Vatican newspaper: ‘plural unity’

November 06, 2015

In an article published on the front page of L’Osservatore Romano, an Italian theologian who participated in the last two synods on the family said the people of God can rejoice that the more recent synod’s final report gives witness to “doctrinal unity in pastoral plurality.”

Quoting Pope Francis’s address at the conclusion of the synod, Father Maurizio Gronchi, a professor at the Pontifical Urbaniana University, wrote in the newspaper’s November 6 edition that “cultures are in fact quite diverse, and every general principle – as I said, dogmatic questions clearly defined by the Church’s Magisterium – every general principle needs to be inculturated, if it is to be respected and applied.”

The synod fathers, said Father Gronchi, turned their attention to the “the Christian family sacramentally formed by a man and a woman,” and families live in a plurality of cultural contexts. “In its geographical and cultural variety, the Church lives from a plurality oriented to harmony.”

There is not “an ideal model of the perfect family to reproduce automatically everywhere, but the creative power of human love consecrated by God,” Father Gronchi added.

In the midst of this plurality, which is a richness and not a threat, the guarantee of unity is the hierarchal communion of the bishops with the Successor of Peter, he concluded.

 

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Further information:

• Unità plurale (L’Osservatore Romano, p. 1)