Vatican City, 16 October, 2023 / 8:00 pm (ACI Africa).
José Miguel Gómez Rodríguez, the archbishop of Manizales in Colombia, shared his experience at the Synod of Synodality taking place this month at the Vatican, commenting on what this assembly can ultimately give to the Catholic Church and stressing that it “cannot remove pages from the Bible.”
The Synod on Synodality was announced in October 2021 with the theme “For a synodal Church: communion, participation, and mission.” Participating in the session taking place in Rome this October are 364 people including bishops, religious, priests, deacons, and laypeople. For the first time, non-bishops — including 54 women — will have the right to vote.
In an interview with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, the archbishop of Manizales responded to the question about whether the synod could approve the blessing of homosexual couples and the ordination of women: “No, but the Church already knows that answer.”
“Before the synod, a few days before, they published the pope’s answers to some questions or doubts that some cardinals had raised and there are also these questions, in such a way that what the pope wants is for us to handle with great respect and great delicacy the questions that people have in their hearts and that we answer them with so much respect that no one is offended, that everyone has clear in their minds the why of things,” Gómez explained.
The Colombian prelate emphasized that “the synod cannot remove pages from the Bible, the synod does not have that kind of authority, nor does the pope remotely want that.”
