By Bess Twiston Davies in The Tablet
The Pope directly approved the final document of the Synod on Synodality rather than issue a post-synodal exhortation on it, writes CNA’s Almudena Martínez-Bordiú.
The 52-page document, approved by 355 synod members, outlines substantial proposals for Church renewal including expanded women’s leadership roles, greater lay participation in decision-making, and significant structural reforms.
Tom Heneghan reports in The Tablet magazine that German Church leaders expressed cautious optimism that the document opened the way to further reforms, though some voiced disappointment with its limitations. The lay leader Irme Stetter-Karp said it failed to deal with Church structures.
“They are one of the reasons why abuse of power, sexual violence and cover-ups have been able to happen for so long,” she said.
Today the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors issued its first annual report assessing Church procedures to prevent abuse in dioceses worldwide. Courtney Mares reports for CNA.
In The Tablet blogs, Ben Horan, headmaster of Prior Park College – a school criticised for changing its faith designation – claims that “people have fallen away from their faith because they were not made to feel welcome by people at this school and in our Church”.
Horan argues that to keep young people safe, especially in regard to the teenage exploration of sexual identity, “no school should ever sanction or judge any young person for who they are”. This comes afterthe Bishop of Clifton said he was “saddened” by Prior Park’s decision to “dissociate” from the Catholic Church and become “a Christian school in the Catholic tradition”.
Ribqa Nevash grew up in Pakistan. The only Christian girl on her university course in Faisalabad,she writes in this week’s Tablet: “Some of the students refused to talk to me, while others attempted to pressure me into converting to Islam, even offering me money in return. I’ve always had a strong faith, so I persistently refused.”
Her job applications – despite excellent academic results – “kept being rejected.” Now living in the UK, Ribqa is an advocate for woman and girls suffering sexual violence in Pakistan, working with the charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).
Every day she sees “new reports of abductions” and “so many cases of 40- or 50-year-old men kidnapping Christian girls aged 16, 10 and even as young as three, and forcibly converting them”.
ACN petitioned the governmentto protect religious freedoms against increasing persecutionworldwide at the launch of its latest Persecuted and Forgotten? report in Parliament on Tuesday. John Pontifex, the charity’s head of press and public affairs, said religious minorities “are urgently in need of meaningful UK government support”. Tabitha Smith reports.
In this week’s edition, Stephen Schneck – a lifelong pro-life Democrat – puts his foot in the door of the US presidential showdown to explain why Kamala Harris will get his vote in November.
In considering the preferential option for the poor, Schneck suggests that the “poor”, as an umbrella term, encompasses not just an economic class, but everyone who is “oppressed, marginalised, or powerless”.
“While we might only dream of a society that has the lives of the poor at the centre of its concern, in my view it should be the criterion against which a Catholic judges the values, actions and policies of those who seek our vote for office.”
“There was some bewilderment in the West when, after Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, promptly gave his vocal approval,” writes Lucy Ash in a sharp analysis of Putin’s culture wars.
“But those who have followed the Church’s history recognised a familiar pattern. For more than a millennium, the leadership of Russia’s Orthodox Church has done whatever it takes to stay on the right side of power, even when, as in the Soviet era, that power sought to destroy it.” With Putin’s ascendancy that “poisonous co-dependency” between Church and State has re-emerged.
Ian McGilchrist is celebrated for his groundbreaking argument that the Western world view has become over-dominated by thinking associated with the brain’s left hemisphere, the side that is “detail-orientated, prefers mechanisms to living things and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity”.
The psychiatrist and philosopher believes that “We’ve cut ourselves off from the roots of fulfilment, which is oneness with nature, with the divine and with one another.” Inan interview with Abigail Frymann Rouchthis week, he confessed to a soft spot for St Francis: “I’ve learned with time that more important than petition is gratitude and adoration. And he exemplifies that beautifully.”
Tomorrow, the writer and journalist (and regular Tablet interviewer) Peter Stanford will discuss “The Undisclosed Country: Heaven” in a webinar with the writer Ann Wroe and our editor Brendan Walsh.
“They plan to delve into the concepts of heaven supplied by theologians, artists, writers, psychologists, priests, historians and people from all religions and walks of life. As Peter says: “While images of hell are firmly fixed in the human psyche, no parallel standard vision exists for heaven either within the Christian Church or more widely in the world’s various religious traditions.”
The healing of the blind beggar Bartimeus in Mark’s gospel makes for an uncomfortable comparison with the disciples’ request for positions of power a little earlier.
“Whereas James and John had asked him in last week’s gospel for glory, blind Bartimaeus asks him for sight. The contrast between his humility and their arrogance couldn’t be clearer,” writes Alban McCoy OFM Conv in his sermon for the twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
As Jesus makes clear, it is faith that affords Bartimeus this insight – a faith based “in trusting in God’s unconditional love for us, trusting that nothing we can do or that can happen to us, especially our death, can ever stop God loving us”. Belief in God is belief not in the referent for the word “God”, but in a love that will never fail.
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Bess Twiston Davies