Pope Francis has formally announced that the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops will convene a pre-Synodal meeting inviting young people from different parts of the world, both young Catholics and young people from different Christian denominations and other religions, as well as non-believers.
"This initiative,” the Pope said, “is part of the preparations for the next General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which will be on Youth, Faith and Vocation Discernment in October 2018.”
With this journey, the Pope continued, “the Church wants to listen to the voice, the sensitivity, of faith and also the doubts and criticisms of young people. Following this, conclusions of the March Meeting will be transmitted to the Synod Fathers.”
The Synod’s agenda ultimately is up to the Pope.
As we have already witnessed with past Synods and what may take place with the next, that agenda may develop quite independently of what is proposed by the fourteen Cardinals and Bishops of the Commission that acts as a bridge between one synod and the next.
I continue to predict that married priests will be a central topic of Synodal discussion in October of 2018.
That this is likely can be garnered from a number of various indications.
The first is the evident intention of Pope Francis to implement the agenda dictated in 1999 by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, in a memorable statement at the synod of that year.
The Cardinal, Archbishop of Milan at the time, a Jesuit and the undisputed leader of the so-called “liberal” wing of the hierarchy, said that he “had a dream”: that of a Church capable of getting into a permanent Synodal state, with a “collegial and authoritative exchange among all the Bishops on some key issues.”
And here are the “key issues” that he listed:
“The shortage of ordained ministers, the role of woman in society and in the Church, the discipline of Marriage, the Catholic vision of sexuality, penitential practice, relations with the sister Churches of Orthodoxy and more in general the need to revive ecumenical hopes, the relationship between democracy and values and between civil laws and the moral law.”
Of Martini’s agenda, the two Synods convened so far by Pope Francis have discussed “the discipline of Marriage” and in part “the Catholic vision of sexuality.”
There is nothing to prevent, therefore, the “key issue” of the next Synod from being that which Martini put at the head of them all: “the critical shortage of Priests.”
The shortage of priests - who in the Latin Rite are celibate - is felt especially keenly in some regions of the world. Above all in Latin America.
One year ago, Bishop Erwin Kräutler, Austrian by birth and the head of the Xingu prelature in Brazil, with only 25 priests in a territory larger than Italy and therefore with the possibility of celebrating the Mass and the Sacraments only two or three times a year in the most far-flung localities, has made himself the messenger to Pope Francis of the request from many of his brother Bishops to make up for the shortage of celibate priests by also conferring sacred Ordination on “viri probati,” meaning men of “proven virtue, and married”.
The request is not new.
One must remember that the Brazilian Bishops - but not only them - have made it repeatedly.
Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, 81, Archbishop emeritus of São Paulo and a staunch supporter of Jorge Mario Bergoglio during the Papal Conclave, boldly proposed it when he was Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, from 2006 to 2010.
Pope Benedict simply ignored the issue along with so many others of critical import to the life of the Church in the modern world.
Today, Cardinal Hummes is President both of the Commission for the Amazon of the Episcopal Conference of Brazil and of the Pan-Amazonian Network that unites 25 Cardinals and Bishops of countries in the area.
In this capacity, he told Vatican Radio that he is “working for an indigenous Church, a Church immersed in history and in the culture and religion of the indigenous, a Church that would have an indigenous Clergy (not foreign, understood as not European missionaries) as its guide.”
“Indigenous Clergy” in this context means envisioning a Clergy that is also married.
In another area of Latin America, Chiapas, in the south of Mexico, the pressure for a married Clergy has been made concrete in recent decades with the Ordination of a large number of indigenous Deacons in the vast territorial diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, in which there are a few dozen priests and almost all of them are elderly.
The Ordination of these Deacons, all of them married, had its culmination in the forty years of the episcopacy of Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia.
With the retirement of Bishop Ruiz Garcia in 2000, the Vatican ordered a suspension of ordinations to the Diaconate. Further, the Holy See demanded that the Deacons already ordained state publicly that their Ordination ended there and did not constitute in any way a stage toward a subsequent priestly ordination, as married priests.
However, after the election of Pope Francis, the prohibition was revoked. In May of 2014, the Vatican again authorized the successor to Bishop Ruiz Garcia, Bishop Arizmendi Esquivel, to resume Diaconal Ordinations. The Bishop promptly announced that he had around a hundred of them planned.
Meanwhile, in Rome, Pope Francis has been moving forward with a reorganization of the management and personnel of the Congregation for the Clergy, which has consistently been the seat of greatest resistance to the introduction of a married clergy in the Latin Rite.
To anyone seriously observing the issue, it is clear that the question of the theology of Ordination to the Priesthood just isn't going to go away.
The Pope has shown extreme interest and concern for countries where some Catholic communities never see a Priest more than once a year.
The possibility as well as the implications of a new and developing Clergy -- a married Clergy as well as a celibate clergy -- has begun to take on perceptible features.
The very thought of a married Clergy existing side by side with a celibate Clergy is anathema to the conservative reactionaries with the Church.
When asked whether the upcoming Synod on Youth would address the possibility of Priestly celibacy, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri responded abruptly, “No.” Cardinal Baldisseri is the Secretary for the Synod of Bishops.
What European Cardinals are loathe to admit is that Catholicism in Europe is dead and they are its pall-bearers.
The Pope and most faithful are not looking to Europe to provide models for a vibrant and vigorous expression of Catholic Faith.
And so, Cardinal Baldisseri’s observations notwithstanding, the question now facing the Church is whether or not Pope Francis is going to tackle the issue of optional celibacy in the Latin Church and allow it to be addressed (as it should) by local conferences of Bishops.
The dead giveaway if any of this is even remotely possible is to see whom the Pope approves to offer presentations to the Bishops gathered in Synod as well as those whom he chooses to redact the discussions and publish the interim reports. That is where the proverbial “rubber will meet the road”.
I contend, as we move closer to October 2018, that there will be a growing chorus of voices from Bishops and faithful for the Church to finally grow up and accept the reality that the shortage of Priests is critical and largely because so many find mandatory celibacy an obstacle to their vocational call to Priestly service.
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