Pope adds six top clerics to team drafting final Synod report

Decision is 'highly significant' as the final report will be the key text to emerge from the Synod.

By Gerard O'Connell
Vatican City:  As the synod on the family reached the midway stage on a positive note, Pope Francis took the unprecedented and highly significant decision to add six highly qualified synod fathers to the team that will write its Final Report. That decision could prove to be a game changer.

At almost all of the synods over the past 49 years the Final Report was drafted by the Relator, the Special Secretary and the Secretary General. It had been presumed that the Final Report of the 2014 synod would follow suit and be drafted by the Hungarian cardinal Peter Erdo (the Relator), the Italian theologian-archbishop Bruno Forte (Special Secretary), and Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri (Italy), the Secretary General who is attending the synod for the first time. That is no longer the case.

The Vatican announced Saturday that Pope Francis has decided to add six highly qualified synod fathers to assist them in that onerous and all important task. They are: Cardinals Gianfranco Ravasi (Italy, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture) and Donald William Wuerl (Archbishop of Washington DC), Archbishops Victor Manuel Fern�ndez (Rector of the Catholic University of Buenos Aires and the Pope’s main theological advisor at Aparecida in 2007), Carlos Aguiar Retes (President of CELAM), Peter Kang U-IL (President of the Korean Bishops’ Conference), and Father Adolfo Nicolas Pachon (Father General of the Society of Jesus).

The Final Report will be the key text to emerge from this extraordinary synod, and will be based on what has emerged in speeches and discussions during this 2014 synod. It is a most important document as it will provide the basis for discussion in Bishops’ Conferences and Churches around the world between now and the synod of October 2015. It will serve as the equivalent of a Working Document in preparation for the next synod which is expected to come up with important proposals regarding the pastoral approach to the family in the 21st century, including those regarding how the Church will respond to the questions of cohabitation, the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics, other irregular situations, same-sex unions and much else.

Source: America