Archbishop Anthony Fisher has addressed the issue of the ongoing Synod on Synodality and spoken to its inherent limitations when it comes to “the deposit of faith” and the “apostolic tradition” of the Church.
The Australian archbishop of Sydney, and a delegate at the Synod, told EWTN News Nightly on 15 October in an interview to be broadcast Friday 18 October that it’s not possible to “reinvent the Catholic faith” or “teach a different Catholicism in different countries”, reports the Catholic News Agency.
Fisher, a Dominican friar who completed his doctoral studies at Blackfriars, Oxford, in England, is known for his orthodox views and faithful adherence to the magisterium of the Church.
He made his comments in relation to delegates at the Synod, which includes both laypeople and bishops, debating the part three “Places” section of the Instrumentum Laboris Vatican document for the Second Session of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
One topic being discussed is “Local Churches in the one and unique Catholic Church”, which questions how the synodal process will continue within the Church and the role and authority of national bishops’ conferences.
In paragraph 82, the Vatican document states that “a place can no longer be understood in purely geographical and spatial terms” and that this “reality challenges the Church’s organisational forms”, requiring the adoption of “differentiated criteria appropriate to different contexts, which do not contradict each other”.
Further on, in paragraph 97, the document suggests that one proposal emerging from the synodal process is the recognition of episcopal conferences’ doctrinal authority in regard to “the liturgical, disciplinary, theological and spiritual expressions appropriate to different sociocultural contexts”.
Against this background, Fisher told EWTN that he is “very concerned” and that Catholics must continue to “hold on to the deposit of faith, the apostolic tradition, [and] that we don’t imagine, in the vanity of our age, that we are going to reinvent the Catholic faith or the Catholic Church”.
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