This is an interim report from a synod called to study how the Church can address many of the social issues raised in modern secular societies. It isn't a change in doctrine. It reflects rather a conviction on the part of the Bishops that everyone in the Church from the Pope on down is a sinner. No one stands perfectly before God and no one has yet attained a perfect embodiment of the Gospel ideal.
Secondly, the Church Fathers are reflecting the truth that sexual improprieties (as seen from the perspective of Church teaching) are not the penultimate sins that we all commit in our lives. Put simply, they are stating through the pastoral outreach that sexual sins are but one of the multiplicity of offences that wounds our relationship with God and each other.
This said however, there is a danger in the approach that this document suggests insofar as it may be taken as some sort of affirmation that being less moral or good than we can be is some how okay and that we are not always called to do better. I suspect that when the final document is issued, it will endeavour to put this pastoral outreach into a similar perspective to the one that Christ himself adopted when he encountered the woman caught committing adultery. While he did not condemn her for her transgression, he did tell her to go and 'sin no more'. In other words, without casting her to perdition, he called her to do better and to avoid falling into a similar state of endangering her soul again in the future. Thus I have little fear that when the final document is completed and approved it will be framed in such a way so as to reaffirm Church doctrine while counselling clergy to continue to call forth people into a deeper and ongoing reformation of their lives so as to closer reflect Gospel values.
In short, the final document will be nuanced, a quality not often present in many internet comment threads.
Finally, let me suggest that this approach is hardly all that innovative. Cardinal Ratzinger, before being elected Pope wrote the following which says almost the same thing as this interim report. "It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law." (H/T to Charlie Lewis for sharing this quote with me.) So if Popes Benedict and Francis are essentially counselling the same thing, then I think there's little to fear that the final report will justify neither the fears of conservatives nor the anticipated hopes for doctrinal change among liberals. It will instead be truly 'Catholic' a.k.a. universal in its invitation to walk closer and closer to the path Jesus calls us to walk.
Fr. Tim
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