Australian archbishop: Synod on Synodality cannot ‘reinvent the Catholic faith’

 

Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP, speaks to EWTN News in Rome on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. / Credit: EWTN News

Vatican City, Oct 16, 2024 / 10:20 am (CNA).

We cannot “reinvent the Catholic faith” or “teach a different Catholicism in different countries,” Australian Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP, of Sydney and a delegate at the Synod on Synodality said in an interview this week.

As the synodal assembly debates part 3 of the Instrumentum Laboris on “places,” the bishops and laypeople are considering questions such as the future of synodality and the role and authority of national bishops’ conferences, the archbishop told “EWTN News Nightly” on Oct. 15 in an interview to be broadcast Friday.

Should bishops’ conferences “have the authority to teach a different Catholicism in different countries or to decide a different liturgy in different countries or different Mass for different countries? Do they bring their own local culture to questions in the area of morals, for instance?” Fisher told “EWTN News Nightly” Associate Producer Bénédicte Cedergren.

“Could we, for instance, envision a Church where you have ordination of women in some countries but not in other countries, or you have same-sex marriages in some countries but not in other countries, or you have an Arian Christology in some countries and a Nicene Christology in others?” he continued. “You might guess, I think no.”

The Dominican archbishop leads one of Australia’s largest archdioceses by number of Catholics. Sydney serves around 590,000 Catholics and has a population of nearly 5.3 million people.

As one of 15 bishops on the ordinary council of the Synod of Bishops for the Synod on Synodality, Fisher attended the first session of the synodal assembly in October 2023 and is back in Rome this month for the second session.

After three years of consultations at the local and universal level, at the end of this month the Catholic Church will conclude a process of discernment about how to become more synodal and more missionary.

Fisher told “EWTN News Nightly” he is “very concerned” that Catholics “hold on to the deposit of faith, the apostolic tradition, that we don’t imagine, in the vanity of our age, that we are going to reinvent the Catholic faith or the Catholic Church.”

“In fact, this is a tremendous treasure that we’ve received from generation after generation before us, all the way back to Our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles. And we are here to transmit that faithfully to the next generations after us,” he said.

The archbishop acknowledged that our understanding of the deposit of faith has developed over time and will continue to develop, and added that he thinks it is an exciting feature of the Church that “we’ve managed to have a great variety of cultures and different ways of praying and different ways of evangelizing, and yet we hold together as one in Christ.”

“But it is the one faith, and it’s important to me, coming from the peripheries of the Church in Australia, about as far away as you can be from Rome in the world,” he said, that “it’s the one Church, it’s the one faith and we want to keep celebrating that even amidst our cultural diversity.”

Changes being debated

Fisher said one of the important questions the synod is debating this week is what is “the scope and what are the limits of the local and the cultural” in the universal Catholic Church.

The Synod on Synodality is discussing the third and final part of the Instrumentum Laboris, or working document, Oct. 15–18. The last week of the gathering, which ends Oct. 27, will be dedicated to drafting and revising the final document.

In paragraph 91 of the third part, the document notes that there are structures such as parish councils, deaneries, and dioceses already regulated in canon law that “could prove to be even more suitable for giving a synodal approach a concrete form.”

“These councils can become subjects of ecclesial discernment and synodal decision-making …,” the document continues. “Therefore, this is one of the most promising areas on which to act for a swift implementation of the synodal proposals and orientations, leading to changes with an effective and rapid impact.”

A little further in the same part of the working document, it also says: “Episcopal conferences are fundamental instruments for creating links and sharing experiences between the Churches and for decentralizing governance and pastoral planning.”

“From all that has been gathered so far during this synodal process, the following proposals emerge: (a) recognition of episcopal conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming sociocultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church and favoring the appreciation of liturgical, disciplinary, theological, and spiritual expressions appropriate to different sociocultural contexts,” the text says in paragraph 97.

Interculturality in the Church

In the context of these ideas, Fisher said he thinks “we need to have the same faith, the same morals, the same Church order, and essentially the same liturgy.”

“But we do make space for the different ritual traditions in the Church and for different cultural adaptations and for different ways of evangelizing in different places,” he added.

The archbishop noted that in his Archdiocese of Sydney, for example, they have many different Catholic ritual traditions, such as the Maronites, Melkites, Chaldeans, Ukrainians, and Syro-Malabars.

“We know they bring different spiritualities … a different Mass and different prayer forms, but also often a different understanding of synodality, of the roles of bishops, of the way you choose bishops, they have different canon law and a different Church order while still being part of the one Catholic Church,” he underlined.

“And it is part of the excitement of the Church, I think, that you can go to a Maronite Mass and it’s very different, and yet you also know it’s the same thing: It’s the Lord coming to us under the elements of bread and wine, but he’s really present, his humanity and divinity, for us.”

Bénédicte Cedergren, an associate producer for “EWTN News Nightly,” contributed to this report.


If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!

Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.


About Catholic News Agency 12288 Articles
Catholic News Agency (www.catholicnewsagency.com)

5 Comments

  1. We read: “We cannot ‘reinvent the Catholic faith’ or ‘teach a different Catholicism in different countries’.”

    My, my, how very “backwardist” can we get! The archbishop almost sounds like St. Augustine who said: “We can say things differently, but we can’t say different things.” Or, even the 5th-century St. Vincent of Lerins, often cited on change by Pope Francis but who, in the same Commonitorium (c. 434), also clarified:

    “[….] the doctrine of the Christian religion should properly follow these laws of development, that is, by becoming firmer over the years, more ample in the course of time, more exalted as it advances in age.

    “In ancient times our ancestors sowed the good seed in the harvest field of the Church. It would be very wrong and unfitting if we, their descendants, were to reap, not the genuine wheat of truth but the intrusive growth of error.
    ” On the contrary, what is right and fitting is this: there should be no inconsistency between first and last, but we should reap true doctrine from the growth of true teaching, so that when, in the course of time, those first sowings yield an increase it may flourish and be tended in our day also” (Liturgy of the Hours, Friday, 27th Week in Ordinary Times).

    As for the “intrusive growth of error, this intrusion surely includes (inclusivity!) the deception that formal doctrine can be reaffirmed even while informal contradictions in practice are signaled and even “non-liturgically, informally, and spontaneously” blessed by the successors of the Apostles (Fiducia Supplicans, coupled with a few other synodally-smuggled heresies and apostasies).

  2. Wonderfully well proclaimed by dear Archbishop Anthony Fisher. Thank you!
    a) “Fisher said he thinks: ‘. . we need to have the same faith, the same morals, the same Church order, and essentially the same liturgy.’”
    b) “. . we do make space for the different ritual traditions in the Church and for different cultural adaptations and for different ways of evangelizing in different places,”

    If only our beloved archbishop had then anointed those two apposite observations with the uniting passion of Jesus Christ, as in e.g. Ephesians 3:14-19 –
    “This is what I pray, kneeling before The Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name.”
    “Out of His infinite Glory, may The Father give you the power through His Holy Spirit, for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, then planted in love & built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth & the length, the height & the depth; until knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all understanding, you are filled with the utter fullness of GOD.”

    Is this not THE purpose of The Church: the infinitely desirable good fruit of all our theologies & philosophies & ecclesiologies & liturgies; what it is that actually pleases The Father.

    This overwhalming inner conviction of the will of GOD in Christ Jesus is able to make sense of the psychological, sociological, & other material concerns being debated.

    Hopefully, this spiritual truth, understood by all who are of GOD, is preached at retreats for all the synodalista, before ever they begin their deliberations, for fear that those deliberations might be unspiritual, fleshly, fruitless, or even bear bad fruit.

    Always in the grace & mercy of The Lamb of GOD; love & blessings from marty

    • “The will of GOD in Christ Jesus . . ”

      The logical sequence is instructive for the highest Catholics, like Pope Francis & Archbishop Fisher, as well as for all of the least of us, like me.

      Is it too much to hope that all participants in the synods also follow this rule?

      John 14:15 – “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

      John 5:19 & 30 – “The Son can do nothing on His own, but only what He sees The Father doing; for whatever The Father does, The Son does likewise.” “I seek to do not My own will but the will of Him who sent Me.”

      Our New Testament with our Catechism of the Catholic Church explain God’s will for us, as given to Moses & reinforced by Christ & His Apostles:
      1. Worship the one God, revealed to us by Jesus as Father/Son/Holy Spirit.
      2. Have no other god nor idol.
      3. Never profane the Name of God; never swear oaths.
      4. Keep holy the Sabbath Day.
      5. Honor your father & mother.
      In this way we can show by our obedience that we truly love GOD.

      6. Have no part of hatred or revenge or violence against any person.
      7. Maintain sexual purity & faithfulness in thought, word, & deed.
      8. Do not steal, or rob, or defraud.
      9. Be honest in all you say & communicate.
      10. Do not covet for GOD in Christ is providing all we need.
      In this way we can show by our obedience that we truly love our neighbor.

      The Church’s GOD-given purpose is to help every Catholic to become filled with the love of Christ. That cannot happen where GOD’s commands are flouted; no matter what subtle theological, philosophical, psychological, or sociological equivocations are entertained.

      Will this synodal process confirm our Church as lovingly obedient to GOD; or as, in effect, hating GOD by its disobedience? The choice is before us as never before . . .

2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. Il Baldacchino di San Pietro – Cristianesimo Cattolico
  2. The baldacchino of St Peter’s - Voice of the Family %

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative or inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.


*