The Papacy: Calling Workers and Bishops

Looking rather like a visitor to Dante’s Inferno, Pope Paul VI last week stood before a blazing blast furnace and watched as sputtering molten iron ore was poured into ingots. The Pope was visiting the Italsider steel plant in the Southern Italian town of Taranto, where, true to a promise he had made last month, he celebrated Christmas Eve Mass for 7,000 steelworkers and their families. In his sermon, delivered from an altar made of rolled steel slabs, Paul deplored the “separation and lack of understanding” that divides the worlds of labor and religion. “It almost seems that there is no common language be tween you and us,” he said. “But this estrangement has no reason to exist. The church knows you, studies you, interprets you and defends you, much more than you often think.”

The Pope last week was also concerned about estrangement within the church. Shortly before his visit to Taranto, he announced that he was summoning a second synod of bishops to meet in Rome, starting next Oct. 11.

The purpose, he said, would be to “discuss the best ways to assure a better cooperation and more profitable contacts between the various episcopal conferences and the Holy See.”

The Vatican has sent questionnaires to bishops’ conferences, asking for opinions on how the session should be organized. Unquestionably, one issue that will be raised is the timing and content of a second major statement on birth control, which the Pope also promised last week. Thanks to the Vatican’s laggard communications methods, his encyclical Humanae Vitae was released to the press before most of the world’s bishops had received their copies. Its teaching, moreover, disturbed a number of national hierarchies, which subsequently modified its harsh condemnation of contraception as an absolute moral evil. The new encyclical, many bishops hope, will not only provide more clarity but also reflect a larger consensus of Catholic opinion.