Sir, – Perhaps Dr Nicola Brady should be congratulated on the publication of what she terms the national synthesis of the Catholic Church in Ireland (“National synthesis is an opportunity for reflection, dialogue and action by Irish church”, Rite & Reason, August 15th). No doubt the publication serves the purposes of the parameters set out for it some time ago.
Dr Brady identifies the core of the proposed synodal process. It is that of discerning the requirements the Catholic God seeks from Catholics now. She is clear that none of us who have participated can quite know what shape the process will take to achieve that objective down the line. She lays great store on a pattern of events entailing considerable financial resources, meetings, surveys, documents, recurrent syntheses, more meetings, etc, together with prayer. And she is wisely promising nothing. She is actually not promising an authority within the church ratified “from below”.
Perhaps she declines such promises on foot of observing events elsewhere in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis operates his ministry in a manner at odds with synodality. The synodal path of the Catholic Church in Germany seems on the brink of creating new structures of governance and changes of Catholic doctrine. An unnamed source in the Vatican has told them they cannot do so in a unilateral fashion independent of the entire church.
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich has led the participants in his Luxemburg diocesan synod on synodality (the usual minority of laity) to call for a change in church teaching on marriage and the abolition of mandatory priestly celibacy. Since Cardinal Hollerich heads the global church synodal process, perhaps some of the German doctrinal decisions are merely waiting in the wings for total ecclesial approval.
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Dr Brady’s article is in a way a waiting exercise, thinking and talking and praying about Catholicism. The United States hierarchy has, in contrast, invited the Catholics there to actually try it out in the here and now. It has launched a three-year project seeking the view of their God through renewed interaction with the source and summit of Catholicism, known therein as the Eucharist, the Sacrifice of the Mass.
How, in Dr Brady’s view, would the same initiative impact on future published Irish synodal syntheses? – Yours, etc,
NEIL BRAY,
Cappamore,
Co Limerick.