PROVIDING THE Eucharist for increasing numbers of Catholics around the world, while the Church suffers a severe shortage of priests, dominated discussions in the opening week of the international Synod of Bishops. As the first week of the three-week synod draws to a close today, a debate that threatens to divide the 256 participants from 118 nations was forming over the expediency of ordaining married men as a way of solving the dilemma.
At the beginning of the week the subject was scarcely mentioned, and when Pope Benedict opened the eleventh ordinary general assembly of the synod at a special Mass in St Peter’s Basilica on Sunday, he instead concentrated on secularisation and the loss of Christian faith in Europe, saying it was “hypocritical” to relegate God to the private sphere and “deny him the public forum”. In his homily the Pope made only one reference to the synod, when he prayed that “not only will we say beautiful things about the Eucharist, but above all live from its strength”.
However, at a press conference the day after the opening, two bishops, one from Haiti and the other from the Philippines, pointed out that living from the “strength” of the Eucharist was nearly impossible for a great many people around the world because, due to canonical restrictions (as in the case of the divorced and remarried) or the absence of priests in their community to celebrate the Mass, they are not even able to receive Communion.
“On the first Sunday after my ordination I said nine Masses,” confessed 48-year-old Bishop Luis Tagle of Imus in the Philippines. He said this was “regular” in his country, and added that many Filipinos had urged him to speak about their “condition” at the synod. “Pastorally speaking,” he said, “we cannot cope.” Bishop Pierre-Antoine Paolo OMI, 61, from Port-de-Paix (Haiti) urged a greater emphasis on the Eucharist as “panis viatorum” (bread for the journey) so that fewer people would be restricted from receiving Communion.
But the man the late Pope John Paul II selected last year to guide the synod’s discussions, Cardinal Angelo Scola, Patriarch of Venice, offered a cautionary note. “The Eucharist is a gift, not a right or a possession,” he said. The 64-year-old cardinal – who became a priest in 1970 for Communion and Liberation – is the synod’s “relator general”, a role that allows him to set the tone at the outset of the synod. At the first session last Monday, he read sections from a 52-page Latin text he wrote to “orient” the participants’ discussions, drawing from topics that were put forth in the synod’s 85-page working document (instrumentum laboris).
In an opening report, Cardinal Scola acknowledged that the lack of priests reported by many bishops had reached “extremely serious” proportions. But he added that the Church could not deal with the problem in the manner of a commercial corporation trying to fill a predetermined quota of management recruits. He said celibacy had a “prophetic and educative” value, and sugested that the shortage of clergy could be met in part by a more even distribution of priests around the world, rather than by ordaining married men.
Robert Mickens, Rome