Lay Catholics, including women, will be permitted to vote on issues facing the 1.3 billion-member church during an upcoming general assembly of bishops known as a synod, the Vatican announced Wednesday.
Pope Francis will appoint 70 “non-bishop” members — of which 35 will be women and “several” will be “young people” — as delegates to the event with the same voting rights that the approximately 300 bishops will enjoy.
The pontiff also specified that 10 members of religious orders of both sexes — five nuns and five monks or friars — will be appointed to attend and vote at the event.
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the general relator for the event, called the inclusion of women and lay members in the voting pool “not a revolution but an important change.”
The “Synod on Synodality” session is consultative but not legislative and thus can only offer advice to Pope Francis, several Catholic observers said. The recommendations coming from the multi-year “Synodality” process can be approved, modified or rejected by the pontiff.
The official Vatican News Agency said the changes were announced by Cardinal Hollerich and Cardinal Mario Grech, who heads the Secretariat for the Synod.
Cardinal Hollerich told a correspondent from Argentina’s La Nacion newspaper that the word choice for the departure from church practice was intentional.
“Revolutions make victims, we do not want to make victims,” he said, though he later conceded to the paper that the move is, in fact, a “totally radical change.”
American Catholic leaders were divided on the move’s impact.
Francis is “extending the trajectory of the Synod,” said Phyllis Zagano, senior research associate-in-residence and adjunct professor of religion at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.
The difference with these appointments is that instead of being observers without a vote, “now they’ll have a vote. It’s a gradual change, but it is completely within the trajectory of the development of the Synod,” she said.
“It’s an example of the growth of the church to go back to its roots, to consult the lay people as well as the clerics,” said Ms. Zagano, who served on a Vatican commission on women and the diaconate. “I don’t think that women part is the important part. I think it’s the lay part.”
The pope, she said, “knows what he’s doing” in expanding the voting pool for the Synod, which she calls “a process of discernment” for the church and “not a political thing.”
Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of CrisisMagazine.com, a website for “faithful Catholic laity” that he said gets a million visitors annually, said the October meeting at the Vatican will have its very nature changed by the addition of lay voters.
“The Synod is supposed to be a ‘Synod of Bishops,’” Mr. Sammons said. “And that is a long-standing practice in the Catholic Church [that] goes back all the way, almost 2,000 years.”
He said the change “really goes against how things have already been in the Catholic Church, they’ve always been bishops are the ones who have the authority … to set out teaching and things of that nature, along with the Pope, obviously.”
Mr. Sammons also said that only a “hand-selected” group of bishops will attend the event, “which ends up being people they know will already agree with what they want to happen.”
But Catholic theologian Dawn Eden Goldstein, who next month will receive licensure in canon law from the Catholic University of America, said the inclusion of lay members at the pope’s direction signals bishops “can’t just lord it over them” in terms of their position.
“If the bishops want to have their way of leading the church, they’ve got to get the lay people on board,” said Ms. Goldstein, who recently published “Father Ed: The Story of Bill W.’s Spiritual Sponsor” about a key advisor to the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
What the change does, she said is “separates governance from ordination” in the church.
“For many hundreds of years in the global church, governance and ordination have been united. And there’s been a chipping away of that,” Ms. Goldstein said. “Particularly since the Second Vatican Council, and theologically, the ground for keeping governance united to ordination is getting shakier.”
She said, “I think Pope Francis is recognizing that there are really solid reasons theologically for involving lay people. And you know, at the end of the day, it’s still Pope Francis, who’s going to decide [which] decisions of this Synod are going to be taken up into the law of the church.”
Larry Chapp, a contributor to the National Catholic Register newspaper and author of “Confession of a Catholic Worker,” said he supports both the church’s tradition of reserving ordination for men only as well as the inclusion of women in the Synod of Bishops voting cohort.
“It’s not a good optic for the church when any time you pan a crowd of leaders at the big meetings, it’s all male faces,” Mr. Chapp said in a telephone interview.
“I think we need more input from both lay people and women in the church,” he said.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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