Church "on a pause"

Catholic bishops gathered in Rome are trying to protect their church from a split, generated by the inability to clearly respond to the challenges of time

In an extremely preheated information atmosphere, it was opened on the evening of October 4 in the Vatican of the General Assembly of the Synod of the Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. It will last 25 days, but the Catholic media already call the Assembly the “third Vatican Cathedral” (the last Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church-the second Vatican-was going to the distant 1960s)-due to the scale of the tasks and challenges that the largest Christian denomination encountered.

For the first time in almost 80 years in the center of Europe, a large -scale military conflict is blazing - and world Christianity can not do anything about it. From the inside, Catholicism is corroded by the struggle of conservatives and liberals, in the core of which “gender problems”: the church status of LGBT and the hierarchical rights of women. In this area, Protestants who recognize same -sex marriages and female priesthood set the tone. The Catholic Church is looking for a “middle path”, considering liberal humanism to some extent and his brainchild, but he cannot find it yet.

Small Cathedral with a great task

“Synod” is a Greek word that usually translates as “cathedral”. But in the system of Catholic law, the “Cathedral” itself is the concept of a higher, exclusive order; Cathedrals are rarely convened and last for several years. The Synod is a kind of small cathedral, the right to vote on which the elected bishops representing national Catholic churches or regional associations of such churches have. According to Paul VI, the General Synod gathers, led by dad once every three years, and his powers stem from the powers of the pope, to which the members of the Synod only help to find the solution to certain problems.

The Assembly in the Vatican is preceded by the “Synodal Way” - when the same problems are discussed at the level of parishes, dioceses and continents. Dad, as it were, initiates a general church sociological survey, the results of which summarizes with the elected bishops.

In anticipation of the current Synod, Catholics around the world reflected on the expansion of the service of women in the church, the possibility of canceling celibacy (celibacy) for the clergy, LGBT rights and the spread of abortion.

In the current Synod, 464 people participate - not only bishops, but also priests, monks and laity, among whom (for the first time in the history of Catholicism!) 54 women. True, they do not have the right of a decisive voice. The Russian Federation is represented by the head of the National Conference of the Catholic Bishops and the Diocese of the Diocese in Moscow by Archbishop Paolo Patsci and the head of the youth service of this diocan Oksana Pimenov.

The discovery of the Synod was preceded by an ecumenical prayer, which, in particular, arrived Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew and Jerusalem Patriarch Feofil. The latter had a personal audience with the pope, after which he announced his intention to “make a decisive contribution” to the termination of hostilities in Ukraine. This statement could be considered “protocol”, if it weren’t for Theophilus as almost the main ally of the Moscow Patriarchate in world Orthodoxy. From the side of circles close to Patriarch Kirill, the statement of the Jerusalem Primate caused indignation.

Opening the Synod, Francis peculiarly prevailing the “gender theme” so important for him: he called for entrusting the Church of the Holy Spirit, calling him the “maternal principle”. Another pontiff surprised the audience with the recognition that "the church took a pause ... This is the suspension of the whole church."

The opponents of Francis heard in this recognition of the inability to respond to the most painful challenges-military-political and moral-ethical.

The Western Catholic world (and even more Ukrainian Catholics) has not yet come to its senses from the annoying confessions of the pontiff in love for the Russian people and Russian culture. The current synod began with the expression of sympathy for the suffering of the Ukrainian people, similar to the suffering of Christian martyrs.

Catholic Catholics also “explode the brain” of the pope’s calls to include LGBT people in church life, his attempts to ask for forgiveness from gays and achieve the right to adopt children with single-sex parents.

On the eve of the Synod, Francis even called for blessing the same -sex couples, as the church “blesses all sinners”, but at the same time not to recognize their marriages and not to equate them to a traditional family. Vatican experts explain the “oddities” of Francis to his Jesuit school, multiplied by the Latin American background.

In the twentieth century, Catholic thought underwent a bizarre evolution in Latin America, merging with leftist rhetoric and giving rise to "theology of liberation." The future Pope Francis, being the head of the Argentina church, of course, was affected by this process.

Endless "dubia"

Papa’s statements give rise to “temptation” in the Catholic environment, which were testified by the cardinals, who sent their “doubts” (“dubia”) on the eve of the Synod in the name of Francis. The dad hardly satisfied the applicants (for example, speaking of the female priesthood, Francis assured that the teachings of the church on this issue "have not yet been developed").

Trying not to annoy both sides (conservatives and liberals), Francis actually formulates his thoughts so that both are annoyed.

However, conservative cardinals constantly emphasize that they will not go to break with Rome due to the “liberalism” of the current dad. Liberal hierarchs are expressed in a completely different way, the citabel of which was the conference of the Catholic bishops of Germany, led by Bishop George Betzing, in an ultimatum form to achieve the ordination of homosexuals in the Holy San. In March of this year, in the framework of the Synodal Way in Germany, Betzing warned that German bishops would not obey the Vatican in matters related to the restriction of the rights of LGBT people in the church. When voting, his position was supported by 38 German bishops and only 9 opposed. Moreover, from March 2026, the Catholic Church of Germany will officially begin to bless homosexual alliances, despite the direct ban on the Vatican congregation of the creed.

The main conservative in the Catholic Church of Germany remains the 75-year-old Bavarian Cardinal Gerhard Muller. In an interview on the opening of the Synod in Rome, he agreed to call Francis an instrument in the hands of anti -church forces building a “new world order”.

The lips of the pope, the cardinal believes, these forces are introduced to the church “Anti -Christian narratives ... of the concerns and civilization of death”, the brightest manifestation of which he considers transgender, surgery to change the floor.

The passions that boil around the current Synod were commented by the “new” head of the World Union of Old Believers Leonid Sevastyanov , who talked with Francis in Rome on September 25 for two hours. “Pope admitted that the problem of homosexual unions is associated with German bishops that require their implementation,” said Sevastyanov. - Dad decided to give this problem to the Holy Spirit, which acts through the synod. And the synod is not a parliament, it does not create blocks and fractions, but everything solves unanimity. ” Francis opens against the “sacralization of homosexuality on the contrary” - that is, the perception of homosexual manifestations as “special sin”, which the church should not accept and bless. “If you bless other sinners, then you cannot distinguish these in a special category,” Leonid Sevastyanov describes the position of the pope. - What is the best heterosexual connection for the sake of childbearing? Both that and the other is sin. ”

Synod is an attempt to avoid the split of the Catholic Church, when the conflicting parties try to make responsibility for the danger of such a split.

... The current synod is not the final of the process of compromise searches, which will avoid a split. Bishops will again gather in Rome next year, and the dad plans to sign the final document based on the results of their discussions only in 2025.

Time is the best doctor, and dad hopes that tightening the process in time will help to cool passions.

And it is impossible to find a rational way out of the situation in which the Catholic Church was impossible. Following the Ajornento strategy (compliance with the spirit of the times), proclaimed by the second Vatican Cathedral, it cannot but adapt to modern realities in the field of human rights. But the unconditional acceptance of these realities threatens the loss of Catholic identity and the merger with the world of Protestantism.