VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis encouraged bishops from more than 120 countries to speak freely when they gathered at the Vatican nearly three weeks ago for a broad discussion of family matters related to the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. And speak freely, they have.
The result has been the most momentous, and contentious, meeting of bishops in the 50 years since the Second Vatican Council, which brought the church into the modern era. The meeting has exposed deep fault lines between traditionalists focused on shoring up doctrine, and those who want the church to be more open to Catholics who are divorced, gay, unmarried with children or cohabiting.
As the bishops face a deadline Saturday to present their report to the pope, it is increasingly clear that Francis is struggling to build consensus for his vision of a more inclusive and decentralized church. The question is whether the pope, who has won the hearts of those in the pews, can convince the bishops to help create a church that fully welcomes people with the kinds of family situations it now condemns.
"This is a pivotal moment of this pontificate," said Roberto Rusconi, who teaches the history of Christianity at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a state school. Francis is sounding out world's bishops "to better understand whether they are going to follow his line or not."
"The risk," Rusconi said, "is polarization."
Already the summit meeting — known as a synod — has had to conduct its debate amid a distracting a swirl of intrigue that has included the leak in the Italian media of a private letter to Francis from 13 cardinals asserting that he had stacked the 10-member committee drafting the final report with partisans favorable to his vision of change. On Wednesday, an Italian newspaper reported that Francis has a treatable brain tumor — a report the Vatican swiftly declared to be "unfounded."
The synod meetings are closed to the media, but at daily briefings bishops have said that Francis appears serene and quite pleased to have uncorked a genuine debate. On Saturday, the synod's final report is expected to be published and the 270 participating bishops, known as synod fathers, will vote up or down on each passage.
Progressives, led by the contingent from Germany, are pushing for a church that is more welcoming toward divorced, gay and other parishioners who are not living the Catholic ideal of family. The German bishops have found allies among some prelates from Western Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The traditionalists — whose standard bearers are the African and Eastern European bishops — have resisted any proposals that appear to soften the church's doctrine that marriage is "indissoluble" and homosexuality is "intrinsically disordered."
In one indication of their fervor, Cardinal Robert Sarah, who is from Guinea and leads the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship, told the synod, "What Nazi-Fascism and Communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic fanaticism are today."
Bishops from the United States have revealed themselves to be just as divided as their flock back home. Their tensions surfaced here when an Italian newspaper reported last week that Cardinals Timothy M. Dolan of New York and Daniel N. DiNardo of Houston were among 13 who signed the letter to Francis complaining about the drafting committee. On that panel is a fellow American, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C.
This week Wuerl, usually known as a centrist diplomat, fired back in an interview with the Jesuit magazine America, saying the charges that the pope was trying to manipulate the synod's outcome or undermine church teaching were unfounded.
"I don't know what would bring people to say the things that they are saying because we are all hearing the pope, and the pope is saying nothing that contradicts the teaching of the church," Wuerl said. "He's encouraging us to be open, to be merciful, to be kind, to be compassionate, but he keeps saying that you cannot change the teaching of the church."
"I wonder," he added, "if it is really that they find they just don't like this pope."
The synod can make recommendations, but unlike the three-year-long Second Vatican Council, it cannot make decisions. That power lies with the pope.
Francis is expected to speak this weekend, giving him the last word after the bishops vote on their final report. But it could be many months before Francis issues an official document on the church's approach to family issues, and it has not been determined what that document will cover and what weight the pope will give the bishops' report, several Vatican spokesmen have said.
But Francis has already tipped his hand, in several ways. He has called for a "Jubilee Year of Mercy" to begin on Dec. 8, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception — in keeping with his consistent theme that mercy trumps judgment. During the Year of Mercy, he will allow priests worldwide to absolve women who confess to having had abortions, a power usually reserved for bishops.
The pope threw another thunderbolt last Saturday, saying in an address to bishops that the church needs a "sound decentralization" of authority. He said the church should not be run like a top-down organization with the pope at its summit, but instead should be an "inverted pyramid" in which the pope is at the bottom in service to the "people of God."
That speech bolstered those bishops who have argued that one way to navigate their disagreements over family issues is to allow national bishops conferences some flexibility in deciding how to minister to Catholics who are divorced and civilly remarried, gay or cohabiting.
But in his speech, the pope also made it clear that he would be the final arbiter. He said that the synod always acts "with Peter and under Peter," a reference to the saint that Catholics consider the first pope.
The most pressing issue the bishops have grappled with at the synod is whether to offer communion to Catholics who have divorced and remarried without getting annulments from the church. The church teaches that they are adulterers, living in sin.
Many conservative bishops argued that the church cannot change its position because of the doctrine that marriage is indissoluble. But other bishops have called the church's approach insensitive, even cruel, because it fails to take personal circumstances into account.
Bishops met in small groups organized by language, and when they issued their final reports on Wednesday, their recommendations were all over the map. The German-language group wrote that "intransigent pastoral attitudes" have "brought suffering to people, in particular, unwed mothers, children born out of wedlock, persons cohabitating outside of marriage, persons of homosexual orientation and to the divorced and remarried."
They proposed that divorced parishioners who remarry be allowed to work closely with priests to arrive at "full reconciliation with the church."
But one English-speaking group of bishops decried the idea of a decentralized solution to the communion issue, saying, "To do so would risk harm to the unity of the Catholic Church." Another English group and an Italian group proposed that the pope set up a special commission to study the matter.
By opening up discussion on what had long been taboo topics, Francis has both electrified and terrified the church's hierarchs. Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany, said in an interview Tuesday night that some synod fathers "are fearful of any change."
"That I can't understand because church history is living tradition," not something static, Marx said. "We are not a castle to be defended, surrounded by enemies."
This year's synod is the sequel to another three-week-long meeting last year. After all these meetings, the committee drafting the final report is under tremendous pressure to produce something that the bishops will accept, Cardinal Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Mumbai, said in an interview on Sunday.
"You can't have two meetings and say 'business as usual,'" Gracias said. "There would be disappointment for all people, for the church, and for the bishops of the world."
"Everyone is trying to find a solution, putting together concern for the institution of marriage, and compassion towards people in difficulty," he added. "Now we just have to find a way to put these together."