Postscript: Smoke From Amazon Synod Affects the Lungs of the Whole Church

National Catholic Register, 01 November 2019

The Pan-Amazon synod manifested a certain lack of ‘care for all the Churches’ in three ways.

A venerable phrase kept occurring to me during the last days of the Pan-Amazon synod: sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarium. It means the “care for all the Churches” and refers to the governance of the entire Church universal. Had this necessary care for the welfare of the Church as a whole been sufficiently present, I wondered, throughout the synod’s controversial deliberations?

The Amazon synod, which closed Oct. 27, highlighted the need for all bishops to recover a fuller sense of their sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarium in the pastoral care of the entire flock of Christ. The governance of the Church universal is entrusted to the entire College of Bishops, which acts in two ways, according to Vatican II: through its head alone, the pope, and as a body united to its head, the pope.

Each individual bishop, therefore, has not only the care of the particular Church (diocese) entrusted to him, but participates in the sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarium, in the care for all the local Churches united in the one flock of Christ.

It was, by the way, the title given to the papal bull of 1814, whereby Pope Pius VII re-established the Society of Jesus after it had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. The phrase was not in my mind due to the prominence of Jesuits in this current moment of the Church’s life, beginning with the novelty of a Jesuit pope.

It came to mind because the Amazon synod manifested a certain lack, to my mind, of the sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarium in three ways.

First, there is the pastoral problem of access to the sacraments in the remote areas of the Amazon. This is not a new problem in the history of the Church, and it even earned the attention of the Second Vatican Council, which sought to address the imbalance in the global distribution of priests by creating new structures for priests to serve in lands far away from their home dioceses. That’s where the idea of “personal prelatures” came from, though none have been set up to address the distribution of priests around the world. The only personal prelature erected has been for Opus Dei, but for quite different canonical reasons.

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