Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

This year, Catholic conservatives are ready for Pope Francis

His Synod on the Family may not be the big reforming step he expects

Pope Francis’s three-week Synod on the Family began on Sunday. Most of the 279 ‘Synod Fathers’ are senior bishops, many of them cardinals. They have no authority to change any aspect of Catholic teaching or pastoral practice. They are discussing the ‘hot button’ issues of communion for the divorced and remarried and the spiritual care of gay Catholics — but, once the meeting is over, power will rest entirely in the hands of the Pope.

Conservative Catholics aren’t happy. Last year, at a preparatory ‘extraordinary’ synod, officials hand-picked by Francis announced in the middle of the proceedings that the Fathers favoured a more relaxed approach to gay relationships and second marriages. Senior cardinals exploded with rage, because most Fathers favoured no such thing. The liberal synod organisers — Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary general of the synod, and Archbishop Bruno Forte, its ‘special secretary’ — were forced to drop their claims. The whole thing was a car crash and obviously their fault.

Yet Francis stuck by them. As a result, once again the synod working papers are stuffed with sociological waffle. Worse, Baldisseri and Forte are sitting on the commission that will draft the final report that goes to the Pope. This time round, however, the conservatives are alert to the dangers. On Monday morning they struck first.

Cardinal Péter Erdö is Primate of Hungary and a much-admired canon lawyer who received his red hat at the age of 51. He’s still only 63. As ‘general relator’ of the 2014 and 2015 synods, it has been his job to deliver an opening address setting out their goals. Though emollient in manner, he is unquestionably a conservative — but, last year, his speech was full of liberal platitudes. What went wrong? The journalist Edward Pentin claims in his book The Rigging of a Vatican Synod? that Erdö had his arm twisted by Baldisseri, who forced him to rewrite his 2014 address to make it more Francis-friendly.

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