In the fall of 2024, the cardinal who is now Pope Leo XIV was at a large round table in the Vatican and discussed The challenges This is confronted with the Roman Catholic Church with a cardinal from Ethiopia, Archbishops from Cameroon and Kenya, placed a cardinal to Mongolia and bishops from Texas and Liberia.
Participating in the table was a Catholic podcaster from Dallas; A business consultant from Melbourne, Australia; A university manager of Fiji; And a parishioner from Myanmar, of whom there were three women.
Every person at the table, clergy or laymen, received three minutes uninterrupted speech.
“Every voice had equal value,” said Susan Pascoe, the business consultant, who is chairman of Catholic Emergency Relief Australia. She sat at a table with the future pope for the meetings, which often stretched in Rome for four weeks for four weeks or more a day.
Pope Francis came by to listen to, leading another meeting with the meeting, Wyatt Olivas, a student from Wyoming, to refer to the Pontiff as his ‘bestie in Christ’.
When Pope Leo XIV boarded the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday and his First address as PontiffHe indicated that he would continue this practice to listen to many voices.
He called for a ‘synodal church’, referring to the Dialogue Between church leaders and lay people who was one of Pope Francis characteristic legacies.
Francis opened the church when trying to democratize, peaks of bishops for laymen, including women, who were in 2023 allowed to vote for the first time About which issues the church should tackle.
Francis did not want the church policy to be decided only by bishops in closed rooms. He wanted to open the doors for all Catholics.
That the new pope decided to mention the concept completely in his first address was important, said the Reverend James Martin, a Jesuit writer and Well -known inquiry of Outreach to LGBTQ Catholics. Lay people invite to sit as equals with bishops was one of the controversial movements of Pope Francis.
“So a cardinal Archbishop from an old diocese had to listen to a 20-year-old student from Philadelphia, and that is pretty threatening for some people,” said Father Martin. “It is really important that Pope Leo has embraced that.”
Olivas, a 21-year-old Sunday school teacher and junior at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, was first invited for a meeting in Rome in 2023, when he was 19.
In the beginning, he said, he wondered if one of the church leaders, in particular the high -ranking cardinals, would take him seriously. But when the meetings started, with strict engagement rules that everyone had to listen while others spoke, the appearance of the hierarchy broke off.
“These cardinals who usually sit on their thrones,” said Mr. Olivas, “for them to sit right with a 19-year-old and to listen to me” gave him the feeling that “we are all together in we are.”
During the meetings during Francis’s papacy, some divisions arrived, including the consecration of women such as Catholic deacons, the requirement of celibacy for priests and the attitude of the church towards the pairs of the same sex. Francis asked to investigate various research groups some of the more difficult issues and to put together reports, in fact decisions about postponing the teachers or church law.
Progressives that had high expectations that these listening sessions could lead to tangible shifts in church policy, are concerned that the new Pope will continue on a path of “a lot of talk and very little action,” said Miriam Duignan, executive director of the Wijngaarden Institute for Catholic Research.
Some conservatives say that progressives have hijacked the meetings as a way to push their liberal agenda. “Synodality for some people is an ideology,” said Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a conservative cardinal from Germany.
Proponents of the process say that simply bringing lay people into discussion with church leaders improves a transparency that the church was missing earlier.
“If you look at a country like Australia, it would have done that A five -year investigation into sexual abuseThe idea of a culture of administrative was part of the analysis of what had to be tackled, “said Mrs. Pascoe. Too long, she said, the church was organized around a structure where “all authority was located with one person of the priest or bishop.”
By forcing church leaders to talk seriously with lay people, she said, tried to introduce a “responsible approach of life and in the church inaugurated by Francis.”
For Pope Leo XIV, who worked as a mission and parish priest in Peru, listening to and living under lay people has long been an important principle of his leadership style.
In Peru, he served as a bishop of a national diocese and “lived with them, not in a palace but in a simple house,” said the Reve to the Gilles Routhier, a professor in theology at Laval University in Quebec and an adviser to the Vatican meetings convened by Francis.
Archbishop Andrew Nekea Fuanya of Bamenda, Cameroon, who was also sitting at the same table as the future Pope Leo during the meetings in 2024, said that the man who is now Pontiff took the sessions very seriously, although he had to leave occasionally to go with his daily job that the Vhesob Bears office chooses.
“You could see that he appreciated everyone’s contribution, and he also came across as a very good listener,” said Archbishop Nkea Fuanya.
In A conversation recorded last year In a church in Illinois, when he was still a cardinal, the man who is now Pope Leo, explained how Francis “was looking for a way to help people understand that the church is not a father here on Sunday with many spectators.”
He added: “It does not take away all authority, if you want, or the Ministry of those who are called for specific services in the church, such as a bishop or a priest. But it does call the best gifts from everyone to bring them together.”
It is not yet clear whether Pope Leo will encourage the advisory groups to keep talking about the most sensitive problems that the church is confronted with. But those who participated in the process say that it would be difficult for him to fully crush those discussions.
Father Martin said that those who had specific problems with pets needed to understand that the process was more about “changing the methods we could go with some of these problems.”
He added that some of the most increased topics by certain Catholics did not necessarily resonate with the believers around the world.
“We also heard from people who were much more concerned about migrants and refugees, about poverty, about life in countries where Catholics are minorities” than about the regulations of women or supporting the desires of separate and remarried Catholics to receive communion, Pater Martin said.
“Those are a certain constellation of worries,” he added. The new pope, he said, “really has to take a much more universal view of the church.”
Josephine de la Bruyère Contributed report from Rome.
- Advertisement -
