Looking ahead at 2024, The Guy seems to recall hearing that there’s a U.S. presidential election going on.
If so, that will inspire ample chatter about the religion factor. There are important elections in other nations, including Taiwan last Saturday and probably Britain. Jews and their Christian allies will be closely monitoring the Israel-Hamas war.
All that said, it’s clear that debates about various angles of sexuality and gender will dominate the year’s religion news. Again.
Start with next October’s second and final session at the Vatican of Pope Francis’s Synod of Bishops concerning “Synodality,” a fuzzy buzzy word for enhancing members’ involvement in church life through a process behind closed doors.
Sidestepping synodality, Francis pre-empted his Synod with the December 18 go-ahead for Catholic priests to provide church blessings for same-sex couples plus those in as-yet-undefined “irregular” situations. Expect Catholics to agitate through the year against this historic innovation, especially in Africa (where bishops seem to believe that synodality may include listening to bishops in growing churches).
We can forget Synod action on female priests. But will there be concrete proposals to the Pope to enhance women’s church leadership otherwise, especially by ordaining them as deacons? If that includes altar duties, it will be a massive, historic change.
There’s a tiny possibility the Synod would issue a dramatic call to abolish the 885-year-old mandate that priests be celibate and unmarried (excluding Eastern Rite clergy and Protestants who convert). Or not. Did the influential adjunct secretary at the Vatican’s agency on doctrine, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, issue a Synod signal January 7?
The Maltese archbishop told an interviewer “if it were up to me” he’d drop the celibacy demand, though admitting that “will sound heretical to some people.” Don’t forget Francis himself noted to an Argentine news outlet last May that the rule is “temporary” (that is, a disciplinary tradition that’s changeable, not permanently defined dogmas). The pope added what may have been an ambiguous Jesuit nudge: “I do not know if it is settled in one way or another.”
Folks at The Pillar say “the Holy See is broke” financially, and note the U.S has its oldest lineup of bishops ever. Twelve major archbishop posts will either be filled by Francis this year or have incumbents past the retirement age. Who’s covering these stories?
Considering the pope’s new same-sex blessings, it’s fascinating that a similar policy was implemented last month by the Church of England, whose average attendance of a mere 654,000 is swamped by tens of millions of Anglicans in the “Global South.” England’s change is bringing to a head a long-developing split in the Anglican Communion, a major international branch of Christianity.
So mark your calendars for June 11–13 and the first “Pan-African Congress” of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches at its new Cairo headquarters. Last year its top leaders declared that the same-sex blessings meant the Church of England and its leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, have forfeited their leadership roles in the Anglican Communion over against “those provinces that remain faithful to the historic biblical faith.”
It’s obviously huge if a new world organization emerges from Cairo that explicitly or implicitly separates from the Anglican Communion.
There’s related confusion regarding the Global Anglican Future Conference, an organization that has a partly overlapping leadership with the Global South Fellowship. It shares conservative distress and also spurns Canterbury as the international titular leader but says it is “resetting,” and not quitting, the Anglican Communion.
The global disruption is also on the agenda for a meeting in Rome April 29–May 2 of the leaders (known as “primates”) of national branches that retain full communion with Canterbury. Datebooks should also mark the General Convention of the U.S. Episcopal Church, June 23–28 at Louisville, which will elect one of those “primates,” its next presiding bishop, who will lobby for LGBTQ+ interests amid the Anglican split.
The United Methodist Church (UMC) just suffered the biggest U.S. schism since the Civil War. It holds a General Conference (postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19) in Charlotte April 23-May 3. With roughly one-fourth of the U.S. membership newly departed, conservative voting power will be so reduced that liberals hope to finally abolish the UMC’s longstanding and oft-defied conservative teaching on the Bible and sexual morality.
But this is another story with a strong African angle. The other hot issue will be “regionalization” that might encourage conservatives in Africa and the Philippines to remain within the UMC. The bulk of the U.S. walkouts joined the Global Methodist Church, under transitional oversight by former UMC bishops Scott Jones and Mark Webb.
The new church will get organized at its first General Conference, September 20-26 in San Jose, Costa Rica. As the name indicates, the Americans are working to unite with the millions of overseas doctrinal conservatives in a new international denomination. But key Africa’s bishops want to stick with the ongoing UMC, while watching trends to change church teachings.
There’s always stuff happening at the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting, this year June 13-14 in Indianapolis. It will vote on ratifying a constitutional amendment to bar any and all female clergy, and elect a new president who faces this reality: Religion News Service’s Nashville veteran Bob Smietana says “there seems to be little momentum to move forward” on national-level efforts to combat the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued the SBC for five years running.