Summarizing the work of the continuing meeting, known as a synod, the document acknowledges bluntly that the strict application of church doctrine is no longer enough to support people in their quest for God.
“It is necessary to accept people in their concrete being, to know how to support their search, to encourage the wish for God and the will to feel fully part of the Church, also on the part of those who have experienced failure or find themselves in the most diverse situations,” states the document, released Monday morning.
“This requires that the doctrine of the faith, the basic content of which should be made increasingly better known, be proposed alongside with mercy,” it continues. . . .
Monday’s document also appears to reflect a move among the prelates from legal exactness in adherence to church teaching to graduality, a theological notion that people can grow in their holiness or in their adherence to church teaching over time.
Devoting a whole subsection of the 12-page document to the subject, it states: “Jesus looked upon the women and the men he met with love and tenderness, accompanying their steps with patience and mercy, in proclaiming the demands of the Kingdom of God.”
“In considering the principle of gradualness in the divine salvific plan, one asks what possibilities are given to married couples who experience the failure of their marriage, or rather how it is possible to offer them Christ’s help through the ministry of the Church,” the document continues later.
Answering that question, it turns to the Second Vatican Council document Lumen Gentium, saying that document provides a “hermeneutic key” when it states that “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of [the church’s] visible structure.”
“The doctrine of levels of communion, formulated by Vatican Council II, confirms the vision of a structured way of participating in the Mysterium Ecclesiae by baptized persons,” the document continues.
“Realizing the need, therefore, for spiritual discernment with regard to cohabitation, civil marriages and divorced and remarried persons, it is the task of the Church to recognize those seeds of the Word that have spread beyond its visible and sacramental boundaries,” it continues.
The document also calls for the church to have a conversion in the way it teaches about the family, referencing Jesus’ parable in the Gospel of Matthew of a sower who drops his seed in both rocky and fertile ground.
“In the light of the parable of the sower, our task is to cooperate in the sowing: the rest is God’s work,” it states.
It also states that church must not be theoretical and must address real-world problems.
“What is required is a missionary conversion: it is necessary not to stop at an announcement that is merely theoretical and has nothing to do with people’s real problems,” states the document.
Addressing “wounded families” — specifically, couples that are separated, divorced, or divorced and remarried — the document says, “what rang out clearly in the Synod was the necessity for courageous pastoral choices.”
“The Synodal Fathers … felt the urgent need for new pastoral paths, that begin with the effective reality of familial fragilities, recognizing that they, more often than not, are more ‘endured’ than freely chosen,” states the document.
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