• Dreher
• John Travis
• Elizabeth Scalia
• NY Times
• RR Reno on First Things
• Andrew Sullivan: “Yes this is a pastoral revolution”
• CNN: Vatican Backtracks
• Dreher on “Does Synod matter?”
• “Mercy for Heterosexuals?”
• Snippets from The Dish on Theocon’s reactions
• Douthat
• Dreher: As churches do, they come to believe.
• Dreher: Pope Francis: Liberal Machiavelli?
• Synod Day 9: Bishops to the world: “Never mind”
• Damon Linker: Francis’ Machiavellian strategy to libereralize the RC
• Terry Mattingly on the camps
• Sullivan on the push back
• American Liberal Catholics 
• Dreher: what if Conservatives resist Francis 
• http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/world/europe/no-consensus-at-vatican-as-synod-ends-.html
• The end of Papal Authority 
• Synod on the Family and the Developing World
• Andrew Sullivan Interprets Ross Douthat’s Piece
• Damon Linker on Culture War coming to Rome
• • http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/why-i-am-a-catholic
  • And Sullivan’s Response
  • Douthat again
  • http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/the-synod-and-the-single-catholic/

From Synod of the Family and the Developing World

Try as it may, the Church under Francis seems to be unable to resist scratching the sores of Western sexuality. The consuming obsessions of the West, now in the terminal phases of the sexual and cultural revolutions that have swept over it for more than half a century, are dominating the Church’s agenda once again. At the Pope’s insistence, the bishops did a reset, plunging the Church into renewed debate over divorce and homosexuality and cutting short the conversation that the Pope had earlier invited over famine, persecution and want. With Islamist terrorist groups like Boko Haram recently murdering 2500 Catholics in one Nigerian diocese alone, and with Christian children being crucified or cut in half by ISIS, you might think that the world’s bishops would have more pressing things on their mind than the compatibility of same-sex unions with Church teaching. You would, of course, be wrong.

Indeed, even considering “family” issues alone, the non-Western Church was short-changed: how much attention was given to the question of inter-faith marriages, despite its being a major concern for the Church in India? In the Philippines, many marriages break up because poverty forces a spouse or parent to migrate overseas in search of employment, leaving home, spouse and children behind. Philippine Cardinal Luis Tagle noted this problem, saying that poverty “goes right at the heart of the family” in his country ; but how much attention did this issue get?

From the Comments on the second Dreher piece

You are not wrong in fact but you are very wrong in emphasis. The essential fact here is that doctrine is, in the end, the only thing that can, or will, solidly ground behavior. That is to say: in the end, it is only the truth — or, in the event, the particular error or illusion that is believed in its place — that will be a certain support and guide for behavior.

And this is exactly where the Roman church, and where the Orthodox church, too, has failed: in emphasizing doctrine in a pastorally effective way.

Dreher gets to preaching in this post

The ultimate purpose has to be to unite souls with God, through Christ. I think it is a legitimate pastoral question as to whether or not the best way to do this is through strict proclamation of and adherence to doctrine, or through merciful toleration of those who fall short. In fact, I strongly believe both approaches are required, depending on the situation. The mistake some conservatives make is believing that following the Law will save you; the mistake some liberals make is believing that the Law is irrelevant — that is, that God doesn’t really care how you behave (at least in terms of your sex life, which in the US is the great point of division between the Christian left and the Christian right).