Liberal or conservative, goal of World Meeting of Families is unity

From the Art Museum to City Hall, filling Benjamin Franklin Parkway and flowing down Broad Street, as many as two million people may pour into Philadelphia when Pope Francis says Mass at the close of next year's World Meeting of Families.

Yet Francis and 99 percent of those crowds will never hear the beating heart of the six-day international gathering that will precede his Sept. 26 arrival.

Called the Congress of the World Meeting, it will offer a four-day encounter with the Catholic Church's teaching on that sometimes troubled, often beautiful thing called "family" as it plays out in the modern world.

The congress' six keynote addresses and 67 workshops will teach how to "support each other in the joys and struggles of life," its program proclaims. It is open to all faiths, and a quarter of its panelists are not Catholic.

But will the 15,000 expected to attend the congress encounter the inclusive "Who am I to judge?" tone of the surprisingly provocative Francis, who last month called bishops into a public, sometimes messy debate on divorce and remarriage, same-sex relationships, and other vexing family matters?

Or will the congress reflect the tone and style of Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput?

An unswerving traditionalist on family and life issues, Chaput once barred a lesbian couple from educating their children at a parochial school and has publicly cautioned church leaders - including Francis - against sowing confusion among the Catholic faithful on such matters.

"I was very disturbed," he said last month, by the way the bishops' gathering - whose agenda Francis had directed - left the impression that the church might change its prohibition on same-sex partnerships or remarriage after divorce.

"I think the public image that came across was one of confusion," he said. "Confusion is of the devil."

Chaput also made headlines last year when he warned that church conservatives "generally have not been really happy" with the newly elected pope's liberal-sounding views on homosexuality or his suggestion that the church had scolded too much about abortion and euthanasia.

Francis "has to talk about those things," Chaput insisted. But Paul Elie, an author who writes regularly about the Catholic Church, contends there are some things Chaput does not want the pope talking about.

"Chaput and others with him in the [Catholic conservative] hierarchy see the conversation on human sexuality as closed," Elie said. "They see the duty of the church is to enunciate its primal teachings."

To Chaput, the terms liberal and conservative "are not useful at all," and "lead to unneeded division."

"They're politically rooted," he told The Inquirer last week, "and they start from a flawed understanding of who and what the church is."

The world meeting, he said, "is not my program but the Holy Father's program."

John Allen, author of numerous books on the Catholic Church and a former Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, predicts Francis and Chaput will get along swimmingly come September because "in substance, they're not very different."

"They're both anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion and -euthanasia and -contraception," Allen said in a phone interview from Rome last week. "Francis is not a revolutionary on teachings.

"But in tone they're very different. Chaput over the years has been saying, 'We have to challenge the prevailing secular culture out there - be clear about what we stand for, even if it stirs up opposition.'

"But Francis wants to begin every conversation with, 'What do we agree on?' This is very much a guy of dialogue and outreach.

"That's the contrast," said Allen, "and that's why Francis is seen as a change agent. But he's not about a change in what the church teaches, but how it relates to those who don't agree with that teaching."

It appears that teaching - without any debate on what the Catholic Church should teach - is just what the world meeting will seek to do.

With 10 months to go before the Convention Center opens to the congress on Sept. 22, the meeting agenda suggests a contemporary tone with an emphatically orthodox message.

Six of the 13 workshops and breakout sessions for Sept. 23, for example, are distinctively Catholic. Their titles include "The Eucharist as the Model of the Family," "Marriage, a (Sacra)mental State," and "Fostering Vocations in the Home."

Others titles suggest a broader message: "The Power of Virtue," "Concerns for the Urban Family," "Loving the Elderly," "Responding to the Hookup Culture," "Addiction and Devotion," "Interfaith Marriage," "Struggling with Divorce," and "Navigating the Net."

"This is not an attempt to wrestle with the teachings of the church," said Kevin Hughes, associate professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, "but to deepen our understandings of its gifts."

"Eighty percent of the [workshop] content tries to respond to the challenges in the lives of families and individuals," Mary Beth Yount, director of content and programming for the world meeting, said last week.

The cost of admission to all four days of the congress will range from between $175 and $399 per adult, with the cost for children under 18 between $99 and $199. One-day admission will be $95 for adults and $25 for children, who will have their own workshops and programming.

An assistant professor of theology at Neumann University, Yount gathered a team that helped the archdiocese create the congress agenda, which was then vetted by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family.

Visitors hoping for a whiff of Francis' inclusive ways will not, however, hear divorced and remarried Catholic panelists speak of the anguish of being excluded from receiving Holy Communion. Nor will they hear from same-sex partners about raising children in a church that calls their orientation "disordered."

Instead, the only openly gay person enrolled to speak is a man who says he is a celibate virgin because the church holds that sex outside marriage is sinful.

Further signs of the congress' orthodoxy may be evident in its stipulation that any clergy or religious wishing to register must submit a letter stating that they are in the good standing of their diocese or order.

To the question of whether the world meeting will have a "Franciscan" or "Chaputian" feel, Yount said it was a "false dichotomy."

"The Pontifical Council and the archdiocese and the Vatican are aligned in supporting this exciting content," she said, calling it "very supportive to families in real-life situations."

Auxiliary Bishop John J. McIntyre, who is coordinating the international gathering for the archdiocese, agreed.

The world meeting will "present the teachings of Christ in a way that's consistent throughout the whole church," he said, while "geared towards the things people face day in and day out."

And despite the debate and media attention in North America and Europe over welcoming same-sex partnerships into the life of the church or allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion, these are topics of only passing concern in other parts of the Catholic world, McIntyre noted.

For example, he said, one of the great vexations for some African bishops is people who convert to Catholicism while in polygamous marriages. "They say, 'I have five wives. What do I do?' "

Though polygamy will not be one of the topics at the congress, families separated by immigration or imprisonment will be. "One of the speakers," McIntyre said, "is a Palestinian whose son was incarcerated by the Israelis."

Chaput told a news briefing last week that the archdiocese expected visitors from at least 153 nations would attend the world meeting.

William Madges, professor of theology and religious studies at St. Joseph's University, said it appeared the congress would be a "celebration of traditional families from a Catholic perspective: an occasion to say, 'What are the challenges families experience in their cultures?' "

Its most significant cultural divide appears not to be liberal-conservative, he said, but geographical. "The majority of these workshops seem geared," he said, "towards issues in a U.S. or Western European content."

Allen, an editor at the Boston Globe's special website, Crux, devoted to the Catholic Church, said he knows many conservative, "strict constructionist" bishops who feel the pope has aligned himself with the "merciful, compassionate camp," and "that Francis is not really with" the conservatives.

"But I think he'll be extremely respectful and positive about Chaput when he's in Philadelphia," Allen predicted. "There'll be no perception of distance, only comity and rapport.

"And in many ways, that serves Francis politically. He needs to be everybody's pope, and he's not a dumb guy. Most of his problems are with conservatives.

"So by coming to Philadelphia, following the program Chaput puts together, and being respectful and laudatory," Allen said, "all of that sends a signal to church conservatives that says: 'I am not your enemy.' "