Rome Newsroom, Jul 7, 2023 / 06:42 am (CNA).
The Vatican published Friday the full list of participants who will take part in the upcoming Synod on Synodality assembly in October.
Nearly a third of the 364 voting delegates in the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops were chosen directly by Pope Francis, including the American Jesuit Father James Martin, a frequent commentator on LGBTQ outreach; former prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, and Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago.
For the first time, laypeople will not only participate in the Synod of Bishops assembly, they also will be full members, with the ability to vote on a final document at the end of the process in October 2024.
Pope Francis chose 120 delegates including Americans Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, and Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego. You can read the Vatican’s full list of participants here.
In addition to the American prelates chosen by Pope Francis, the U.S. bishops’ conference has elected five members to attend the synod assembly: Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan of New York; Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas; Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota; Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, and Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference.
During the nearly monthlong Vatican assembly, the delegates will discuss questions posed in the recently released Instrumentum laboris, which covers such hot-button topics as women deacons, priestly celibacy, LGBTQ outreach, and highlights a desire for new institutional bodies to allow for greater participation in decision-making by the “People of God.”
The 50-page text also outlines a “synodal method” of spirituality focused on listening to the Holy Spirit and “discerning the signs of the times” and calls for new formation programs to train candidates for ordained ministry “in a synodal style and mentality.”
German bishops participating in the assembly include German Bishops Conference (DBK) president Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, Bishop Franz-Joseph Overbeck of Essen, and Bishop Bertram Johannes Meier of Augsburg, who were selected as DBK representatives, and papal picks Bishop Felix Genn of Münster and Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau, as well as Cardinal Mueller. Oster is one of four German bishops who recently voted to block funding the next stage of the controversial German synodal reform process.
More than 50 women will be participating as voting members in the synod assembly scheduled for Oct. 4-29 at the Vatican. Among them is Nicaraguan Sister Xiskya Valladares, known as the tweeting nun, who is a professor and journalist based in Spain and is a cofounder of iMision, an organization seeking to support the presence of the Church in the digital world.
Among the lay delegates selected by the pope are Americans Cynthia Bailey Manns, the director of adult learning at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Wyatt Olivas, a young adult musician from Cheyenne, Wyoming. The lay delegates from Europe include Enrique Alarcón Garcia, president of the Spain-based Christian Fraternity of Persons with Disabilities.
Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, SJ, and Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga will be among the cardinals nominated by the pope to attend the synod assembly. Cardinal Charles Muang Bo of Yangon, Bishop Stephen Chow of Hong Kong, Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney will also participate.
Irish-American Cardinal Kevin Farrell will participate as a delegate from the Roman Curia and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark is automatically a delegate as an ordinary member of the synod council.
Jesuit Superior General Arturo Sosa and Sister Elizabeth Mary Davis, R.S.M. are among the delegates representing religious orders.
Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, a prominent British theologian who has drawn criticism by some for his statements on homosexuality, is listed as a spiritual assistant, a non-voting position in the Synod on Synodality. Radcliffe, who served as master of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001, will also lead a three-day retreat for all of the synod participants ahead of the assembly.
In a change from recent synods, Pope Francis has broken the general assembly into two sessions, one to be held in October 2023 and the second in October 2024.
According to Cardinal Mario Grech, the head of the Vatican’s synod office, conclusions will be reached only after the second session in 2024. At the end of the first session this year, the synod leadership will propose to participants some ideas for what to do in between the two sessions.
The Catholic Church’s Synod on Synodality has been underway since October 2021. At the end of the process in 2024, synod assembly participants will vote on an advisory final document that will be presented to the pope, who can decide, if he wishes, to adopt the text as a papal document or to write his own at the conclusion of the synod.
Pope Francis has said that he sees the Holy Spirit as “the heart of synodality.”
“The synod now taking place is — and should be — a journey in accordance with the Spirit, not a parliament for demanding rights and claiming needs in accordance with the agenda of the world, nor an occasion for following wherever the wind is blowing, but the opportunity to be docile to the breath of the Holy Spirit,” the pope said.
Jonathan Liedl of the National Catholic Register, Andrea Gagliarducci of CNA, AC Wimmer of CNA Deutsch, EWTN Rome correspondent Rudolf Gehrig, and freelance writer Rachel Thomas contributed to this story.
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Pope Francis has said that he sees the Holy Spirit as “the heart of synodality.”
Since when did the Holy Spirit become visible?
Ever since he redefined the role of the Holy Spirit. In his process theology, God is in the process of “learning from His creation.” This means Francis needs to give classroom instructions to each member of the Trinity as well in their new roles in the Synodal Church. The Holy Spirit has to get in line like everybeing else.
The Sensus Fidelium or the Non-Sensus Fidelium? One wonders.
In my mind, anything that comes out of this Sinod on Sinadoltry is DOA.
Am worried that poor Cardinal Müller might be synodaled to death. The other Cardinals should be OK since they have marched in Synodal Pride Parades.
We read: “During the nearly monthlong Vatican assembly, the delegates will discuss […] such hot-button topics as women deacons, priestly celibacy, LGBTQ outreach, and highlights a desire for new institutional bodies to allow for greater participation in decision-making by the “People of God.”
On the first three listed topics:
FIRST, on female ordinations, some of the variously defined “People of God” recall the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994) where we read:
“Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (n. 4). https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html
Recalling, also, that this Letter was promulgated shortly after the Anglican ecclesial communion (not Church) ordained the first of some now twenty oxymoronic female bishops (1989). Anglicans, now?
SECOND, on priestly celibacy, this discipline sustains an irreducible difference. Something about total commitment, as should also be sustained for the sacrament of marriage, despite the offramps simultaneously cobbled into Amoris Laetitia (Chapter 8).
THIRD, on LGBTQ outreach, regarding the undocumented “sociological and scientific foundations” announced by Cardinal Hollerich, the synod should demand that he and the synod fully include, for example, the causative factors of absentee or abusive fathers, and a porn culture of getting locked-in by experimental sex. There is no gay gene, and yet the LGBTQ demographic multiplies without physical procreation. A miracle!
Do the math, and refuse to rolled along as an enabler and de facto accomplice. As for creative attention to “concrete cases,” each synodal member, and all of us, might personally consider what Jesus Christ had to say about the creative use of millstones (Luke 17:2).
We also read: “At the end of the first session this year [2023], the synod leadership will propose to participants some ideas for what to do in between the two sessions.”
Marvelous idea, and with a precedent, too. Synodism, itself, appeared as such an add-on at the end of the Synod on Young People (2018), not from the participants but from the “leadership.”
Butt, there’s cause for hope….Unconfirmed rumor has it that synodese retreat-master Fr. Radcliffe, himself, will assume a “leadership” role–for the purpose of recommending that Courage International (couragerc.org) should be acknowledged during the exciting period of discernment and then prominently placed on the action-item agenda for 2024! Truly, the Holy Spirit is chock full of surprises!
Too, in a 20-year pulse-check of the Council, and with the purpose of restraining confusion and worse, the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops recommended partly that “a deeper knowledge and reception of the Council […] can be attained above all through a new diffusion of the documents themselves.” Good summertime reading, even if seventy years overdue, especially (another of several “suggestions”) the Constitution Lumen Gentium on “collegiality,” Chapter 3 (together with the Explanatory Note immunizing against inadvertent but exploitable ambiguity).
You clearly follow Church matters closely. On your third issue, has anyone at any time, in any forum, addressed the matter of bisexuality? What possible “lifestyle” rationale justification can it have other than promiscuity. What phony rationale might some twisted theology be employed to explain it?
What a relief! I feel much better about the proceedings knowing that James Martin and Blase Cupich will be attending 🙄.
Make that 2 of us. If this is what we were searching for we could become Episcopalians. This group often called the catholic church in English is where we should be. They have women bishops. It is quite startling to see a woman processing down the aisle in a cope and miter. We will take the really old-time religion, confession. fasting et al.
I feel reassured that 5 of the 125 US conferees were seected by the US bishops.
The list is filled with liberal “catholics”, Social Justice (Socialist) Catholics and those who do not hold to the Catechism of the Church and would prefer to use the Bible out of context. If any member of the laity who is “up to speed” in their catechesis is expecting anything but more fodder for changing the Church that Jesus Christ began with Peter and the Apostles (Apostolic Church)…. dont! This will prove to be a further undoing of our Catholic Church as we know it and lead to further efforts at change that are not just schismatic in nature but self-destroying… Note, the Catholic Church that of Jesus Christ as HEAD will survive albeit much smaller, much stronger and in Truth! Pray for our Pope and all those who are not following the Faith.
The gates of hell shall not prevail!!!!!!!
The list shows a fine mixture of the young and the young at heart. The Synod on Synodality in October will be a long affair. Wishing the participants strength and stamina. God bless.
“Get thee behind me Satan…..
The only surprise is that Francis didn’t include Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. And, as long as he’s including non-Catholics, why not Bill and Hillary? The Synod to Destroy the Catholic Church is absolutely on track with these new appointments.
I find myself approaching the conclusion that the Catholic Christianity into which I was baptized eighty-five years ago is about to self-destruct in the current complex efforts to orchestrate a strange new aura of infallibility for what I fear to be the current Pope’s vision of a globalist “Synod-on-Synodality”-type of Church in which the timeless truths of the Catholic Faith are scrapped in favor of times-conscious, trendy untruths, created in the chaos of fickle human social, political, and religious preferences—turning God into an image and likeness of—Us !
It is regrettable that so many of the persons named do not identify with the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus and his Apostles, but instead preach what St. Paul called “another Gospel.”
With that observation in mind, my prayer is that the “Synod-about-the-other-gospel” is used by The Holy Trinity to confound the aims of those orchestrating it.
And I add that I identify the voice of the Good Shepherd in men who the Pontiff Francis has publicly voiced contempt for, such as Cardinal Mueller.
Perhaps Archbishop Fernandez can read his poems to the teens invited to vote? And if things get contentious, thank goodness Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, will be there to spiritually comfort the hurt feelings of papal guests. Ah, the progress from synodaling is hard work in Rome.
The Synod boils down to one thing and one thing only. Synodal Catholics not only wanting their crimes against humanity to be validated but their demand that God shut up and accept His role and His opinions as permanently subordinate to whatever crimes against humanity Synodal Catholics desire to perform in the future.
Edward: “God”? What God? The only god proclaimed by this Sinod is the glorified god of the self-god, the ego-god, the god of sin.