A closely watched Vatican assembly on the family ended on Saturday without consensus among the bishops in attendance on what to say about gays, and whether to give communion to divorced and remarried Catholics.
The bishops’ final report watered down the warm and welcoming language about gays and divorced couples that appeared in a preliminary report released on Monday, midway through the two-week assembly. Conservative bishops had expressed alarm that the Roman Catholic Church was sending a mixed message on marriage and homosexuality.
Pope Francis addressed the bishops in the final session, issuing a double-barreled warning against “hostile rigidity” by “so-called traditionalists,” but also cautioning “progressives” who would “bandage a wound before treating it.” The bishops responded with a four-minute standing ovation in the closed-door meeting, Vatican spokesmen said afterward.
The assembly is far from the final word, and has served only to open debate among prelates and in the wider church, as Francis said he had intended. Francis is taking the unusual step of publishing the final report showing the vote tallies on each passage, in the interest of transparency, said the Rev. Thomas Rosica, the English-language spokesman at the Vatican meeting.
The entire document received approval from a majority of the bishops, but a vote of two-thirds is required to be considered the consensus of the assembly. The passages on gays and divorce did not receive two-thirds of the vote by the 183 bishops in attendance on Saturday, but were not “completely rejected,” Father Rosica said. “It shows that it’s a work in progress,” he said. “We still have a ways to go.”
The preliminary version of the report set off a furor, with phrases implying that the church was shifting toward understanding and acceptance of gay couples. Earlier on Saturday, before the final report was issued, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi of Italy said it would be “welcoming” to gays, but not approving of them.
“Like Christ with the adulteress, his response is to welcome her, but then he tells her not to sin again,” Cardinal Ravasi said.
The final document drops the language in the preliminary draft that spoke of “welcoming” gays and that they had “gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community.” The final version says that gays must be met with “respect and sensitivity,” phrasing also in the church’s catechism, but emphatically asserts there is no basis whatsoever for comparing same-sex unions to marriage between a man and a woman.
Upon opening the assembly, known as a synod, Francis urged the bishops to hold a genuinely freewheeling discussion without fear of censure.
“Speak clearly,” Francis told the 191 bishops gathered. “No one must say, ‘This can’t be said.’ ”
He apparently got what he was asking for. The synod, while clarifying points of consensus, nevertheless brought to the surface clear fault lines between the prelates. They discussed how the church should respond when even active Catholics disregard its teachings, seeing the church as out of touch with modern life.
Some bishops took the position that the church must double down on doctrine by articulating more clearly the reasons for its teachings on marriage, and its disapproval of birth control, divorce, homosexuality and cohabitation. Doctrine, they say, is unchanging.
“We’re not giving in to the secular agenda,” Cardinal George Pell, an Australian archbishop now serving in the Vatican, told the Catholic News Service on Thursday. “We’re not collapsing in a heap.”
But other bishops said the church should stress inclusiveness, understanding and mercy. Doctrine should be responsive to new developments and information, they said.
Asked at a news conference on Friday whether church teaching can change, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, chairman of the German bishops’ conference, said: “Obviously it can change. The history of the church is 2,000 years old.”
“Doctrine doesn’t change, but it is understood in a deeper manner,” he added.
The preliminary report, written by a committee appointed by Francis, stressed a warm, pastoral approach to the divorced and to cohabiting couples, gay couples and their children. To the surprise of many Catholics, it said some gay relationships provide “precious support in the life of the partners.”
There was no mention of the teaching, included in the church’s catechism, that gay relationships are “intrinsically disordered.”
Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa, was among several bishops who immediately expressed their dismay over the report’s contents. He said the passages that were picked up by the news media reflected what only a few bishops had said in the synod. “The message has gone out, and it’s not a true message,” he said.
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, an American who has emerged as the synod’s standard-bearer for orthodoxy, called on Francis to clarify that the church was not changing its doctrine, saying such a statement was overdue.
Francis soon added Cardinal Napier to the committee to draft the final synod report. Ten committees of bishops suggested extensive changes.
But Cardinal Burke said in an interview with BuzzFeed that the pope “had done a lot of harm” by not clarifying his position. He confirmed that Francis planned to remove him as head of the church’s highest judicial authority, the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.
The process reminded some church observers of the debates that took place during the Second Vatican Council, the landmark series of meetings in the early 1960s that changed the church’s worship practices, the role of lay people and relations with other faiths.
The Rev. John W. O’Malley, a historian at Georgetown University and the author of “What Happened at Vatican II,” said, “In Vatican II also, the conservatives felt that the church was going to hell in a handbasket with the direction it was taking, and they did everything to stop it.”
But he said that in those days, bishops did not go public with denunciations of one another, or make demands of the pope. “We’re in different times,” he said.
