Happy Friday friends,
The big story this week in the Church is the meeting currently happening in Rome, convened by Pope Leo to mark the tenth anniversary of Amoris Laetitia.
We have some coverage of that, and we will obviously be sticking close to it as it carries on. But I was struck by a particular plea of the pope’s in his opening remarks on Wednesday. Leo asked “that we all preserve the discretion and confidentiality that this time of listening and discernment requires.”
Don’t talk to the press, in other words.
Now, this is far from a novel ask by a pope. Francis routinely made similar requests before the various synodal sessions he convened during his tenure — not to suggest that this meeting is a synod, etc. and I will talk more about that in a minute.
And to a great degree I sympathize with the pope(s). If you want people’s honest opinions on complicated issues, opinions which often require nuanced drawing out, it’s hard to get them if everyone is worried about being (or eager to be) soundbited.
But the thing about these meetings, with their round tables and break out sessions and small groups, is that what is discussed is highly cabined (by accident or design, reasonable people can disagree) and a lot of power to shape the narrative, so to speak, is necessarily invested in organizers and those charged with “summing up” what was said across however many groups.
We’ve seen at previous synods meetings that minority voices can frame fringe views as something approaching overwhelming consensus. I think that is less of a risk at this meeting, for reasons I will go into later, though by no means zero.
What I do think is a real likelihood is that some people are going to talk to the press. Because some people always do. And the temptation can be to think of these anonymous briefings about what’s really going on in the synodal Paul VI Hall as clear windows into the meetings. I’d just urge a touch of caution with those reports as they emerge, though.
It is my observation that at meetings like this, most of the people hear the pope’s request for confidentiality and take it to heart and try to abide by it. Those that don’t almost always have an agenda they are trying to spin. It’s been my abiding frustration in the past that, watching rival fringe factions anonymously duke it out in the press, they are offering less of a window into the conversations taking place, and more reflecting them out with a funhouse mirror.
And, to be clear, minority voices like to see themselves amplified, and narratives of deep division make easy copy, so it’s a win-win for those involved.
I usually spend my time during these meetings trying to get sane and sober attendees to correct all this, and offer something closer to a true sense of what’s going on. And they in turn struggle mightily with qualms of conscience, given the pope has asked them to keep things to themselves.
There’s no easy answer to any of this. If you hold a confidential meeting to discuss important subjects, people are going to want windows into it, in the name of transparency. It’s a law of journalistic nature. If you put the whole thing out in public, on camera, a lot of people are just going to clam up and say nothing, and a few people will hog the mic and grandstand. That’s just a fact.
So as the meeting in Rome carries on, everyone is going to do what they do. But as you read along, just keep in mind that there are a lot of perverse incentives at work, and the people you are least likely to hear from probably make up the majority of the real conversations inside.
Those are the ones we are going to be trying to talk to, though I don’t blame them for being hard to get a hold of.
Here’s the news.
The News
Pope Leo opened the conference on the tenth anniversary of Amoris Laetitia in Rome this week, calling on the bishops to consider how to proclaim the fullness of the Church’s teaching about marriage and family to people in fragile circumstances.
“In many contexts, a growing distance has emerged between the ways in which sex and intimacy are lived and the Christian vision of marriage,” said the pope.
“Young people continue to long for love, fidelity and belonging, yet many find it difficult to embrace how such a vision of love can take shape in their own lives or to believe that a lifelong commitment is the condition for reaching what they desire.”
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The former bishop of Australia’s Broome diocese was sentenced Wednesday to six years and six months in prison for sexually abusing two young Aboriginal men. Bishop Christopher Saunders, who led the diocese from 1996 until his resignation in 2021, was sentenced Oct. 7 at the District Court of Western Australia.
The 76-year-old will serve at least four years and six months. He will become eligible for parole in February 2031, when he will be 81 years old.
A jury found Saunders guilty on 12 counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual penetration, arising from incidents between 2008 and 2019. He was found not guilty of six other charges.
Most of the charges reportedly concerned one victim, who was 16 when the sexual contact began and 19 when it ended. That is highly significant, since in canon law this is sexual abuse of a minor — Saunders canonical file has been stalled in Rome since his initial arrest.
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Staying in Australia for a moment, a major new study of Catholics in Australia who do not regularly attend Sunday Mass has concluded that most participants still retain a deep connection with their faith.
In fact, of the more than 90% of Catholics who don’t go to Mass, the study found that 65% described faith as being very important in their lives, 64% said they prayed regularly, and 55% affirmed the doctrine of the Real Presence.
Which just doesn’t make any sense to me. So, if the faith is so important and they believe the Eucharist is what it is, what aren’t they going to Mass?
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This month will see the beatification of five Franciscan missionaries who were martyred in 1597 in the region known as La Florida, along the coast of modern-day Georgia.
The missionaries evangelized and ministered to the local Guale people, and had largely lived in peace with them for years until what came to be known as the 1597 Uprising, sparked by the insistence of a local chieftain’s heir on continuing to practice polgamy after entering the Catholic Church.
The cause for canonization for the five murdered missionaries was opened in 1981. In January 2025, Pope Francis approved the official promulgation of their martyrdom.
Read all about their story here.
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The Diocese of Pittsburgh released on Tuesday a statement to Catholics about an apparently illicit celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy being celebrated in the diocese.
“Neither the chapel nor the announced liturgical celebrations have received authorization from the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The faithful are therefore advised not to attend these celebrations, which do not fulfill the Sunday obligation,” said the statement.
As you might expect, this got us talking, since the statement raises some interesting canonical questions. But rather than JD and me arguing back and forth over the phone as we worked out what we thought, we decided to give you a glimpse of how the canonical-analytical sausage gets made around here.
So, as an experiment, we tried the first — and maybe last, we’ll see — Pillar Explainer Sic et non, with JD and and me trading off, writing back and forth, in an unvarnished, unresearched, authentic synodal dialogue, as we worked out what we think about the statement.
You can read along until we agreed, or agreed to disagree, right here.
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The upheaval in the Argentine episcopate continued last week with the removal of an auxiliary bishop of Córdoba from his offices weeks before Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to visit the city.
The Archdiocese of Córdoba announced Oct. 2 that Bishop Ricardo Seirutti had been removed from his offices as auxiliary bishop and vicar general following a canonical judicial process ordered by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and conducted by the Interdiocesan Tribunal of Buenos Aires.
“The case was initiated following complaints filed by two adults who alleged that he had engaged in conduct unbecoming to his episcopal office,” said the archdiocese, which is preparing to host Pope Leo Nov. 10.
The archdiocese did not specify the nature of the allegations against the bishop and Seirutti does not appear to have addressed them publicly. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s involvement in the case does suggest the accusations must be of the most severe variety, however.
The DDF is involved in penal matters reserved to its competence by canon law. These include crimes against the faith and sacraments, and the clerical sexual abuse of minors. So, the publicly acknowledged charge of “conduct unbecoming” is begging the question of what he is accused of pretty hard here.
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A new way of being synod
When Pope Leo first announced this week’s meeting on Amoris Latitiae, I confess I was a bit hesitant about the whole thing — not to say I rolled my eyes to the heavens and cried aloud “Oh for God’s sake not again!”
I was, as things got closer, especially puzzled by the rather self-conscious way this was not being called a synod.
It’s a meeting of bishops from around the world, representative (but not in the democratically delegated kind of way) of the wider college, convened by papal order to discuss and help him shape his thinking on a particular subject. It’s being organized by the permanent secretariat for the Synod of Bishops, for crying out loud.
This whole “don’t call it a synod” thing seemed like a rather obvious, and obviously forced, bid to get away from a word which had become a toxic brand in the Church. But as the meeting got closer and finally kicked off this week, I’ve come to appreciate what I think is Leo’s real wisdom in all this. I’d go so far as to say he’s come up with one of the simplest, most targeted means of reforming a dysfunctional process.
The pope has, I think, come up with a “paradigm shift,” if that sort of language appeals to you; a new way of being synod, so to speak.