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The Church’s extraordinary Synod on the family hasn’t gone down terribly well with secular pundits. It’s been billed as a failure on the BBC, which declared that gay Catholic groups are ‘disappointed’ with the inability of the Synod to make progress towards acknowledging gay relationships. Other groups are similarly disappointed by the Synod’s refusal to admit divorced and remarried people to communion. As Damian Thompson observes, Pope Francis probably has no-one but himself to blame, in that he allowed so much of the pre-Synod discussion to focus on these contentious areas.
All the same, it’s reductionist to equate the success of a Synod on the family – certainly the first phase of it – in terms of the Catholic church’s progress towards contemporary norms (viz, sort of parity of esteem for every relationship and family structure: gay or straight, permanent or ad hoc, first marriage or subsequent ones).
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