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Letter #47, 2015: From Russia to Rome[2015-10-24][Engleză]October 23, 2015, Friday From Russia to Rome"The word mother can be traced back cleanly to Proto-Indo-European, as can father, brother and sister -- it appears in cognate form in languages like Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and so forth, and it may go back further." Discussion of the origin of the word "mother" on an internet page (link) "The crisis which the Western society is undergoing has primarily spiritual roots. Secular society without God naively believes that while exploiting only their own proprietary and consumer instincts it would be able to successfully regulate the growth of well-being, thus achieving prosperity and justice. However, the tragic experience of the entire 20th century has vividly shown that the renunciation of God and His commandments does not lead people to happiness, but, on the contrary, brings about numerous disasters and sufferings." Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, the "foreign minister" of the Russian Orthodox Church, speaking as a guest of the Synod of Bishops in Rome on October 20; his complete talk is included below at the end of this email (link) "We must continue on this path. The world in which we live and that we are called to love and serve even with its contradictions, demands from the Church the Church the strengthening of synergies in all areas of her mission. And it is precisely on this way of synodality where we find the pathway that God expects from the Church of the third millennium."Pope Francis, October 17, in his important, and controversial, address on Church government and the role of the Synod in that process (the entire text is included below) "Today, when the world ever more resembles that foolish man which built his house on the sand (Matt. 7: 26) it is the Churchs duty to remind the society of its firm foundation of the family as a union between a man and woman created with the purpose of giving birth to and bringing up children. Only this type of family, as ordained by the Lord when he created the world, can forestall or at least halt temporarily modern-day societys further descent into the abyss of moral relativism. The Orthodox Church, like the Catholic Church, has always in her teaching followed Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition in asserting the principle of the sanctity of marriage founded on the Saviours own words (Matt. 19: 6; Mk. 10: 9). In our time this position should be ever more strengthened and unanimous." Metropolitan Hilarion, ibid. =============== Synod Ending The Synod on the Family is about to end. During Saturday, October 24, the Synod will hear the proposed final document read out loud, and will vote on that document. The document will then go to Pope Francis. It is not yet clear whether the Pope will order the final document to be published immediately, or keep it private. We should know the answer in a few hours. ===================== The True Story of the Synod Is Yet To Be Written And May Never Be Clearly, this Synod has been important, dramatic, historic and confusing. Important because the family is at the center of every human society. Each human being has a mother and father. The words for "mother" and "father" are ancient -- they go back to before the dawn of recorded time. To discuss what a family is, how it can be strong, how the children of a family can be cared for and grow into adults, is therefore profoundly important. And efforts to "re-engineer" the family are at the core or many conflicting "utopian" (often in fact dystopian) visions for our world and our human future. Dramatic, because bishops and cardinals and lay people from Poland and the United States, from Germany and from all over Africa, from Romania and from India, have passionately expressed their vision for the family, and for the Church. Historic, not so much because it occurs 50 years after the Second Vatican Council, bu more because it occurs at the very moment that enormous societal transformations are occurring in Western and "global" society -- in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, in China, India and Russia -- as the "globalizing" world attempts to determine how much to retain of the wisdom of traditional human society and how much of the new secular humanist worldview, including a new "gender agenda," to embrace. Confusing, because what has happened -- the arguments, the claims, the counterclaims, the questions, the partial answers, the motivations stated and not stated -- do not fully explain this event, this Synod. This Synod eludes full comprehension. It eludes full comprehension in the way that the resignation of Pope Benedict in 2013 still eludes full comprehension. This explains why there are so many conflicting narratives, after three weeks of Synod meetings, about what actually has been happening, and why. Perhaps the final teaching of Pope Benedict before his resignation, when he spoke about the true meaning of the Second Vatican Council, and told us that there were really two Councils, the Council of the media, and the Council as it was, holds true here. Here is a link to that important teaching, which bears re-reading. (link) In one central passage of this talk, Benedict said things that could apply to the Synod which is just ending. In this passage, where the Emeritus Pope says "Council," imagine that he is saying, "Synod on the Family." Pope Benedict said on February 14, 2013, three days after he announced he would resign: "There was the Council of the Fathers the real Council but there was also the Council of the media. "It was almost a Council apart, and the world perceived the Council through the latter, through the media. "Thus, the Council that reached the people with immediate effect was that of the media, not that of the Fathers. "And while the Council of the Fathers was conducted within the faith it was a Council of faith seeking intellectus, seeking to understand itself and seeking to understand the signs of God at that time, seeking to respond to the challenge of God at that time and to find in the word of God a word for today and tomorrow while all the Council, as I said, moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of the journalists, naturally, was not conducted within the faith, but within the categories of today's media, namely apart from faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic: for the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different trends in the Church. "It was obvious that the media would take the side of those who seemed to them more closely allied with their world. There were those who sought the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression 'People of God,' power for the people, the laity. "There was this threefold question: the power of the Pope, which was then transferred to the power of the bishops and the power of all popular sovereignty. "Naturally, for them, this was the part to be approved, to be promulgated, to be favoured. "So too with the liturgy: there was no interest in liturgy as an act of faith, but as something where comprehensible things are done, a matter of community activity, something profane. And we know that there was a tendency, not without a certain historical basis, to say: sacrality is a pagan thing, perhaps also a thing of the Old Testament. In the New Testament it matters only that Christ died outside: that is, outside the gates, in the profane world. Sacrality must therefore be abolished, and profanity now spreads to worship: worship is no longer worship, but a community act, with communal participation: participation understood as activity. "These translations, trivializations of the idea of the Council, were virulent in the process of putting the liturgical reform into practice; they were born from a vision of the Council detached from its proper key, that of faith. And the same applies to the question of Scripture: Scripture is a book, it is historical, to be treated historically and only historically, and so on. "We know that this Council of the media was accessible to everyone. Therefore, this was the dominant one, the more effective one, and it created so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering: seminaries closed, convents closed, banal liturgy and the real Council had difficulty establishing itself and taking shape; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council." [End, citation from Pope Benedict] So, there have been "two Synods" -- the Synod itself, and the Synod of the media. Onlookers -- including the bishops who are voting, and the journalists who have followed every twist and turn of this Synod -- should keep this in mind. Even after the voting tomorrow, we will not really know why the bishops voted as they did, and what they intend -- or what the Holy Father intends. We will have to wait for greater clarity. The Vatican Press Office has posted all of the documents that were made public during the Synod on line at this link (link). I think it is worth a few seconds to go look at what this link contains. (Note: the link contains all the press communiques including many not related to the Synod; if you click on links to the Synod communiques, they open up onto other pages which contain a wealth of information, like this link, which has the texts of all 13 of the "smaller groups" where the Synod proposals were discussed in language groups. These are "primary documents," so if you wish to see for yourself what the official "primary sources" say, take a look as this and other daily links (link). The Synod was also reported on in considerable detail by many journalists. In addition to the "heavyweights" in the media (AP, Reuters, daily papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (which published an interesting op-ed by Archbishop CNN, etc.) it would be quite useful, if one would like to go deeper, to go to the smaller, specialized Il Sismografo, (which provided as many as 100 reports each day in five or more languages). Rome Reports, (which provided useful daily brief video reports) LifeSiteNews, Crux and John Allen, Sandro Magister (who focused during this Synod on the "Letter from the 13 Cardinals"), Edward Pentin, and Rorate Caeli (which offered links to news and interviews from a traditional Catholic perspective). Phil Lawler at CatholicCulture.com (link) has just given a thoughtful analysis, worth citing here: "With the Synod moving toward a conclusion, and the 'Kasper proposal' clearly lacking support among the bishops, the cabal that tried so hard to write the script for this Synod is now engaged in damage-control. Kasper does not have the votes in the Synod for his solution, conceded Father Tom Reese in the National Catholic Reporter, even before the small-group reports made that result apparent to all. Now he and his Jesuit confreres (Father Anthony Spadaro of Civilta Cattolica, Father James Martin of America) are taking a new line in their (many) public statements. Since the Synod will not yield the result they had hoped for, theyre advancing the line that the Synod isnt really aimed at results after all. "Whats important (according to this new narrative) is that the Synod raised questions. Now its up to the Pope, who will deliver the final product of the Synod, to give the answers. "But will the Pope ignore the Synod fathers disapproval of the Kasper proposala disapproval which became so clear as the discussion progressed? "Pope Francis, in his address to the bishops marking the 50th anniversary of the Synod -- which was clearly one of the most important talks of his pontificate to date -- stressed his commitment to build a synodal-mission Church. "He explained: 'A synodal Church is a Church of listening.' "Having stressed so strongly that he would be listening to his bishops the Pope cannot blithely override their conclusion on the subject that generated the most attention during the Synod, without violating his own prescription for a healthy Church. Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com Contor Accesări: 833, Ultimul acces: 2026-08-12 16:01:59
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