Alongside more than 1,200 other participants, the team from the Seminar of Canon Law attended the European Academy of Religion’s annual conference in Vienna 8–12 July 2025. The five-day event featured keynotes and interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of theology, law, cultural studies, and social studies.
On 9 July 2025, Ryszard Bobrowicz, Visiting Professor of Comparative Law and Religion, chaired a panel entitled “Receiving Synodality in Global Catholicism”, alongside Professors Bryan Froehle (Palm Beach Atlantic University) and Massimo Faggioli (Trinity College). Speakers from the Australian Catholic University, KU Leuven, LMU Munich, and the University of Marburg presented papers on synodality in the global Catholic sphere. Topics included the role of female experts in the Synod, linguistic approaches to binaries in the Synod’s final document, legal aspects of the German “Synodaler Weg” and the ecumenical dimensions of synodality.
On 11 July 2025, Ryszard Bobrowicz and Judith Hahn chaired the panel “Ecclesial Order(s) for the Third Millennium”. In this panel, Antonia Wojaczek presented her paper, “Ubi societas, ibi ius? Amoris Laetitia, Fiducia Supplicans and the Pastoral Turn in Canon Law”, offering a critical perspective on the pastoral approach of Pope Francis. Mara Albracht presented her paper, “From Coercion to Consent: Realigning c. 1395 § 3”, proposing changes to the current ecclesiastical legislation concerning clerical sexual misconduct against adults. Taylor Ott, Travis Lacouter, and Kim Mendoza from KU Leuven contributed papers offering an ecclesiological perspective. Ott demonstrated the limits of what is considered to be Pope Francis’s global turn. Lacouter showed the potential of Christian anarchist thought for global Catholicism in the third millennium. Mendoza expanded the ecclesiological concept of the church as a polyhedron, drawing inspiration from materials science in her paper, “Shapes of Authority in a Synodal Church: Inverted Pyramid and Polyhedron”. Christoph Koller (University of Freiburg) addressed the implementation of secular legal principles from the perspective of canon law, suggesting the analogous concept of “Rechtskirchlichkeit” as a guidance of ecclesiastical constitution. Katja Zimmermann (University of Groningen) quite literally expanded the scope of the panel beyond the earth by discussing the implications of Catholic Social Teaching in the context of the new race to space, which promises to solve the problem of resource scarcity on Earth. Ryszard Bobrowicz concluded the panel by presenting an “Ecclesial Vision Behind Dignitatis Humanae: 60 Years Later”, proposing a new interpretation of the document and its ecclesial vision.
The panel sparked lively discussions among the speakers and attendees. We look forward to continuing this successful collaboration in the future.