This is not simply because of its approach to the hot-button issues of marriage and sexuality, but especially because of its vision of the Church.

Amoris Laetitia continues to develop Francis's ecclesiology in a very interesting direction.

Collegial and synodal
First, Amoris Laetitia's view of the Church is collegial and synodal.

Francis quotes his first exhortation Evangelii Gaudium seventeen times, Vatican II's constitution on the Church in the modern world Gaudium et Spesnineteen times, but also ten documents of national bishops' conferences (Spain, Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Australia, the council of the Latin American bishops CELAM, Italy and Kenya).

This is consistent with Francis's ecclesiology before Amoris Laetitia, but it is also a genuine development of the Bishops' Synod itself.

What this new exhortation adds is the extensive use of the documents of the Bishops' Synod of 2014 and 2015 - 136 quotations in total.

To be sure, Francis's predecessors used to quote from synodal documents, but in order to confirm what they wanted the Synod to say: that was part of most bishops' frustration with the Bishops' Synod as an institution.

Francis's Synods of 2014 and 2015 have been for the first time a real expression of a Church where "episcopal collegiality" is not just in the books (particularly in the document Lumen Gentium of Vatican II), but is real (effective and not just affective) - in which the bishops and the pope cooperate together to the maturation of the discernment of the Church over a particular issue.

This is new because the "synodal process" of Francis is something that never happened before: a synod in two steps and a synod with a real freedom of debate. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics, from an article by Massimo Faggioli, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He is the author of Pope Francis: Tradition in Transition and Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning.
• Image: Catholic News

Fr John O'Malley said this in an opening address to a conference on Vatican II at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

The conference was focused on the meaning and import of the council and how its vision might be carried forward

Fr O'Malley referred to the typical refrain that Vatican II was a pastoral council and therefore did not propose new doctrines of the Church.

Saying that such a perspective tries to downplay the council's decrees or call Vatican II a sort of "council-lite", the Jesuit said the 1960s event was pastoral through its doctrinal nature.

Vatican II, Fr O'Malley said, offered a new model of merging between so-called pastoral and doctrinal councils.

"Vatican II was a pastoral council by its teachings, that is, its doctrines," he said.

"In a word, Vatican II was pastoral by being doctrinal."

Former Catholic Theological Society of America president Dr Richard Gaillardetz expanded upon Fr O'Malley's conclusions by tying Vatican II's understanding of doctrine to Pope Francis.

Dr Gaillardetz, from Boston College, said Francis "has boldly returned to the foreground a broad range of conciliar teachings".

Among those, the professor said, is a "recontextualisation" of the role of doctrine in the life of the Church.

"Our first Latin American pope is not afraid to affirm the necessary place of doctrine in theC, but he . . . situates it within the pastoral life of the Church," Dr Gaillardetz said.

At the conference, Filipino Cardinal Luis Tagle called on Catholics to avoid wanting to witness to Christ "in some idealised past that they long for with nostalgia".

Rather, Catholics should embrace and live out the council's sense of openness to the modern world, he said.

"The Church is being asked to retrieve its deepest identity as a communion, but a communion that is not focused on itself," he continued.

"Not self-focused, not self-referential."

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Jesuits.org

Naturally, the venues where these three myths tend to be most deeply entrenched — the secular media, the academy, political circles and so on — are also places where the whole idea of Lenten sacrifice is sometimes a nonstarter. Yet they're remarkably widespread inside the church too, among people who really ought to know better. If Catholics perpetuate these ideas, it's hard to fault the outside world for being seduced by them.

Here are three popular fallacies, in the hope that Lent 2012 might mark the beginning of their expiration date.

1. Purple ecclesiology

"Purple ecclesiology" refers to the notion that the lead actors in the Catholic drama are the clergy, and in fact, the only activity that really counts as "Catholic" at all is that carried out by the church's clerical caste, especially its bishops. You can always spot purple ecclesiology at work when you hear someone say "the church" when what they really mean is "the hierarchy."

(I was once called by a producer from the BBC looking for leads on a segment they wanted to do about women in the Catholic church. I ticked off a series of high-profile Catholic laywomen they could ring up, to which the producer replied: "I'm sorry, I need someone from the church." She meant, of course, someone in a Roman collar — that's purple ecclesiology at work.)

The truth is that the number of ordained clergy in the Catholic church comes to roughly .04 percent of the total Catholic population of 1.2 billion. If they're the main act, then all one can say is that the Catholic show is wildly top-heavy with supporting cast.

The self-parodying nature of purple ecclesiology was once memorably captured by Cardinal John Henry Newman, who, asked for his opinion on the laity, replied, "Well, we'd look awfully silly without them." Read more

Sources

• John L Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Quod Semper