For nesten 25 år siden leste jeg bøkene «Xavier Rynne» skrev fra Vatikankonsilet. Den amerikanske presten som skrev under dette navnet var godt informert, men også den som fikk pressen til å skrive om kampen mellom de konservative og de liberale. Slik skriver Wikipedia om ham:
Fr Francis Xavier Murphy attended the Second Vatican Council which met at the Vatican from 1962-1965 as a journalist. Under the pseudonym Xavier Rynne, combining his middle name and his mother’s maiden name, he revealed the inner workings of Vatican II to The New Yorker. He is credited with setting the tone for the popular view of the council, depicting it as «conservative» versus «liberal».
Tidsskriftet First Things opprettet til bispesynoden i 2015 en Xavier Rynne II, og lot ham skrive anonymt fra bispesynoden i Roma (og jeg skrev om det på denne bloggen). Det samme gjør de dette året, og han har allerede levert flere «epistler»:
LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2023: #1
LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2023: #2
– Special edition, 5 October
LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2023: #3
LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2023: #4
OG FLERE: LETTER #5, LETTER #6, LETTER #7, LETTER #8
– Special edition 2, 18 October
Første epistel i år begynner slik:
During Synod-2014, the first of two such international meetings to discuss the Catholic Church’s response to the crisis of the 21st-century family, Cardinal George Pell expressed grave concern about the performance of the Vatican Press Office and suggested that alternatives to the official spin would be important when the second Synod on the family met a year later. Thus these Letters from the Synod were born at Synod-2015 and have continued at subsequent Synods. Their aim is to offer to a global readership an example of what our predecessor, the original “Xavier Rynne,” writing during Vatican II, described as theological journalism.
The goal has been to inform, not titillate. So, over the next four weeks, Letters from the Synod-2023 will explore the deeper issues involved in the Catholic Church’s current experiment in “synodality.” Concurrently, Letters will provide a forum in which Catholics from different states of life in the Church an opportunity to address those gathered here in Rome under the rubric, “What I Would Say to the Synod”—an opportunity that will also be afforded to some who, while not Catholic, understand the Catholic Church’s importance at this moment in history.
We hope, in this way, to provide a service to a Church of “communion, participation, and mission,” always keeping in mind that this is Christ’s Church, not ours, and that it is the Risen Lord Jesus who must always be at the center of the Church’s proclamation and witness. …