Word: synods
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Still, the month's only dramatic action came not from much-publicized liberal quarters, but from the church's Ukrainian hierarchy. Exiled Josyf Cardinal Slipyi took the synod floor to break an eight-year silence over the persecution of the 4,500,000 Roman Catholic Ukrainians, who have been forced into Eastern Orthodoxy by the Soviet regime. They have, he said, "sacrificed rivers of blood and mountains of bodies because of their fidelity to the Apostolic See, but they are defended by no one"-an obvious attack on Pope Paul's diplomatic Ostpolitik. The Ukrainians want...
ROME-Now that the third session of the international Synod of Roman Catholic Bishops is over, what has really taken place? The synod, like the two others held since the Second Vatican Council, was less than the council had intended when it recommended such meetings as a way for the bishops to have a continuing voice in church developments. Today's synods, unable to exercise any real power of their own, merely advise the Pope of the bishops' thinking on subjects of import. This time the subjects were of import indeed: the crisis in the priestly ministry...
...times when the center cannot hold, as Yeats said. Most especially it cannot hold when it is the center of an institution that fails to comprehend -or merely ignores-the centrifugal forces that are tearing at its edges. It is just that lack of comprehension that characterized the synod...
...attitude may be understandable in men who know in advance, as the synod delegates did, that the final say on any subject belongs to an increasingly besieged Pope. But, to a waiting world, the seeming immobility of the hierarchy is inexplicable. Perhaps the real question this autumn is not so much what the bishops have or have not done as whether the Catholics of the world seriously care about what they do at all. Most bishops may still listen to the Pope, but fewer and fewer priests listen to either the Pope or their bishops-and many of the laity...
...thing that might restore such authority to the Pope and his bishops is a new, more flexible vision of the church, less dependent on the sort of legal complexities that bogged down the synod. What the church needs to be, argues Kennedy, is not an organization but a family, "where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in." Such a family, he says, fosters "an atmosphere of growth rather than a domain of control." In short, he says, it "makes room for everybody" because in the end it is the home of sinners...