11/07/2025 08:30
- 16:15
HALL: Lecture Hall 33
Proponent:
Bobrowicz R.
Chair:
Faggioli M.,
Froehle B.,
Hahn J.
Speaker:
Albracht M.,
Bobrowicz R.,
Koller C.,
Lacouter T.,
Mendoza K.S.,
Ott T.,
Wojaczek A.,
Zimmermann K.
Two millennia after Christ, seventeen centuries after the Council of Nicaea, a millennium following the Gregorian Reform, and sixty-five years since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church continues to explore its identity as a truly global community. With Europe's long-standing dominance waning and after centuries of centralization, the Church faces numerous internal and external challenges, ranging from sexual abuse and financial scandals to the shifting demographics of the global Catholic population and the imperative to address colonial legacies. Pope Francis has proposed sweeping reforms emphasizing synodality, pastoral sensitivity, and renewed approaches to canon law and doctrine. All this poses multiple questions. What sort of reforms will address the complex challenges of the third millennium? How might they meet the needs of local Catholic communities in their profound diversity and the tension between unity and uniformity? How can they bridge divides exacerbated by polarization? From Catholic constitutionalism to the polyhedron church, from questions of epistemic justice to recognizing spaces for divergent views and dissent from authoritative decisions, this panel examines challenges of current approaches to ecclesiology, canon law, ethics, and many others as a starting point for re-imagining how Global Catholicism might emerge over forthcoming centuries. In other words, we seek to open a conversation on ecclesial order(s) in the third millennium.