John Allen har intervjuet ekrebiskop Joseph Kurtz i Louisville, Kentucky, som er president i den amerikanske bispekonferansen, og erkebiskop/kardinal Daniel DiNardo i Galveston-Houston, som er visepresident.
Intervjuet med Kurtz har overskrifta: Moving too fast on divorce question could lead to fracture, Kurtz says, og innholder bl.a. følgende:
(He) has a request for his fellow prelates who are considering kicking thorny pastoral decisions to the local level: Please slow down. If individual countries varied on how they deal with key issues, Kurtz worries that global communion is at risk. “Naturally, it’s obvious to people that if it’s a topic that relates to the unity of Church teaching, I think it would fracture communion,” he said.
He said the so-called Kasper proposal, an idea floated by German Cardinal Walter Kasper to create a pathway for Catholics who are divorced and remarried to be readmitted to Communion on a case-by-case basis, demands much more theological reflection before being adopted. …
Last week, for example, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput wrote that a sense of anxiety about the synod’s final report has permeated the summit, while Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich said that Pope Francis looked to be at peace, so other bishops should be as well.
Kurtz placed himself somewhere in the middle. “I think there is unity within the synod, but there are a diversity of opinions that are being suggested,” he said.
Intervjuet med NiNardo starter med: DiNardo says the synod end game rests with Francis, og fortsetter bl.a. slik:
… the 13 small working groups in which bishops participate are generating a great deal of input, reflecting what different voices are saying. The other, he said, is that no one seems quite sure what’s going to become of it. “It all seems to be going into this huge blender in the sky,” DiNardo laughingly told Crux on Sunday.
He said the 10 bishops who make up a drafting committee for the synod’s final document — a group that includes Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC — will have to find a way to take the small group suggestions (technically called modi) and weave them into a document that honestly reflects the synod’s thinking.
That document is supposed to be based on a working text distributed at the beginning called the Instrumentum Laboris. DiNardo said it’s been slow going slogging through it — leading, he said, to the insider joke that it’s actually the Instrumentum “laborious.”
At the beginning there were charges the process doesn’t give the bishops adequate chance to express themselves clearly, and DiNardo was among roughly a dozen cardinals who signed a letter to Francis raising those concerns. By now, he said, it seems the playing field is “pretty level” for the various camps. Yet DiNardo cautioned that a final judgment about fairness will depend on what happens with the concluding document. “To my mind, that will be the tale,” he said. “If something comes back that suggests people have paid attention [to what bishops actually said], then I think we’ll do well.”
On the specific issues on the docket this week, DiNardo said he’s against the “Kasper proposal,” named for German Cardinal Walter Kasper, to allow divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to return to Communion. “I basically don’t favor it,” he said. “I don’t think it’s coherent. To my mind, indissoluble means ‘unbreakable,’ and you can’t say later it’s indissoluble but not exclusive.” …