Don’t Go Too Fast — but Do Go

If you a Catholic, or a journalist, or a Vatican-watcher, or a person with a family, or a person of good will, or a person interested in questions of politics or wealth and poverty or justice and peace or human sexuality — if you are a man or woman or child alive to the questions of how to live in our time — keep your calendar clear for next October.

That’s when the Vatican plans to host “a special synod of bishops … to discuss issues facing the family.” The so-called “extraordinary synod” is only the third such synod to be called in the modern history of the church.

What issue involving the church and contemporary life doesn’t face the family?

Already the Vatican’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, has asked German bishops shaping reform of the church’s approach to divorced and remarried Catholics not to cause “confusion” by changing things too fast.

Reinhard Marx, cardinal archbishop of Munich, who discussed moral implications of the economic crisis in Europe while a guest of the Berkley Center at Georgetown last year, is in the center of the effort to balance tradition and reform in Germany and in the larger church: he is one of the eight “special advisors” appointed by Pope Francis.

What’s the significance of an extraordinary synod of bishops? It depends. But with the pope himself giving sympathetic voice to long-stifled energies for change in the church, it’s not unlikely that the innocuously named synod on the family will shape up as truly extraordinary — as something like a Vatican Council III.

• 9 October 2013