Word: synods
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...extraordinary two-week-long synod now meeting in Rome to review the work of Vatican II, collegiality was clearly on the minds of many of the 161 delegates. Indeed, one of the most radical proposals to emerge last week came from Archbishop Maxim Hermaniuk, spiritual leader of Ukrainian Rite Catholics in Canada. To carry out Vatican II's teaching on collegiality, declared Hermaniuk, there should be a permanent synod, sitting in Rome as an ongoing body, empowered to act "in the name of the entire college of bishops." This group, said Hermaniuk, would acquire "legislative power to decide with...
...against locals who sell to Jews. Nevertheless, Palestinian Orthodox Christians have seized on the scandal to push for greater representation in the Patriarchate's hierarchy. There are some 120,000 Greek Orthodox Palestinians, the largest Christian group in the Holy Land, but only one of the 18-member Holy Synod is an Arab. Local members want control of the Church so that one of their own can tend to the community's spiritual needs, but also to prevent what they see as the sale of their patrimony to the Israeli enemy. "The Greek Orthodox Church is led by foreigners," says...
Ratzinger also criticized the growing role of national bishops' conferences as an ecclesiastical innovation that has no warrant in Scripture or tradition. At the synod the president of the U.S. bishops, James W. Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, expects to defend the conferences and their pastoral and social involvement. Malone got a boost at last week's meeting of the American hierarchy in Washington, D.C., when Papal Pro-Nuncio Pio Laghi praised the U.S. bishops' conference and its pastoral letters on nuclear disarmament and economic morality for "offering the service of leadership on public issues." Malone said last week that...
...conservative mind-set is expressed by Msgr. Wilhelm Schätzler, secretary general of the West German bishops' conference: "Following the euphoria of the council, certain negative developments have crept in, and they must be soberly analyzed and, if necessary, corrected by the synod." Conservative U.S. lay Catholics have lobbied for synod action on empty seminaries, dissident priests and nuns, and what they consider to be inadequate parish education. But the most noteworthy reforms enacted by Vatican II are no longer at issue...
...synod, Ratzinger and his allies are expected to warn that the church is endangered by being too immersed in worldly matters. Father Edward Schillebeeckx, a liberal theologian in the Netherlands, whose theology has been investigated by the doctrinal commission, predicts that there will be attacks against Ratzinger at the synod because, he says dryly, "it is always easier to voice criticism to a cardinal than to a Pope." The Pontiff does not necessarily share all of Ratzinger's views. During an August plane trip returning from Africa, John Paul told reporters that Ratzinger's plea for reconstruction is "his personal...