Cardinal Napier: Next Year’s Synod Will Feature ‘Truth, Fidelity and Authenticity’

[McCall1981]

ncregister.com/daily-news/cardinal-napier-next-years-synod-will-feature-truth-fidelity-and-authentici/

Cardinal Napier: Next Year’s Synod Will Feature ‘Truth, Fidelity and Authenticity’

The South African cardinal has been appointed as one of the presidents of the Synod on the Family.

BY EDWARD PENTIN 12/26/2014

VATICAN CITY — Last month, Pope Francis appointed South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, the archbishop of Durban, as one of the presidents of next year’s Synod on the Family. His appointment was viewed as part of a push to have more African bishops represented in key leadership positions, and immediately preceded the Pope’s appointment of Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah as prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Cardinal Napier was one of the most high-profile and outspoken critics of some aspects of the recent extraordinary synod on the family. In this Dec. 23 email interview with the Register’s Rome correspondent, Edward Pentin, he discusses why he chose to speak out, his hopes for the next synod, and what African Catholicism has to offer the universal Church.

(Read the rest there)

 

[FollowChrist34]

Some nice stuff here:

The first thing of note about the Church in Africa is that it is a Church made up of people who know and acknowledge that they need God. Because of that God has a real and living place in their life. Secondly the Church in Africa is much more committed to living the faith than to arguing or debating about it. I believe the Church in the West could benefit from putting faith in God, especially the sacrifices that are implicit in that faith, before and above niceties of explanations of doctrines, etc.

I am confident that both the Secretariat of the Synod, its council and those attending the synod session will have learnt the need to give clear teaching by distinguishing it from possible or speculative thinking and proposals.

I am also fairly sure that bishops’ conference representatives, as well as individual bishops, will be much more aware of what their people think, feel and want the Church to do and say.

 

[PTL]

You were one of the most outspoken critics of how the recent synod was run. What disturbed you most about the proceedings and any developments since then?

When I spoke at the media briefing and criticized elements of the Synod proceedings, I was by and large reflecting the views of our circulus minor [small working group of synod bishops]. To a lesser extent, I was expressing the concerns of the Church in Africa, and third I was raising my own disquiet, because I knew from experience how media distortions could and would spread confusion and even damage the Church’s clear teaching and practice as a longstanding exponent of what Jesus, the Apostles, the Fathers and the Magisterium had taught and lived down the ages.

Of particular concern was the dressing up in overly positive terms the irregular situations such as cohabitation, divorce and remarriage, single parent families by choice, same-sex relationships. When you are holding up the bar of moral uprightness, you cannot at the same time, sing the praise of the contrary.

African leadership in the Church gives hope.