Vatican City, 16 October, 2024 / 1:55 pm (ACI Africa).
We cannot “reinvent the Catholic faith” or “teach a different Catholicism in different countries,” Australian Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP, of Sydney and a delegate at the Synod on Synodality said in an interview this week.
As the synodal assembly debates part 3 of the Instrumentum Laboris on “places,” the bishops and laypeople are considering questions such as the future of synodality and the role and authority of national bishops’ conferences, the archbishop told “EWTN News Nightly” on Oct. 15 in an interview to be broadcast Friday.
Should bishops’ conferences “have the authority to teach a different Catholicism in different countries or to decide a different liturgy in different countries or different Mass for different countries? Do they bring their own local culture to questions in the area of morals, for instance?” Fisher told “EWTN News Nightly” Associate Producer Bénédicte Cedergren.
“Could we, for instance, envision a Church where you have ordination of women in some countries but not in other countries, or you have same-sex marriages in some countries but not in other countries, or you have an Arian Christology in some countries and a Nicene Christology in others?” he continued. “You might guess, I think no.”
The Dominican archbishop leads one of Australia’s largest archdioceses by number of Catholics. Sydney serves around 590,000 Catholics and has a population of nearly 5.3 million people.