Vatican City, Oct 16, 2014 / 02:28 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After the synod’s small groups released their reports Thursday asking for a substantial rewriting of the meeting's mid-term report, the Vatican has said the synod's final report will be prepared, and voted upon on Saturday morning. Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See press office, added that it is unlikely the synod's final relatio will be released Saturday evening. “We are in a work in progress, and I would approach step by step toward Saturday. Given the several requests for amendments, I find it difficult (to suppose) that Saturday evening there will be a polished text ready for publication,” Fr. Lombardi said Oct. 16. Unlike previous synods, the synod fathers will not vote on a series of proposals that the Pope will take in consideration for the following post-synodal apostolic exhortation, but will vote rather on a comprehensive text that will serve as the basis for discussion and preparation for 2015 synod, also on the family. Beyond Cardinal Peter Erdo and Archbishop Bruno Forte, General Rapporteur and Special Secretary of the Synod, and Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, Secretary General of the Synod, the Pope had appointed a commission of six prelates to help in drafting the final document. Yesterday, Pope Francis enlarged that commission, adding Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban and Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne. “Since someone noted that there were no representatives from Africa in the commission, the commission has been enlarged in order to include representatives of all the five continents,” Fr. Lombardi commented. He also announced the release of the texts of the ten reports of the small groups, and recounted that “there had been an explicit discussion within the synod about whether to make these relations public or not.” According to one of the synod fathers, Cardinal Baldisseri said that the relations were not going to be published, thus arousing the lively reaction of the assembly. “Many bishops stood, and someone also banged their fist on the table. Cardinal Baldisseri said he wanted to listen to everyone, and he found that the majority of the synod fathers wanted the document to be published,” the source maintained. “This way, there will not be so much ground to change or bias our discussion in the final report,” he maintained. Glancing over the ten reports issued by the small groups, the need to substantially rewrite the mid-term report emerges. There are three common and primary concerns of the synod fathers: the absence in the text of any reference to the Gospel of the Family, and more widely to Gospel references; the need to underscore and highlight positive examples of Christian families; and the request to take out, or at least clarify, the principle of graduality, which may lead to confusion. “Gradualness should not make insipid the challenge of the Gospel to conversion, to ‘go and sin no more’, as Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery,” reads the report of the third English-speaking small group, chaired by Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville. “The aim of recognizing gradualness should be to draw people closer to Christ.” “Truth and mercy are not mutually exclusive terms, and in proclaiming truth we also proclaim the most profound mercy – that of reconciliation and unity with God; on the other hand, it is in mercy that we find truth,” the group added. Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, coordinator of one of the French-speaking small groups, tried to balance the different positions while speaking with journalists during a media briefing. “If some synod fathers say: ‘Be careful, because we mustn't forget doctrine’, on the other hand there is also a need for the accompaniment of many situations, those situations the Pope refers to as a field hospital.” As many of the synod fathers have lamented the absence of the word “sin” from the mid-term report, Cardinal Schoenborn clarified that “the discussions have also dealt with Confession.” For the Archbishop of Vienna, it is “evident there are tensions in the synod, there are different aspects to take in consideration: on one side, the doctrine, the clear Word of the Gospel; on the other, Jesus acting with mercy. How to join these two sides is the permanent challenge of the Church and pastors.” These tensions are proven by the some 600 requests for modification presented in the morning before the reading of the relations of the small groups. All remaining focus is on the synod’s report, which is to be voted on Saturday morning. “If the new report does mirror the synod fathers' remarks, it is possible that the text will be dismissed by the assembly,” one of the synod fathers commented to CNA. Read more

Vatican City, Oct 16, 2014 / 04:07 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In his mass on Thursday Pope Francis encouraged attendees to pray to God by praising him, saying that remembering the good he has done, particularly how he created us in love, helps us to know how... Read more

Vatican City, Oct 16, 2014 / 04:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Synod on the Family has provided an opportunity for people to bring up issues concerning marriage and family life facing Catholics around the world, but as one auditor has noted, not all of those issues are the same. Selim and Rita El Khoury, spouses who are coordinators of the Pastoral Office of Marriage and Family in the Maronite Patriarchate in Lebanon, had the opportunity to participate as auditors in the synod, and said that although many issues are being discussed, not all of them apply to Catholics worldwide. For example, family issues plaguing Catholics in Africa such as polygamy, are not necessarily the same issues facing Catholics in Asia. “What I see generally (is that) each continent has its own problems … but there are some general for all and there are specific problems,” Selim El Khoury told CNA Oct. 9. “What is good is the Pope is here everyday listening to all and we have a really interesting debate; everybody is giving his ideas.” In Lebanon, divorce and remarriage is not as prominent as it is in Europe and North America, so there is less focus on care for those types of situations. The nuclear family remains strong there, with parents and children living under the same roof even once the children become adults, El Khoury said. However, the slow economic environment in Lebanon has created a disruption in family life by causing many men to leave their families in search of work, sometimes taking them far from home. El Khoury's office aims to reconcile families when this problem first arises, rather than intervening only when one spouse seeks an annulment, or leaves the Maronite Church – an Eastern Catholic Church – for the Syriac Orthodox Church in order to get a divorce. “We are (providing) formation for couples so that they can seek help from the priest in the parish to try to solve the problems because they are getting so big and going to the tribunal,” he said. The father of three said his children were able to join him and his wife of 25 years for a picture with the Holy Father. “Our children were here to take photos with the Pope, and it was really something marvelous.” At the start of the synod, Pope Francis took the opportunity to meet with nuncios from the Middle East to discuss the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities by the Islamic State, a militant Sunni Islamist caliphate. “As you know, we in the Middle East are facing a really big danger regarding our existence there, especially (those who live in) Syria and Iraq,” El Khoury said.   Although the threat from the Islamic State is not as immediate in his country as it is in other areas of the Middle East, he said that Christians in Lebanon are still concerned. “We are Maronites: we stick to our homeland and we will never leave it.” After the synod the Holy Father has planned to hold a consistory with Middle Eastern nuncios to further discuss issues facing Christians there. El Khoury hopes that they will use that time to pray for the persecuted, and draft a letter to the United Nations.   “The United Nations has to move more quickly,” he said, “not to give food for the people who left their home, but to help them regain their home as soon as possible.”   Read more

Vatican City, Oct 15, 2014 / 01:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As the synod fathers' small groups continue to meet, it seems increasingly clear that the Synod of Bishops' concluding document, the 'relatio synodi', will be substantially different than the midterm relatio which was released Monday. The relatio synodi is called to mirror the concerns and proposals raised during the small group discussions this week, in which bishops have been grouped according to language. After the issuance of the midterm report, the synod fathers raised their concern in 41 free interventions, which highlighted the absence of the word sin, the absence of the Gospel of Family, and some perhaps naive sentences of the document which could be subject to misinterpretation. “The issue at stake is whether the Catholic Church is going to shape the world with its teaching, the truth it reveals, or if it is going to be shaped by the world,” Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan, who is president of the Polish bishops' conference, shared with CNA Oct. 15. Archbishop Zbignev Stankevics of Riga, the Latvian capital, echoed Archbishop Gadecki's words in an Oct. 14 interview with Vatican Radio. “Currently, the family is under a very strong ideological attack. The main task of the synod fathers is not to make a poorly-defined opening, but to apply, once again for today’s situation, the teaching of the Church,” Archbishop Stankevics said. He then added that “certainly, we should meet the contemporary challenges as much as is possible; but without losing our Catholic identity, and without renouncing the truth about marriage.” The small groups are having lively discussions about the issues at stake, though Cardinal Lluis Martinez Sistach of Barcelona and Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville both downplayed the degree of this liveliness in a briefing with journalists on Wednesday. “There is a climate of fraternity and pastoral care. All of our amendments have been voted by a unanimity of participants,” Cardinal Martinez said Oct. 15. Archbishop Kurtz said that three suggestions have emerged from the discussion of his small group: emphasizing the positive value of Christian families; ensuring the Church's words are welcoming and heartfelt; and guaranteeing that pastoral care is rooted in the beauty of Church teaching and of scripture. In an chat with CNA held under condition of anonymity, one synod father said that his small group has “substantially re-written the introduction of the relatio,” has “cut the quote of the ‘seeds of good’, because it was out of context and could create confusion, and has asked that we place more emphasis on the positive examples of the faithful.” “The document was too clerical in our view,” the source maintained. Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, underscored in a briefing with journalists that his small group “also discussed topics which had not been properly discussed in the synod hall.” “We proposed that the processes for the declaration of nullity be free of any charge, since it must never be said that the Church is paid for a declaration of nullity: it drives the faithful to think that nullity can be obtained when it is paid for,” Archbishop Fisichella said. The archbishop also stressed that “there is little acknowledgement of the natural methods of family planning: there is almost a form of boycott to educate about natural family planning.” Also, the bishops of Africa raised their concern for some ‘missing hotspots’ in the synod’s midterm report. Bishop Nicolas Djomo Lola of Tshumbe, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, listed among the missing hotspots “the attention for the children without family because of war.” The list of proposals generated by the small groups will be given to the General Secretariat for the Synod, and then the relator of each small group will report on the outcomes of their groups. After that, there will be a free discussion, and during the afternoon the General Secretary of the Synod, the General Rapporteur, the Special Secretary, and the committee of six will meet to collect all the interventions and draft the relatio synodi. Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, a member of the committee of six, told CNA that the bishops “seem to be basically satisfied from the major outline of the midterm report,” which is “going in the right direction: it’s pastoral, it’s inviting, it’s based on our doctrine, and it is rooted in the Sacred Scriptures.” According to Cardinal Wuerl, the synod’s final report will deal with “how to make pastoral applications, how to be inviting, how to be welcoming.” The final report will collect all the issues at stake and will be voted on by the synod fathers, and then given to the Pope, who will decide whether or not to make it public. Read more