to the Synod of Bishops in the Vatican. This step is what’s different from any prior synod. The Synod of Bishops is the Vatican office that designed the process, and they have put themselves right in the middle of it. Their role is to discern the commonalities among the various diocesan documents. I anticipate the papal pen in their hands.

Who are they, anyway? You may remember the February appointment of Sister Nathalie Becquart as Undersecretary. We debated whether she would be the first woman to vote in the 2022 synod. But she may have had a much larger role than one vote by helping to formulate this new process with Father Luis Marín de San Martín, added at the same time to the leadership team headed by the General Secretary, Cardinal Mario Grech. There is a charming YouTube “Vatican Synod 2022” video that shows all three around a conference table. Then the three explain the 2023 synod in their own languages with English subtitles. Grech himself was a surprise promotion in September 2020. This is clearly a Pope Francis team to handle the synod that means so much to his legacy.

What they will do is draft another guide for the next discussions: the Continental phase. Think about that. What continent are we on? Canada to the tip of Latin America? Just North America? The Latin American bishops already have a strong association, CELAM, which has generated many significant documents at its conferences from Medellin to Aparecida. We imagine the church in Africa or Asia or even Europe having common conditions and concerns, but I wonder if this is another mess Pope Francis and the Synod of Bishops officers are creating. This is another totally new part of the process. The organizers could want to structure a discussion for eventual continental implementation, of course, but they could also want to get the participants to work together to discover commonalities beyond national boundaries and stereotypes. In any case, each continent develops a document. 

Then it’s back to the Synod of Bishops office to draft the final discussion guide to be used by those bishops who gather in Rome for the Universal phase of the synod in October 2023. Cardinal Grech talks only about bishops, by the way, but stresses that they must listen to those voices raised in the beginning of the process. Nobody is talking about who else is going to vote, except us.  And you remember what happens with the document the Universal Synod drafts: the Pope responds.  

Finally, law. Lest you feel unduly optimistic about response, let me just remind you of WOC’s current campaign to collect signatures on a letter to the Pope about the latest Canon Law fiasco. I said I’d write more about that but I’ve written too much already. Just go here and add your voice!