Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Vatican Synod on the Family is over and the conservatives have won

This afternoon the Vatican Synod on the Family amended and approved the final document summing up three weeks of chaotic and sometimes poisonous debate – much of it focussing on whether divorced and remarried people should be allowed to receive communion.

The majority view of the Synod Fathers is that they don’t want the rules changed. They especially don’t want one rule to apply in, say, Germany and another in Tanzania. Pope Francis has just given a cautiously worded (but also, alas, rather waffly) address in which he acknowledges as much:

… we have also seen that what seems normal for a bishop on one continent, is considered strange and almost scandalous for a bishop from another; what is considered a violation of a right in one society is an evident and inviolable rule in another; what for some is freedom of conscience is for others simply confusion.

Significantly, the Fathers didn’t back a ‘solution’ suggested by liberal cardinals, whereby divorced and remarried Catholics could consult their consciences and their confessors over whether they should follow the rules.

This was the liberal Plan B, hastily put together after it became clear at the beginning of the Synod that there was no chance that Cardinal Walter Kasper’s radical plan to scrap the communion ban would be voted through.

Please don’t ask me to explain Plan B in detail. Liberal journalists got very excited about this supposed ‘breakthrough’, associated with the German-speaking cardinals Marx and Schönborn, plus Archbishop Cupich of Chicago. But they didn’t manage to tell us how it would work in practice, given that the Synod Fathers are sticking by St John Paul II’s ruling that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics can’t receive the sacrament and that’s that.

The final report of the Synod encourages pastors to ‘accompany’ divorced and remarried Catholics as they ‘discern’ their culpability – on a case-by-case basis, as not every divorced Catholic is equally guilty (very true, but a point already made by St John Paul).

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