So this, I realized as I watched, was still a church of surprises. Vatican II lived on. A weight accumulated over thirty-five years dropped from from my shoulders.
Process, papacy, and accompaniment: It may not be too early to wonder how Pope Francis's handling of the Synod on the Family fared on these three considerations.
Francis has introduced the possibility that the spotlight of moral judgment can can be shone back on those who make the judgments, and on their very act of judging.
John Henry Newman once said of the laity that the church would look foolish without them, and from the beginning the synod did indeed look foolish without us.
Aside from restatements of the teaching on sexual morality, there were glimpses of how a spirituality of discernment could infuse the church in its mission of mercy.
Engagement rather than denunciation marked the synod’s formal pronouncements, a pastoral style deeply rooted in Vatican II, and embodied in everything Francis does.
Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics was debated, and dismissed, at Vatican II. Fifty years later, the debate continues, but with a difference.
Francis knows there's no such thing as a perfect family. Yet he also knows it's within families where we learn what it means to be responsible for one another.
The bishops and the church as a whole are about to take an honest look at the gap between that which cannot be changed and that which can and sometimes ought to be.
Secular law can help us grapple with questions about when wrongdoing begins, when it ends, and how people can put it behind them and move on with their lives.
The starting point for the unraveling of Catholic confidence in the church’s sexual ethics is contraception. Shouldn't the next synod finally meet the issue head-on?
Laws that once upheld the "traditional views" of marriage social conservatives advocate were dismantled piece by piece because they inflicted other moral costs.
The synod comes at a time when a huge gulf has opened up between the teaching of the church on sex, marriage, and the family and the practice of many Catholics.
