Published on Commonweal Magazine (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org)
Contraception & Honesty
A Proposal for the Next Synod
Peter Steinfels May 14, 2015 - 3:16pm
[1]I doubt that everyone present was able to live up to that plea. For not a few bishops, self-censorship has become second nature, especially when speaking publicly with other bishops, and infinitely so when in the earshot of the pope.
Fortunately, that was not true in many cases, or the synod would not have made headlines with the several highly controversial topics served up and batted back and forth: reception of Communion by the divorced-and-remarried, cohabitation, even same-sex relationships. But could engrained inhibition have accounted for the glaring gap in the synod’s work? I refer to the apparent lack of attention to the question of contraception. Why did the synod appear to treat so perfunctorily the issue that was, and is, the starting point for the unraveling of Catholic confidence in the church’s sexual ethics and even its credibility about marriage? To which, of course, one could add further questions about this baffling silence: Does it even matter? And if it does matter, are there grounds for hoping that the bishops who will be gathering in Rome next fall to complete the synod’s work can do better?
A lot rests on the answers to these questions. A synod that grabs headlines about remarried or cohabiting or same-sex Catholic couples but says nothing fresh about the spectacularly obvious rift between official teaching and actual behavior in Catholic married life is an invitation to cynicism. It could prove to be a crucial test of Pope Francis's papacy.
[Video: Peter Steinfels explains what prompted him to write "Contraception & Honesty" and talks more about the issues he raises in it.]
I.
The interim report of last October’s synod was startling
in its candor about matters commonly considered beyond discussion, yet
that controversial report’s extensive description of “socio-cultural
context” and “pastoral challenges” regarding the family made no
reference whatsoever to contraception. The subject was belatedly and
perfunctorily addressed, almost as an afterthought to all the more
controversial issues: “Realistic language” and “listening to people,”
the synod fathers had reportedly proposed, are needed for “acknowledging
the beauty and truth of an unconditional openness to life” and for “an
appropriate teaching regarding the natural methods of human
reproduction, which allow a couple to live in a harmonious and conscious
manner the communication between husband and wife, in all its aspects,
along with their responsibility at procreating life. In this regard, we
should return to the message of the encyclical Humanae vitae of
Pope Paul VI, which highlights the need to respect the dignity of the
person in the moral evaluation of the methods of regulating births.”
This language, sandwiched between concerns about declining birthrates and “affectivity” in marriage, echoed the pre-synod lineamenta,
almost phrase-by-phrase. And with an added reference to adoption, it
was echoed in turn by the final synod report. From start to finish,
these documents gave little evidence of any discussion. Nor did the
press conferences indicate any lively attention to contraception, taken
up as they were by the headline-grabbing topics. The only exception to
this neglect seemed to be the testimony to the synod of a well-chosen
Brazilian couple, Arturo and Hermalinde As Zamberline, married forty-one
years with three children, and active in a movement devoted to the
spirituality of marriage. The couple stressed that even within their
movement many religiously serious Catholic couples rejected Humanae vitae,
as do, they added, “the vast majority” of Catholic married people
generally. This unpalatable news was sweetened by the couple’s own
endorsement of the encyclical and fervent advocacy of Natural Family
Planning.
It is also hard to reconcile Pope Francis’s insistence
on “speaking honestly” with the code language used throughout these
documents. There are numerous references to “openness to life,”
“unconditional openness to life,” “openness to the gift of children,”
“respect” for “the dignity of the person in morally assessing methods in
regulating births,” the “very act of opening itself to the generation
of life,” and so on. The sexual meaning is clear and yet the phrases can
be stretched to encompass all sorts of generous giving of oneself quite
beyond the sexual. The result is a terminology at once edifying and
obfuscating.
To their credit, the Zamberlines diverged just enough
from this vague, exalted language. First, they gave some glimpse of the
concrete importance of sexuality in married life, and, second, they
identified the specific issue at stake. Quoting John Paul II’s statement
in Familiaris consortio [4] that
“the fundamental task of matrimony and the family is to be at the
service of life,” the couple continued with a reference to Humanae vitae,
“and, therefore, ‘every marital act must remain open to the
transmission of life.’” It is precisely in that “therefore” that the
whole debate lies.
The Zamberlines did not point that out, of course. Generally, they trod a fine line, professing complete fidelity to Humanae vitae and
to Natural Family Planning, yet delivering the hard news that this
teaching was not likely to be accepted without some great “pastoral
pedagogy...to adopt and observe the [encyclical’s] principles” and “an
easy and safe orientation, which responds to the needs of the
present-day world, without wounding what is essential of Catholic
morality.” What exactly would be that pedagogy, those principles, that
easy and safe orientation responding to present reality without wounding
essential Catholic morality? The couple did not attempt to say; nor, it
seems, did the synod.
One other attempt to raise the question of contraception at least somewhat straightforwardly appeared in the “Report Prior to Discussion” [5]
prepared by Cardinal Péter Erdő, archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and
primate of Hungary. (As the synod’s relator general, he was the official
author of the controversial mid-synod report.) Presented on the opening
day, this initial report was intended to summarize responses to the
preparatory documents. In a sub-section, “Topics Relating to Humanae vitae,”
Cardinal Erdő proposed that to surface its “positive message,” the
encyclical “needs to be reread” using “a suitable historical
hermeneutic, which knows how to grasp historical factors and concerns
underlying its writing by Paul VI.” From Pope Paul’s poignant statement
at a July 31, 1968, audience recounting the anguishing labor and prayer
that lay behind the encyclical, Cardinal Erdő quoted a few sentences
that seemed to downplay the document’s moral prohibition, acknowledge
the encyclical’s incompleteness, and put it in the context of the “law
of gradualness” later noted in John Paul II’s Familiaris consortio.
Other preparatory material for the synod accurately reported Catholics’ massive rejection of Humanae vitae and the natural-law reasoning it reflected. Ascribing this to “secularization” and lack of education, the instrumentum laboris,
for example, avoided any hint that the pastoral challenge posed by this
testimony from both laity and clergy might be to reexamine the
teaching. Inevitably the pastoral challenge was framed as one of
educating and guiding the faithful. In other words, exactly what has
been called for time and again for almost half a century.
II.
Why this complacency, especially in contrast to the
boldness of the discussion on other topics? Perhaps many of the synod
fathers considered the whole controversy a dead letter: Why revive it?
If Humanae vitae might have been the leading reason for the
sharp decline in Mass attendance in the 1970s, as Andrew Greeley
concluded for the United States, that was perhaps a one-time event. The
decline eased, even though it never stopped. More than twenty years ago,
interviewing young Catholics for a New York Times story on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Humanae vitae, I found that most knew virtually nothing about it [6].
They took the morality of contraception for granted. Most of their
parents had reached the same conclusion, perhaps with some conscientious
wrestling. One of the findings about contraception that seemed to
distress those preparing the synod was not merely that Catholics
massively rejected Humanae vitae’s condemnation of
contraception but that they did so with such good conscience, neither
seeking absolution nor staying away from Communion.
It might have been tempting, then, to think that battles
over contraception were done and over with, the whole question fated to
disappear. Yes, Pope John Paul II appeared to double down on Paul VI’s
condemnation. Yes, an outspoken minority saw it as the litmus test
separating the sheep (“faithful Catholics”) from the goats
(“dissenters”), some even arguing that it was an infallible teaching.
Meanwhile the vast majority of Catholics so steadily went their own way
that to make much of a fuss about contraception came to seem, well, a
bit embarrassing. That topic again? Oh, please! The less said about it,
the better. Especially at a synod. And especially because much of the
world seems to have moved on—to treating premarital sex as routine,
legalizing same-sex relationships, and celebrating sexual transgression
in the arts and entertainment.
That temptation should be resisted. Humanae vitae itself
and the theological civil war once surrounding it may now be as
unfamiliar to most Catholics as Pope Innocent III’s 1215 condemnation of
the Magna Carta as “shameful and demeaning” or the nineteenth-century
demands for restoration of the papal states. Yet bitter and sometimes
tragic stories of mothers torn between risking death by additional
pregnancy and unyielding talk of hell by confessors are still told.
Timothy Egan’s powerful New York Times column [7]
about his own mother last January was one example. And one way or the
other Catholics learn, often in distorted versions, that the church is
“against” birth control (“Catholics believe that the only purpose of
sexual intercourse is procreation”). This may no longer drive people
from the pews; but if they find such notions unintelligible, it inserts a
wedge into their relationship with Catholicism, a wedge that then
extends to all manner of other teachings about sexuality, and sometimes
more broadly to teachings on marriage and abortion. If priests,
especially fresh and inexperienced ones, denounce contraception from the
pulpit, skepticism can turn into anger. If priests pass over the
teaching in silence, whether in the pulpit or the confessional,
gratitude is nonetheless tinged with a corrosive suspicion that the
church is duplicitous.
This hemorrhaging of confidence in the integrity of
Catholic moral teaching is only one cost of the sweeping condemnation
stated in paragraphs 11 and 14 of Humanae vitae. That
condemnation remains a source of anguish for many confessors, a source
of tension for many moral theologians, and a source of disqualification
for otherwise promising candidates for church leadership. Avery Dulles,
SJ, a papal loyalist whose theological centrism would later earn him a
cardinal’s hat, said all these things to the bishops back in 1993. The
gap between insistence on the condemnation and its widespread rejection
has introduced a serious element of dissembling at all levels of the
church.
Not unreasonably, the 2014 synod addressing “the
challenge of the family in the context of evangelization” repeatedly
recognized that the primary evangelizers of Catholic teaching on the
family would be Catholic families themselves. What went unacknowledged
was how unlikely Humanae vitae’s condemnation of contraception
made this. Harboring serious doubts about the church’s understanding of
sexuality hardly prepares parents to wholeheartedly “evangelize” their
own children, let alone their culture, about the tradition’s larger
wisdom regarding love, desire, marriage, and family. A Catholic church
divided against itself over contraception has been effectively sidelined
from the high-stakes debates about sexuality roiling many societies. So
much for all the talk of the church’s stance as “prophetic.”
There is a sobering analogy from the age of the
Enlightenment. One astute historian of that period, Dale K. Van Kley,
has written that from the perspective of Paris, “the reputed capital of
the Enlightenment, the eighteenth century may be as plausibly christened
the century of Unigenitus as of lumières.” Unigenitus?
Hardly any contemporary Catholics can identify this 1713 papal
pronouncement on the “heresies” of Jansenists in their battles with
Jesuits. Those battles were not theologically trivial. But to think that
the ecclesiastical, social, and political conflicts surrounding this
papal bull were more preoccupying and internally divisive than the
assault on the church and faith mounted by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot,
and the Encyclopedistes is mind-boggling. Will some future historian
conclude that in the age of globalization, economic disruption, boom and
bust, religious violence, ecological danger, and mass migration and
displacement, Catholic energy and authority pivoted around Humanae vitae?
Indeed, in regard to sexuality itself, now contested on every continent
in one dimension or another, from battling rape and abuse to yearning
for the Dionysian, will that future historian marvel that all that the
church could have said had to begin with this one encyclical’s judgment
on contraception?
These are the consequences that should be contemplated
by any synod fathers who imagine that the issue of contraception no
longer matters. Of course, some synod fathers may be influenced by
another impression—namely, that even if the condemnation of
contraception is no longer a live issue for many Catholics, it is carved
in granite for many bishops. No matter the testimony of Catholics, no
matter the destructive consequences for the life of the church, no
matter remaining questions for third-world poverty or combatting AIDS.
There are simply too many in the ranks of the hierarchy, it is felt,
including perhaps Pope Francis himself, who just cannot contemplate any
return to the question. At least some accommodation can be made on
Communion for the divorced and remarried or on pastoral attitudes toward
cohabiting or same-sex couples. About contraception, biting one’s
tongue is the better part of valor.
If this is the situation, it is a very strange one
indeed. All the former issues raise considerations much more radical
than those raised by contraception: the indissolubility of marriage and
the morality of sexual relationships outside of it. Is it the case that
so many bishops have been appointed precisely because of their support
for Humanae vitae that they are capable of flexibility on any
other matter but that one? For them, is it thinkable to entertain
questions about applying Jesus’s words on divorce and remarriage in
Scripture itself but not about Paul VI’s words on contraception in a
1968 encyclical?
III.
At this point, it is essential to recall exactly what this debate is—and is not—about.
It is not about the “contraceptive mentality,” not
about “openness to life,” not about hostility to children or a refusal
to have any. “Contraceptive mentality,” so roundly denounced by
everyone, is an ill-defined term. It has been used to cover everything
from acceptance of marital infidelity, degradation of women, a selfish
refusal of the sacrifices incumbent upon having and raising children,
and even resort to abortion. If the synod wants to condemn such conduct,
fine. But that is not what caused the rejection of the church’s
teaching by millions of Catholics who were palpably open to life, who
were already parents doing their loving, sacrificial best to raise
children, or who were young people looking forward to doing so.
Nor is the debate about Humanae vitae in its entirety, with its many insights and warnings. When I taught courses at Georgetown University on “Change and Conflict in Twentieth-Century Catholicism,” Humanae vitae was
required reading. Inevitably, a good number of students were impressed
by the encyclical’s sentiments about love, marriage, and sex. (I hope
that the growth of the so-called hook-up culture in the past fifteen
years would not make their successors more cynical.) They were also
impressed with the encyclical’s warnings about potential misuses of
humanity’s new powers over sexuality, although I personally believe that
the document was far less “prophetic” than its advocates like to
stress: it came, after all, when the Sexual Revolution was well on its
way, and plenty of others, not necessarily opposed to contraception, had
earlier voiced concerns about the morally disruptive consequences of
separating sexuality from reproduction. But none of this triggered the
massive turmoil surrounding the encyclical. That turmoil centered on
several passages that condemned as “intrinsically evil” any act or means
“specifically intended to prevent procreation” in any instance
whatsoever of sexual intercourse (“each and every marital act”)—even “to
protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family, or of
society,” even “when the reasons...appear to be upright and serious.”
The debate is not about Natural Family Planning. (I
use the capital letters to circumvent the argument that for human
beings the use of pharmaceuticals or mechanical devices is just as
“natural” as the use of thermometers and calendars.) Humanae vitae and Familiaris consortio go
to great lengths (critics would say contortions) to distinguish
forbidden contraception from Natural Family Planning and to praise the
latter. In some circles, Natural Family Planning has been proselytized
as an eighth wonder of the world, if not a kind of eighth sacrament. NFP
is celebrated as highly reliable not only in spacing births but also in
fostering marital communication and sexual sensitivity. The enthusiasm,
frequently bordering on exaltation, is easy to parody, but I don’t
doubt that NFP not only works for many couples [8]
but that its regimen and periodic abstinence can be spiritually
meaningful and maritally enriching. This may also be true for Orthodox
Jewish couples who observe the complicated restrictions of sexual
conduct surrounding menstruation and other circumstances. It may be true
of many couples whose occupations impose regular rhythms or extended
periods of abstinence.
I have my skepticism about these matters. Last year a book titled The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning by Simcha Fisher (Our Sunday Visitor) came my way. The author, a blogger [9] and contributor to the National Catholic Register,
writes in the Erma Bombeck mode, self-deprecating and hyperbolic. I
liked her. I trusted her. Yet amid the wit and common sense and
apologetics about NFP, more than a few glimpses of genuine marital and
spiritual ugliness poke through. One learns from her book and other NFP
sources that the method is no guard against the specter of
“contraceptive mentality”—and worse. And this says nothing about the
workability of NFP in those billions of impoverished and burdened
households that Pope Francis won’t let us forget.
But set all that aside. Assume the best about NFP.
Commend and encourage all who find it valuable and beneficial. It
remains the case that the reasoning underlying Humanae vitae’s
exceptionless condemnation of contraception does not rest on the
effectiveness of NFP or its potential for spiritual growth and moral
harmony. The key argument made in Humanae vitae about each and
every act of sexual intimacy would be just as true—or just as false—if
the only alternatives to constant or dangerous pregnancies were separate
bedrooms or old-fashioned “Vatican roulette” or not even that.
The debate is not about birthrates, aging populations, exploding populations, Malthusianism, or neo-colonialism. These are all legitimate concerns with moral significance. But again the argument of Humanae vitae either
stands or falls quite independently of them. The church may very well
want to encourage larger families or discourage “breeding like rabbits”;
the church may call for material, educational, familial, or communal
resources allowing mothers and fathers to raise more children or plan
for fewer. Those are different matters than the judgment that all resort
to contraception is intrinsically evil. They should not be pretexts or
rhetorical distractions for not examining that judgment.
Two ways of deflecting that responsibility are very much
in the air breathed by the synod fathers. One stems from the fact that
part of the context for Pope John XXIII’s establishment of a Pontifical
Commission for the Study of Population, Family, and Births in March 1963
was a wave of alarm over global population growth. Some of the more
dire predictions, like the original Malthus’s, proved wildly off the
mark, a development seized upon by outspoken defenders of Humanae vitae as
vindication of the encyclical’s wisdom. This triumphalism verges on
hypocrisy. If population growth now appears more manageable (not that
associated problems have disappeared), it is hardly because the world
has observed Humanae vitae or adopted Natural Family Planning.
What has succeeded is not the encyclical but its disregard: the steady
acceptance of contraception in many cultures plus the draconian and
morally disgraceful one-child population in China.
The second, more understandable diversion from the
difficult issue of contraception is the resentment by many church
leaders in the developing world of Western (especially U.S.-led)
efforts, in conjunction with local family-planning advocates, to make
contraceptives legally and practically available. This is easily viewed
as a form of neocolonialism, lumped together with a host of other
economic and cultural pressures disrupting vulnerable societies. Humanae vitae is
seen less in terms of its specific contested argument than as part of a
defensive barrier to protect vulnerable societies against intrusions by
the powerful and destructive West. Unfortunately, this kind of
opposition is indiscriminate and too often allied with oppressive values
(e.g., patriarchy) and myopic about who pays the price of the local
status quo (e.g., women). It is also probably fated to go the way of
Pius IX’s indiscriminate denunciation of “progress, liberalism, and
modern civilization”—and with similar cost to the faith.
IV.
Once the real issue is acknowledged, what can the
upcoming synod do about it? How can the synod fathers, in a two-week
session, realistically address a problem that has been festering since
1968?
They should begin, as Pope Francis pleaded, by speaking
honestly. The synod fathers should recognize the absurdity of taking on
profoundly challenging issues, issues touching on ancient understandings
of marriage, while averting their eyes from a teaching that, despite
links to other moral questions, is relatively modern and narrow—and yet
has had vast pastoral consequences, dividing the church, eroding faith,
and destroying confidence in the tradition’s moral wisdom, especially
about conduct at the heart of marriage and family life. Drop the code
language. Allow other voices to be heard alongside those ardent about
Natural Family Planning. Stop treating all rejection of Humanae vitae as merely a problem to be solved rather than testimony to be taken seriously.
If the synod fathers find it incumbent to reiterate the
standing teaching, they should do so straightforwardly, not tucking its
absolute condemnation into an appeal for better means of “acknowledging
the beauty and truth of an unconditional openness to life.” The fathers
ought to say clearly that all couples employing contraception,
regardless of their reasons or circumstances, “degrade” human sexuality,
themselves, and their spouses (Familiaris consortio).
Traditionally, this was gravely sinful conduct barring couples from
receiving Communion in the absence of confession and absolution. The
synod should clarify whether that remains the church’s position.
But in the process of reaching this or any revised
conclusion, the synod fathers should not let their courage suddenly
collapse in the face of papal statements. If at all versed in church
history, they know that many papal texts from the past two centuries,
even the past century or less, indeed even positions affirmed by
successive pontiffs, have been corrected or reread to lift up certain
points and discard others in light of subsequent experience and
theological reflection. I am confident that the synod would not endorse
much of the wording of Casti connubii, the ur-condemnation of
birth control, today. Yet that encyclical was issued only a long
lifetime ago; Benedict XVI was three when it appeared.
When Pope Francis insisted that the synod fathers feel
free to speak “without polite deference,” there is no sign that he was
excepting deference to himself. That is all the more important because,
in his blessedly refreshing spontaneous manner, he has said all sorts of
things possibly pertinent to contraception, praising Paul VI and Humanae vitae,
warning against irresponsible breeding “like rabbits,” lauding large
families, and so on. On the eve of the synod, he will travel to the
United States and stop in Philadelphia following the World Meeting of
Families, an occasion likely to elicit more such utterances. All of them
deserve attention. But the synod should focus on freely addressing the
question rather than merely adjusting their views to Francis’s.
Finally, what if the synod fathers decide that simply reaffirming the blanket condemnation contained in Humanae vitae is
inadequate to the seriousness of the problem? What can they
realistically do in the course of a two-week synod, no matter how
extensively prepared? A problem forty-seven years in the making cannot
be undone in a dozen days. They could begin, however, with two steps, at
once modest and bold, that would help immensely to restore trust in
magisterial teaching.
Again, the synod fathers need to demonstrate the virtue
Pope Francis asked them to embody: honesty. Their first step would be to
acknowledge candidly the pain and division that have wracked the church
for decades now over contraception. True, the rejection of an official
teaching by so many practicing Catholics is not necessarily
determinative—as always, the church doesn’t decide doctrine by polls.
But this “non-reception” should be recognized as a theologically
significant fact, ground for further discernment and not to be filed
away as merely the bad fruit of secularization, the media, or
insufficient education. The synod might very well praise the loyalty,
motivation, and sacrifice of Catholics who heeded papal recommendations
of Natural Family Planning, at the same time conceding the moral
seriousness of the many devout, churchgoing couples whose informed
consciences about moral responsibility and openness to life put them at
odds with the papal conclusion about “each and every marital act.” The
synod fathers might also acknowledge the difficult, sometimes anguishing
position that division over contraception has created for many priests.
Merely to state these things would be a major step toward restoring the
credibility of the church’s teaching authority.
The second step would be a pledge of further action. The
synod’s time is short, after all, and its agenda long. My suggestion is
that it urge a renewed study of church teaching on marriage and
sexuality, perhaps to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Humanae vitae in
2018. One starting point might be Cardinal Erdő’s proposal for a
rereading of that encyclical like our standard rereadings of
nineteenth-century papal pronouncements on church and state. As he
suggested, a rereading [10]
would underline the encyclical’s historical context—presumably as an
immediate response to novel contraception techniques like the Pill or
increasingly popular intrauterine devices and to the startlingly rapid
breakdown of social disapproval of premarital sex.
Another starting point could be the kind of thinking
expressed by Benedict XVI when he headed the Holy Office and was
interviewed in the mid-1990s by Peter Seewald (Salt of the Earth [11]).
His defense of church teaching focused on openness to children as
blessings, refusal of the kind of drastic separation of sexuality from
procreation one finds in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and
recognition that moral problems cannot be resolved by technique or
technological manipulation. None of these “major objectives” of church
teaching, as he put it, are incompatible with using contraception under
some circumstances and to some extent. Certainly they do not imply the
absolutism of Humanae vitae.
But the study would have to reach well beyond the
encyclical and contraception in scope. It would have to address
sexuality in general. And it would have to welcome the testimony of a
full range of morally informed witnesses, theologians and
non-theologians, men and women, married and single, vowed, ordained, and
lay, stretching across all the continents. Undoubtedly any such study
would attend to the loveless, desperate, and so often abusive features
of today’s sexual landscape, especially for women. It would also confess
that the anti-sexual strands in the church’s own tradition have harmed
its ability to speak convincingly to this confusion and chaos. “Openness
to life,” it might be argued, includes openness to whatever
contemporary insights into sexuality can increase Catholicism’s
potential for offering wisdom and healing. Openness might also mean that
such a study, although not eschewing all clear judgments, could propose
questions for additional exploration rather than pretend to some
exhaustive moral codification.
Any pledge of further study and reflection faces an
immediate objection. Wasn’t it precisely the prolonged work of the papal
commission under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI—followed by the fifteen
months between the April 1967 leak of a majority report supporting
change and the July 1968 encyclical ruling change out—that led Catholics
to decide the matter for themselves without regard to Rome? Wouldn’t
the proposal for a renewed study simply repeat this dynamic?
As a practical matter, no. For a great many Catholics in
the mid-1960s, the default position was either to spurn contraception
or to use it (as birthrates indicate many had been doing) with a guilty
conscience. Today the default position is the reverse. What is primarily
at stake is no longer changing behavior or conviction, for
contraception or against, but articulating a coherent and persuasive
stance on sexuality, marriage, and family, drawing on Scripture,
tradition, and human reasoning, embracing openness to life while placing
moral responsibility in conceiving children firmly within that larger
framework rather than as an isolated decision driving everything else.
The Catholic world—and not only the Catholic world—has
placed great hope in the Synod on the Family. That great hope deserves
an equal degree of honesty, insight, courage, and creativity.
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