Archbishop predicts Synod won't change Church teaching. Why am I not reassured?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 07, 2015

Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Australia, tells John Allen of Crux that if the Synod of Bishops voted right now on a proposal to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion, his guess is that the vote would go about 65- 35 against the proposal. However,

• things could change, and
• under the new rules in force this year, the Synod never will vote—on this proposition or any other, and
• the archbishop suggests that if the proposition were to allow individual bishops or episcopal conferences to set their own policies, the vote would be evenly split.

So the archbishop’s estimate of the Synod’s intentions, which at first glance looked promising, turn out to be simply confusing. Are we to believe that the bishops will refuse to change the teachings of the universal Church, but allow individual bishops to dispense with those teachings on their own authority? As a practical matter, then, the universal Church would no longer have a clear teaching on the subject—or else you might say the teaching, however clear, would be honored only when the local bishop(s) wanted to honor it. Sometimes it seems that many of the bishops participating in this Synod are not ready to change doctrine, but quite ready to disregard it.

By the way, Archbishop Coleridge also reports that he senses a broad consensus in favor of “less condemnatory” language regarding homosexuals. That would make perfect sense to me, if I could find “condemnatory” language in any recent Church document.