He pointed to the fact that the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications has been led for several years by a layman, Paolo Ruffini.
“There is no danger to the nature of the Church,” Czerny added, “because there are responsibilities which are already being — and in some cases are already — entrusted to non-cardinals, non-bishops, non-priests.”
Archbishop Dabula Anthony Mpako of Pretoria, South Africa, said at the same briefing that he believes it is commonly accepted that “synodality must coexist with the hierarchical structure of the Church.”
“I don’t think that is under any question,” he continued. “However, what we are probably wanting to see is how the two can work in such a way that synodality begins to infuse the way the hierarchical structure of the Church operates.”
Adding that he is “not at all worried about that,” the archbishop said, “in the Catholic Church, synodality has a unique character, [because] it is a synodality at the center of which there is the chair of Peter, the pope.”
“At the end of the day, hierarchy goes together with synodality,” he said.