SARAH MAC DONALD

The Tablet

An international network of reform-minded Catholic movements has organised an assembly to coincide with October’s Synod on Synodality that aims to create an alternative space where laypeople can dis-cuss issues too often swept un-der the carpet.

HUDA KHOURY, a Melkite Catholic, has been battling the Church’s marriage tribunal in Lebanon for 20 years. Canon law, she says, is being misused in the Church’s family courts. “It started in 2003; my husband wanted an annulment because he was having an extramarital affair. The quickest way for him to get an annulment was to use Canon 818.”

Section 3 of Canon 818 in the Code of Canons of the East-ern Churches concedes grounds for annulment on the basis that one of the spouses was mentally incapacitated at the time of marriage. Khoury’s husband obtained a psychological report which stated that Huda had been psychologically unfit at the time of their wedding and he was granted an annulment by the marriage tribunal. She says this report was “fabricated” and the process was defective. She ap-pealed to a Vatican tribunal.

Two decades on since this fractious battle began, the couple’s case remains locked in a three-way tussle between Khoury, the Apostolic Signatura and Rota – the Vatican’s highest court – and Elie Bechara Had-dad, the Melkite Greek Archeparch of the Archeparchy of Sidon, who oversees the marriage tribunal in Lebanon. He is a per-sonal friend of Khoury’s husband who, frustrated by the lengthy appeals, has since declared that he has become a Muslim, clearing the way for him to marry again.

Huda Khoury is one of many women alleging that forged documents and falsified reports are used by husbands and their lawyers to gain annulments and evade paying alimony and child support. She is among over 100 speakers from places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, the US and South Africa who will contribute to a discussion of “Human Rights in the Emerging Catholic Church” at a lay-led synodal assembly which is taking place on 8-14 October. While high-profile Catholic lawyers such as Cherie Blair and Mary McAleese and theologians such as Leonardo Boff and James Alison might stand out on the impressive list of speakers, it is personal testimonies of struggle and complexity of Catholics like Huda Khoury from around the world that will likely resonate with participants. The assembly will take place in person in Rome and in Bristol between 13 and 14 October – with keynote addresses by Mary McAleese and Sr Joan Chittister – but talks throughout the week will also be online so people from all over the world can take part without having to travel large distances.

The lay-led synodal assembly stems from a collaboration between 44 “companion” reform groups who have come together over the past year to form the online platform “Spirit Unbounded”. Its roots lie in the success of the Bristol Synod of 2021, organised by the Root & Branch Reform movement. The Spirit Unbounded gathering overlaps with the Synod on Synodality, which is reaching the first of its two climactic assemblies in Rome between 4 and 29 October; the second will be in October 2024. It was preceded by listening sessions at parish and diocesan levels around the world; these conversations have been summarised into a working document (or Instrumentum Laboris).

Maggie Conway, one of the organisers of the Spirit Un-bounded assembly, says some of the national submissions to the Synod on Synodality, including that of England and Wales, were filtered. Some key issues, such as the role of women in the Church and the treatment of LGBT+, Conway says did not “appear in anything like the level of strength or intensity that we know, from the findings of our research, people expressed”. This prompted Conway, an occupational therapist originally from Ireland who now works in London, to join forces with Mary Ring, Penelope Middelboe, Brian Devlin and others to create what they call an “unfiltered” assembly of the People of God.

“We said we can’t let this stand; we have to provide a platform to enable a response to this at a global level. That was the seed and the beginning of the Spirit Unbounded platform, coming from the Root & Branch work,” she says.

The assembly is a complex and expensive undertaking. De-spite the financial risks for the organisers, Conway told me: “It is a moment in time and there is a strong compulsion to do this.” The assembly is about “moving away from an infantilised view of the ‘flocky’ sheep. We need to be much more proactive and engaged. It’s our Church. The clerics need to move out of the way to enable that. I mean that in a respectful way because there are some wonderful clerics.”

Another organiser of the assembly is the former priest Brian Devlin, who with three other clerics exposed Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s sexual misconduct. He dismissed any suggestion that the assembly is an attempt to upstage the Synod on Synodality. “I don’t think that we will be stealing the thunder of the official synod. We are an assembly of Christian people who are trying to make the Church a better place, a kinder place and a safer place for each of us to live in and to embrace.”

Devlin, who lives in Scot-land, explained that the lay-led assembly will hear from people “not invited” “not invited into the room” of the synod. “I don’t think that we can expect all that much to come out of the room with the bishops in it. So, we have to create our own room. We have chosen the theme of hu-man rights very carefully because it recognises that there is a real problem with human rights in the Catholic Church that needs to be addressed.” Mary Ring, a co-founder of Root & Branch, lives in Wales. The grandmother, who describes herself as a “Jill of all trades”, says the assembly organisers have all been “travelling the reform road for a long time”. She believes October’s lay-led assembly is both radical and new due to its technological underpinnings, its accessibility and its global outreach. She compares the Spirit Unbounded assembly to the café gatherings during the Second Vatican Council.

Devlin, who lives in Scotland, explained that the lay-led assembly will hear from people “not invited into the room” of the synod. “I don’t think that we can expect all that much to come out of the room with the bishops in it. So, we have to create our own room. We have chosen the theme of human rights very carefully because it recognises that there is a real problem with human rights in the Catholic Church that needs to be ad-dressed.”

That view is echoed by Michael Centore, editor of Today’s American Catholic, a US-based journal which is one of Spirit Unbounded’s “companion” organisations. “Informal spaces such as coffee bars played a vital role in the proceedings of Vatican II. They allowed council participants to speak to one another in a spirit of openness and parrhesia – to use a favoured synodal term – that wasn’t always possible within the more structured meetings.

This exchange of perspectives no doubt influenced the drafting of the final conciliar documents. One hope for Spirit Unbounded is that it can provide a similar space for the synod, where communion, participation and mission can be encountered in individual voices and stories.” When I spoke to the Ox-ford-based author and pod-caster Penelope Middelboe, like Ring a co-founder of Root & Branch, she stressed that the Spirit Unbounded initiative is taking place “in support” of Pope Francis. She referred to Venezuelan lay theologian Rafael Luciani’s observation that those participating in the synod have to be able to speak with freedom, even about ideas that don’t have consensus support. Middelboe told me: “I would say that it’s probably quite hard for the few lay people voting at that synod and particularly for the bishops to really speak with freedom. So we are trying to offer that opportunity. We have met a lot of bishops who are interested in what we do, but they remain below the parapet.”

One of the most keenly anticipated events at the assembly is Professor Mary McAleese’s keynote address on human rights and the Church. “God created us as equals. The Catholic Church’s Magisterium over centuries has constructed a culture that disrespects that equality. The People of God are now dismantling it,” the former president of Ireland, a canon lawyer, told me. “Literally anybody can take part in our lay assembly. Everything will be open, every-thing will be online, everything will be seen, everything will be heard.” The Synod in Rome, she feels, will not be as transparent.

Acknowledging that the synod’s Instrumentum Laboris “has some really interesting developmental potential”, Dr McAleese said there was no reference in it to the Church’s need to look at the place of human rights in its internal teaching. A focus for McAleese is the denial of a discipleship of equals to some church members and a concern over “constitutional liberties”, namely the right of every human being to freedom of thought, opinion, belief, conscience, expression and religion.

“Is the synod going to be a discipleship of equals? The answer seems to be No. The Magisterium is still in control – the Magisterium will still set the agenda. It will decide what can be discussed; it will decide what the outcomes will be. If that is the case, then the Pope’s synod will ultimately be an exercise in frustration.”

For more information on the Spirit Unbounded lay-led assembly see: https://spiritunbounded.org.