Most major “modernization” efforts in the Roman Catholic Church tend to be something of a wash: not modern enough to please the progressive liberals in places like Germany and Chicago; offensive in kind to the traditionalists in Texas and Poland; and straight-up confusing to most regular Catholics. Whether Pope Francis intended so or not, this seems to be the direction in which the Synod on Synodality is going.
To be clear, the synod isn’t over, although the 363 voting delegates who traveled to Rome to participate will be heading home next week after the conclusion of their meeting on meetings on Sunday. Delegates are to continue the “synodal process” in their diocese, they’ll reconvene around this time in 2024 to advise the pope on the text of the document to be published in November of that year. (READ MORE: On Becoming Catholic)
At the Pillar, editor-in-chief JD Flynn recently proposed that the synod is likely to be something of a non-event (he compared it to “departure” and “bottle” episodes in television). The extremes of the synod are so opposed to one another that, as Flynn says, “I’m told … the lion’s share of participants will push back if the document takes hard positions on controversial issues.” In other words, it may be that no decisions are made or changes determined because the synod has been paralyzed by disagreement.
The Methodology of Synodality
The synod was attended by more than 360 delegates — a total that included a large number of non-bishops with the ability to vote. We likely won’t ever get a full picture of what happened in Rome this month: Participants were “bound to confidentiality and discretion regarding both their own interventions and the interventions of other participants,” Catholic News Agency reports, and that “duty remains in force once the synodal assembly has ended.”
At the outset of the meeting, participants were handed a document — Instrumentum laboris — that laid out the topics up for discussion along with the “question for discernment”:
Which distinctive signs of a synodal Church emerge with greater clarity and which deserve greater recognition or should be particularly highlighted or deepened?
Participants were then divided into groups, sat down at large round tables, and told to discuss topics and fill out worksheets based on the Instrumentum laboris before coming up with reports on their findings. The topics broadly included a “communion that radiates”; “[c]o-responsibility in Mission”; and “[p]articipation, governance and authority.” They were supposed to discuss while keeping in mind the opinions and experiences of Catholics in their localities.
Technically, the synodal process began in 2021 with a series of parish and diocesan surveys — surveys that, in some parts of the world, received very little traction. For instance, in the United States, only about 1 percent of 66.8 million Catholics participated in the “listening sessions,” according to the Catholic Telegraph, and the U.S. was not alone by a long shot.
A Storm of Hot-Button Issues
The synod has received plenty of international criticism. In a letter leaked just before the Rome gathering, Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen criticized synod organizers of “manipulation and pursuing an agenda rather than allowing for authentic ecclesiastical discourse,” Catholic News Agency reports. He also expressed concern about the German Synodal Way, during which some participants called for radicalizing the church by allowing for female priests and blessing same-sex marriages, among other changes.
Those kinds of radical issues have dominated discussion during the synod. On one side of the aisle, the Washington Post reports that “[a] ‘cohort’ of nuns favoring female ordination, and especially female deacons, has formed at the synod.” Meanwhile, a participant “said he felt ‘violated’ by the idea of female priests,” and Eastern Orthodox participants just shrugged their shoulders, saying they didn’t understand the “obsession” with female clergy.
Pope Francis did manage to clarify the issue on Tuesday when an interview he previously gave was released. “Holy Orders is reserved for men,” he said, calling it theologically problematic. The ordination of women wouldn’t increase mass attendance or grow the Church, he argued: “Lutherans ordain women, but still few people go to church. Their ministers can marry, but despite that, they can’t grow the number of ministers. The problem is cultural.” (READ MORE: Meet the Polish Family Martyred by the Nazis)
Nonetheless, a draft of the synodal report, leaked to the Pillar, suggests that some synod participants haven’t ruled out female diaconate, although the number of those in support seems fairly small:
[F]or some, this step would be unacceptable because they consider it a discontinuity with Tradition. For others, however, granting women access to the diaconate would restore the practice of the Early Church. Others, still, discern it as an appropriate and necessary response to the signs of the times, faithful to the Tradition, and one that would find an echo in the hearts of many who seek new energy and vitality in the Church.
Another major hot-button issue has been the blessing of same-sex marriages, which broke international news when the Vatican published its response to the dubia submitted by several cardinals. The pope has said, in the past, that “God cannot bless sin,” and reiterated in that letter that, by definition, marriage is between a man and woman, and gay marriage is, therefore, impossible in the Church. Nonetheless, the response indicated that it could be possible for some blessings to be given outside of the marital sacrament. (RELATED by Aubrey Gulick: More Confusion From Rome Ahead of the Synod on Synodality)
That being said, some participants expressed frustration that the “draft synodal text did not take a more firm position on controversial moral issues raised in connection to the synod.” Those delegates had hoped that the synod would “advance the prospect of liturgical blessings for same-sex couples.”
But what may turn out to be one of the most controversial synod suggestions is less moral and more theological. Hotly contested, according to the Pillar, is the draft document’s definition of the term sensus fidei, which traditionally refers to the fact that “the whole body of the faithful … cannot err in matters of belief.” Some bishops are criticizing the synod’s claiming that sensus fidei “consists in certain connaturality with divine realities and the aptitude to grasp what conforms to the truth of faith intuitively.” These bishops argue that the definition could suggest “that a representative sample of Catholics could demonstrate the orthodoxy of some doctrinal claim.” Essentially, if you took a survey of a random selection of Catholics, whatever they agreed upon would be doctrinal truth.
From a concrete standpoint, the draft reportedly advises that Rome establish a “permanent synod of bishops” to advise the Pope — a suggestion against which many participants seem ready to push back — and introduce “continental assemblies.”
Of course, this is just the unfinished draft of a report to be published soon and further scrutinized before the final document is released in 2024. In other words, we’re up for more debate and far from finished with the Synod on Synodality.
But, for good or ill, the synod, at least at this stage, seems destined to leave everyone dissatisfied over something — which is often the case with meetings, isn’t it?
