Pope Francis leads a Mass to mark the closure of the synod on the family in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican yesterday. Photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

Archbishop Charles Scicluna says the strongest message to emerge from a bruising three-week synod at the Vatican is a willingness to have an open Church.

Mgr Scicluna said the case-by-case approach towards divorced Catholics approved by the synod confirmed a practice that had been adopted by many in the Church.

“But to me the more important overall message that emerged was that we must exclude nobody and include everybody in the life of the Church,” he said, adding this applied even to those who felt they were at the margins of society.

Catholic bishops from around the world went through a marathon 90-minute voting procedure on Saturday during which they cast their vote on each of the 94 paragraphs of the final document.

The contentious clause 85, which spoke of greater openness towards divorced Catholics, only just managed to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority by a single vote.

It speaks of an “internal forum” in which a priest or a bishop may work with someone who has divorced and remarried to decide jointly, privately and on a case-by-case basis if he or she can be fully re-integrated into the Church.

Church leaders should confront difficult issues fearlessly, without burying our heads in the sand

“In order for this happen, the necessary conditions of humility, discretion, love for the Church and her teachings must be guaranteed in a sincere search for God’s will.”

But the synod rejected calls for more welcoming language towards gay people as cultural rifts emerged between bishops from the west and others from Africa and Asia.

‘More open-hearted Church needed’

In his closing message on Saturday Pope Francis decried those bishops with “a closed heart” who hid behind the Church’s teachings and judged wounded families.

He appeared to criticise ultra-conservatives, saying Church leaders should confront difficult issues “fearlessly, without burying our heads in the sand.”

He also decried “conspiracy theories” and the “blinkered viewpoints” of some at the gathering.

The Church, he said, could not transmit its message to new generations “at times encrusted in a language which is archaic or simply incomprehensible”.

In his homily at yesterday’s closing Mass, the Pope called for a more open-hearted Church. “A faith that does not know how to root itself in the life of people remains arid and, rather than oases, creates other deserts.”

He said Church leaders needed to beware “a scheduled faith” where everything was programmed and a condescending point of view where “whoever bothers us or is not of our stature is excluded”.

The synod is a consultative body and its document is not binding. The Pope remains the final arbiter and will produce his own document on family issues.

Mgr Scicluna said it was time for all in the Church to work for the family with “a great openness of the heart”.

Asked about the resistance to greater openness towards gay people, Mgr Scicluna acknowledged the difficulty created by cultural differences in the Church. “We need to give ourselves more time… but we have to work together to create an atmosphere and language that does not exclude gay people from the life of the Church,” he said.

The final document emphasises that gay unions can in no way, “not even remotely”, be compared to marriage between a man and a woman. It also deems it unacceptable for international institutions to make aid for poor countries conditional on introducing laws that made same-sex marriage possible.

But the gay debate brought to the fore the differences in attitude towards gay people in different parts of the world.

The Pope alluded to this cultural gap on Saturday when he noted that what appeared to be a matter of fact for bishops in some societies, was shocking and disturbing for others.

Gozo Bishop Mario Grech, who represented the Maltese Episcopal Council at the synod, called for a merciful Church and a theology that was not cut off from reality in an interview with Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire a day before the voting took place. He had been advocating a more open approach towards divorced Catholics.

The vote-registering ‘farce’

Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Australia, writing in his blog yesterday, gave an overview of how Saturday’s voting process in the synod proceeded. The bishops had to vote on 94 articles in 90 minutes but it started on a light note. This is an excerpt from his blog.

“He [Cardinal Baldisseri] then proceeded in the normal way to register the presences in the Hall, which is something done at the start of each session. But this was more important than usual because we were about to vote on the final document. That’s where the farce began.

At the first attempt, 259 registered as present. But then two more bishops arrived belatedly, so we had to start all over again. Now we had 261. But then, in slow succession, two more entered the Hall, the last (a Curial cardinal!) to resounding applause.

So we had to start all over again. Some were getting tetchy, but I found it seriously comical. After a third registration, we had 263 and we were told that now the two-thirds vote required to pass a paragraph was 177.

Finally we could begin the voting. We all looked furtively at the doors to make sure no more stragglers could be seen.”

kurt.sansone@timesofmalta.com