Vatican confab to review church’s most sensitive issues

Women, other lay people will attend and vote

ROME — Throughout his decade as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has allowed debates on previously taboo topics and set in motion subtle shifts toward liberalizing changes that have enraged conservatives for going too far and frustrated progressives for not going far enough.

This month, starting Wednesday, Francis’ desire for the church to discuss the concerns of its faithful, even the most sensitive topics, will culminate at the Vatican in an assembly of bishops from around the world that will allow, for the first time, lay people, including women, to attend and vote.

The issues under discussion will include priestly celibacy, married priests, the blessing of gay couples, the extension of sacraments to the divorced, and the ordination of female deacons.

Detractors are wary of the very nature of the assembly, known as a synod, and have criticized it as a bureaucratic talkathon or as an insidious Trojan horse for progressives to erode the church’s traditions under the cloak of collegiality.

Supporters see a chance to put into practice the pope’s bottom-up view of the church as an inclusive institution that upends the traditional hierarchy and forces bishops to listen to and work with their flock more.

For them, more than any single issue on the table — and more even than culture war favorites like abortion, same-sex marriage, or euthanasia, which were left off it — it is the process of bishops and lay people working and voting together that amounts to the most potentially transformative change.

“It is an amazing moment,” said Renée Köhler-Ryan, the dean of the School of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia, who will be a voting participant in the meeting, one of the first women ever to do so.

Still, many church watchers say, it remains to be seen whether the gathering becomes an instrument for the transformation that traditionalists dread or another opportunity for the papal inaction that has left the church’s liberals disappointed.

It may end up as neither, and in any case, it is only the first phase of a two-year process. The participants will reconvene in Rome in October 2024, after which the pope is expected to issue a document endorsing or rejecting any recommendations.

“Hopes and fears for the synod are overinflated to the point where it’s hard to see a resolution or an outcome from either this October or next October that doesn’t leave at least one large part of the church feeling not just disappointed but deceived,” said Stephen P. White, a fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank in Washington.

There are other reasons the assembly — formally called the Synod on Synodality, essentially a working meeting on how to work together — may disappoint.

It follows two years spent canvassing local churches to better understand the concerns of rank-and-file faithful.