Petitioners: 'Utmost Importance' Pope Clarifies Doctrine as Synod Ends

A filial appeal of almost 70,000 signatures has been taken to Pope Francis, in addition to almost 800,000 delivered to him at the end of September, calling on the Holy Father to clarify Church doctrine at the Synod on the Family.

The organisers of the appeal said Thursday they had “just handed in a further 68,052 signatures requesting Pope Francis for a clarifying word as the only way to resolve the growing confusion amongst the faithful.”

In a forthright statement, the Filial Appeal Association said the signatures were delivered amid concerns about “chaos” at the synod, proposals for “very inclusive” pastoral language that threatens to undermine Church teaching, and the possibility of devolving issues touching on doctrine to bishops’ conferences.

“The timeliness of the request has been made evident during the course of this Synod now approaching its end,” the association said.

Quoting an American magazine “well-known to be ‘innovating’”, they noted that halfway through the synod “confusion, if not chaos, reigns, to paraphrase a synod father. And in that confusion is fear, fear of uncertainty and the unknown.”

“This is not surprising,” the filial appeal organizers said. “Under the guise of employing very inclusive pastoral language, leading figures of the synod strike at the root of fundamental concepts of Catholic morality such as ‘indissolubility’ of marriage, the ‘intrinsically disordered nature of homosexual relations’, the classification of ‘adultery’ for civil marriages after a divorce and even the aphorism that ‘one must love the sinner, but hate the sin’.”

“Even greater confusion comes from the proposal that pastoral practice towards the divorced and civilly remarried, as well towards homosexual unions, be decentralised—something that will inevitably lead to divergence and divisions,” they added.

The association concluded: “The coordinators of the Filial Appeal deem it to be of the utmost importance that, as has happened many times in the past, Pope Francis himself—as supreme judge of the Faith and utilising his power as successor of St. Peter—definitively decide all these matters of Faith and Morals that have come up during the Synod; and that he do so in a clear, solemn and irrevocable manner: Roma locuta, causa finita [Rome has spoken; the matter is closed]."