The Guardian view on a historic Catholic summit on family policy
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Version 0 of 1. The Roman Catholic church will never be a democracy. But Pope Francis is trying to make it into a better informed and more intelligent autocracy. The synod of bishops that has just opened in Rome is an important step in this process. It will better inform the pope as to the thinking of his bishops. Beyond that it offers a theoretical chance for the voice and experience of ordinary Catholics to be heard. In advance of the synod, the bishops’ conferences around the world were asked to discover the views of the men, and women, in the pews on Catholic teaching on the sex and the family. Almost none of the answers have been published. This is because – as everyone knows – the official line on artificial birth control has been entirely rejected by the faithful. So, largely, has the official doctrine that marriage is for life; and that divorced and remarried Catholics are living in a state of sin and therefore may not receive communion. Cardinal Vincent Nichols refused to publish the results for England and Wales, but this succeeded only in preserving appearances rather than bridging the real chasm between the official teaching and the moral understandings of his flock. Lay married Catholics are not more ignorant or immoral than their notionally celibate priesthood, but their morality is informed by an experience of family life that the assembled celibates have deliberately cut themselves away from. The latter group is also overwhelmingly male. It is true there are some women present though only as auditors, without a vote, but when the pope greeted the synod as “Eminences, beatitudes, excellencies, brothers – and sisters” he made it clear how naturally their deliberations could fall into pompous “mansplaining” unless women – among them wives and mothers – have a decisive voice in the formation of policy. Cardinal Nichols should have followed the example of the German church and published the results of the survey. That he did not shows how very much the Catholic church distrusts the opinions of people who actually live inside families. Even if the synod will not allow the unmediated voice of the laity to be heard, it has already had an electrifying effect on discussions among the bishops and cardinals. Arguments about whether to admit divorced and remarried couples to communion have been conducted with unprecedented openness and rancour. Pope Francis has suggested that the synod listen to the views of Cardinal Kasper, who wants the discipline relaxed so that some remarried Catholics can openly receive communion; five other cardinals, among them the man the pope has trusted to clean up the Vatican’s finances, mounted a co-ordinated attack on Kasper. Some Catholics complain that the media is unfair to concentrate on such a novel and important spectacle. The synod will discuss many other aspects of the family. But the church’s policy on remarriage is the one decision that the synod can make. It is of course true that the family is impacted by many other changes on which the Catholic church also has a view. The globalising forces that tend to make everything solid melt into air have hit family structures as much as they have hit all other forms of society. Pressure on the poor to migrate in search of work has broken more families than feminism ever did. But divorce and remarriage are where policies make a real difference to people’s lives – where the church has to deal with actually existing and imperfect families, rather than the schematic fantasies of men more at home in front of a seminary blackboard than round a kitchen table with children of their own. In the end, the formal decisions of the synod may not much matter. We know already that the dogma of indissoluble marriage will be proclaimed still more perfect and timeless whatever the policy the church settles on. What may and ought to change is the actions of priests in their parishes. They know that sometimes a second marriage is much better than no family at all and that exclusion from communion can weaken families the church should be trying to sustain. The mere fact of public argument will embolden priests to use judgment and charity of their own. |