LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2024: #2

The Church’s One Foundation

by Robert P. Imbelli

A critique repeatedly voiced in discussions over “synodality” is that the critic does not understand the meaning of the term. “What does ‘synodality’ even mean?” goes the lament. I suggest that the problem is other. It’s not that the term is unintelligible or lacks content; rather, it is hyper-saturated with content. And trying to do too much, its repeated use risks accomplishing little.

Let me offer one, not unrepresentative, example. Number 20 of the Instrumentum Laboris (Working Document) for the current session of the Synod reads:

The Church's synodal style offers humanity many important insights. In an age marked by increasing inequalities, growing disillusionment with traditional models of governance, democratic disenchantment and the dominance of the market model in human interactions, and the temptation to resolve conflicts by force rather than dialogue, synodality could offer inspiration for the future of our societies. Its attractiveness stems from the fact that it is not a management strategy but a practice to be lived and celebrated in a spirit of gratitude. The synodal way of living relationships is a social witness responding to the deep human need to be welcomed and recognized within a concrete community. Synodal practice challenges the growing isolation of people and cultural individualism, which even the Church has often absorbed, and calls us to mutual care, interdependence and co-responsibility for the common good. . . . The concreteness of the synodal process has shown how much the Church itself needs to grow in this dimension [emphases added]. 

Verses of T. S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton” spring to mind: 

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. 

Would not George Orwell counsel a more direct discourse and speak straightforwardly of a Catholic way that manifests a relational style, a dialogical practice, and a participative process? One could go on, then, and develop and illustrate the specific contours and contexts of each, without the burden of a too fraught term that veers widely and wildly from its original connotation.

Having just criticized the Instrumentum Laboris, let me now balance my assessment by acknowledging that, on some counts, it is a marked improvement over the preparatory document for the 2023 session. In particular, the section on “Foundations” shows a more adept theological hand at work.

For one thing, it insists that “Synodality is not an end in itself” (no. 9)—though one may be excused if at times, over the past three years, it had appeared so. And it continues:

Insofar as it offers the possibility of expressing the nature of the Church and insofar as it allows all the charisms, vocations and ministries in the Church to be valued, it enables the community of those who “look to Jesus in faith” (Lumen Gentium, 9) to proclaim the Gospel in the most appropriate way to women and men of every place and time, and to be a “visible sacrament” (ibid.) of the salvific unity willed by God. Synodality and mission are thus intimately linked. If the Second Session is to focus on certain aspects of synodal life, it does so with a view to greater effectiveness in mission.

“Greater effectiveness in mission.” So, the focus and intent is not a Church in-turned upon itself but a Church setting out on mission, keen for evangelization, for proclaiming the joy of the gospel, as Pope Francis exhorted eleven years ago in Evangelii Gaudium. Moreover, this “salvific unity willed by God” is a unity in Jesus Christ. 

Here we witness a second notable advance over last year’s document. The perspective is robustly Christocentric. A clear indication of this is that the preamble to the section on “Foundations” refers explicitly to the great definition of Church in Lumen Gentium: “In Christ, light of all the nations, we are one People of God, called to be a sign and instrument of union with God and of the unity of all humanity. We do this by walking together in history, living the communion that is a partaking in the life of the Trinity, and promoting the participation of all in view of our common mission.” The distinctive “in Christ,” too often omitted even in direct quotations, here rightly assumes primacy of place.

The preamble then further underscores its faith conviction, this time in direct quote: “‘Christ is the light of the nations’ (Lumen Gentium 1), and this light shines on the face of the Church, which ‘is in Christ as a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humanity.’” And it draws the inevitable conclusion: “[The Church] does not proclaim itself ‘but Christ Jesus the Lord’ (2 Cor 4:5). If this were not so, it would lose its being in Christ ‘as a sacrament’ (cf. Lumen Gentium, 1) and therefore, its own identity and raison d'être.”

The current Instrumentum Laboris then issues an important clarification, once again invoking the determinative “in Christ”:

In describing the Church, the notion of synodality is not an alternative to that of communion. In fact, in the context of the ecclesiology of the People of God illustrated by the Second Vatican Council, the concept of communion expresses the profound substance of the mystery and mission of the Church, which has its source and culmination in the celebration of the Eucharist, that is, in communion with the Triune God and the unity among human persons that is realized in Christ through the Holy Spirit [no. 7].

In effect these citations only echo the Apostle Paul’s inspired “dogma”: “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11). But it is a re-echoing, a catechesis of the Apostolic Tradition, so vitally needed in our time of “disillusionment and disenchantment”—both in Church and society.

One joins, then, in prayer with the participants in the Synod: that they may build faithfully on this one foundation. And that their own “conversations in the Spirit” resound to the theme St. John Henry Newman sounds in his sermon, “The Spiritual Presence of Christ in the Church.” Newman declares: “[The Holy Spirit] has not so come that Christ does not come, but rather He comes that Christ may come in His coming . . . . The Holy Spirit causes, faith welcomes, the indwelling of Christ in the heart. Thus the Spirit does not take the place of Christ in the soul, but secures that place to Christ.”

The Spirit does not replace Christ; the Holy Spirit confirms and seals Christ, the Church’s sole foundation, in our hearts.

Fr. Imbelli is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. His collected essays and reviews have been published as Christ Brings All Newness (Word on Fire Academic).

Credibility, Sanctity, and Beauty

by George Weigel 

Subtly in the Instrumentum Laboris, and quite openly in the formal announcement of the October 1 synodal “Penitential Celebration” in St. Peter’s Basilica, the managers of Synod-2024 suggest that the Catholic Church has a credibility problem that impedes its mission of proclaiming the gospel.

Institutional Catholicism certainly has credibility problems in many parts of the world. 

The Church parts of North America and Europe continue to forfeit credibility due to revelations of clerical sexual abuse, mishandled (or in some cases ignored) by ecclesiastical authorities. 

The unresolved Rupnik case is a bleeding credibility wound at the Roman center of the world Church. 

The Church in Latin America is only beginning to come to grips with what seem to be widespread, even massive problems of sexual abuse, including the use of remote Latin American dioceses as points of exile for clerical abusers from other parts of the world. 

But the ongoing abuse crisis is not the only Catholic crisis of credibility today.

Isn’t current Vatican policy toward the thug regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua creating a credibility problem for the Church? 

Hasn’t the ongoing scandal of allowing the Chinese Communist Party a role in the appointment of Catholic bishops created a credibility problem, not only in China but also in those parts of the world that look to the Holy See for moral leadership? 

Then there is the sad, unnecessary, but all-too-real credibility gap that exists today between the suffering Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Vatican, the result of intemperate and ill-informed commentary on Russia’s imperialist war of violent aggression in Ukraine by leading Rome-based churchmen. 

So yes, institutional Catholicism has a credibility problem.

But does the gospel?

Throughout a multiyear synodal process, it has been suggested by many of the main protagonists of this Synod on Synodality that the Church’s credibility problem is also a gospel credibility problem that can only be remedied by various changes, some of them dramatic, in the Church’s teaching, pastoral practice, and authority structures. 

At the level of pastoral practice, there are surely solvable problems. 

One of them is clericalism. Diaconal, priestly, and episcopal fraternity is one thing, and a good thing. That is not clericalism, which may be defined by reference to the Hindu caste system. Clericalism is the notion that those in Holy Orders, especially the priesthood and the episcopate, constitute a supreme caste of Catholic Brahmins, who can and should function autocratically. Where it exists, that problem can be remedied by a closer reading of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium); by a deeper reflection on St. Augustine’s Sermon on Pastors, which appears annually in the Liturgy of the Hours; and by reforms in seminary training and ongoing priestly formation. In many parts of the world Church, wise bishops and pastors already consult with their people on a host of questions—a fact that goes largely unrecognized in the Instrumentum Laboris. That experience of effective consultation and collaboration can be extended globally as particular circumstances allow. Solving the problem of clericalism need not involve any change in how the Church understands its sacramental system and structures of authority. All it requires, really, is a deep and thorough understanding of the meaning of the sacrament of Baptism for both individual Catholics and the Catholic community.

There is another way to address this question of a Catholic credibility crisis, however, and that is by attending to a particular teaching of Pope Benedict XVI—now buried in the Vatican grottos, and, alas, seemingly buried in the minds of many.

When he died, Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, was arguably the most learned man in the world. His remarkable intellect ranged over theology and biblical studies, to be sure, but he was also a gifted linguist and a close student of philosophy, history, and literature. And to top it all off, he could explain complex things without over-simplifying them. His capacity to teach the truths of Catholic faith was truly an exercise in the simplicity that lays on the far side of complexity.  

For all that he was a world-class intellect, though, Professor Ratzinger and Pope Benedict consistently taught that the two great warrants for the truth of Christianity—the two realities that underwrite the Church’s credibility—are sanctity and beauty: the holy men and women who conformed their lives to Christ and the gospel, and the beautiful music, art, sculpture, and literature that the gospel inspires. Yet as noted in “LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD-2024: #1,” “sanctity” and the “saints” are largely absent from the Synod-2024’s Working Document (three citations, with “holiness” mentioned ten times), while “synodality” and its cognates get 215 citations, and “process” and its plural get 58 mentions. Something is out of kilter here. 

Why are the saints so crucial to the credibility of the Church? Because saints, by living heroically the truths of the gospel, tell the world its true story, which the world has lost or forgotten. 

Almost a decade and a half ago, Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson penned a brilliant essay entitled “How the World Lost Its Story.” It bears reading and rereading. For the sake of concision, however, let me put the case in these terms: Insofar as anyone learns world history in a linear fashion today, the chapter headings go something like this—Ancient Civilizations; Greece and Rome; the Middle Ages; Renaissance and Reformation; the Age of Revolution; the Age of Science; the Space Age (or the Digital Age). The human story can certainly be told under those headings. To do so is to skim along the surface of history, however.

What the saints remind the world, through conforming their lives to the gospel, is that there is another story. Its chapter headings are these: Creation; Fall; Promise; Prophecy; Incarnation; Redemption; Sanctification; the Kingdom of God. 

Moreover, the saints by their example teach the world that these two stories—the linear “world history” story and the biblical story—do not run on parallel tracks. Rather, the biblical story is the linear “world history” story read at its proper depth and against its appropriately ample horizon. The biblical story, unfolding within the linear “world history” story, gives world history its true meaning, and confirms that “history” is neither cyclical nor random but going somewhere. Which is to say that life is pilgrimage and adventure, not just one damned thing after another.

Witnessing to that, the Church’s saints, who are the gospel enfleshed, underwrite the Church’s credibility.

Then there is beauty. 

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI knew that the late modern and postmodern worlds had lost their grip on two of the transcendentals, truth and goodness. Late modernity was unclear on how the truth of anything could be demonstrated at all. (This is one reason why progressive moral theologians came to insist—and some still do—that there is no such thing as an intrinsically evil act, or if there were, we couldn’t know such an act to be such in a particular instance.) Post-modernity concedes that there is “your truth” and “my truth” but insists that there is nothing properly describable as the truth—a prescription for what Ratzinger, in his sermon at the Mass “Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice” on April 18, 2005, would call the “dictatorship of relativism.” For if “your truth” and “my truth” collide and there is no horizon of judgment against which we can settle the argument, then you will impose your power on me, or I will impose my power on you: and thus is created a tyranny of moral relativism. 

As for goodness, well, one person’s goodness these days is another person’s wickedness, as the global debate over the life issues readily demonstrates.

How get out of this quicksand pit and get back onto more solid terrain? 

Beauty, Benedict XVI taught, was the often-forgotten third transcendental that, recovered, might help us recover our grip on truth and goodness. 

Take the experience of standing in Chartres cathedral as light streams through its dazzling stained-glass windows. In those moments, you’re immersed in beauty. You know that this is beauty, period, not just beauty-for-me. You also experience this undeniable beauty as something indisputably good. 

Reflecting on the experience of beauty, therefore, can re-open a credible Catholic conversation with the world about truth and goodness, in a kind of pre-evangelization of the gospel. 

The beautiful human creations that the gospel has inspired underwrite the Church’s credibility, as does the witness of the saints. One of those creations is the hymn “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name”—sometimes called the “Team Catholic Fight Song,” but in fact a rendering of the Church’s ancient hymn of praise, the Te Deum, which in its third verse links the holiness of the saints to the beauty and holiness of the Triune God (and which has never been better rendered than by the St. Olaf Choir). Let that noble hymn infuse and inspire Synod-2024, so that, amidst the chatter about structures, empowerment, and “process,” sanctity and beauty are recognized as the gospel-inspired best answers to any credibility problem the Church may have. 

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary

October 2, 2024

The difficulty in writing on the Synod, this time around, is that it’s now been covered from just about every imaginable angle, especially among its critics, and it’s long since become largely a set of social media memes and blurbs that hammer away at the same themes again and again. After all, there is only so much criticism with which one can freight the synodal train before the critics, myself included, start to look like cranks, out to torpedo the process before it has actually done anything of note. Like the two old Muppets in the balcony mocking even legitimate acts, the synodal critics run the risk of becoming cynical curmudgeons, throwing stones from a safe distance at people of good will while doing nothing themselves to advance the conversation.

Nevertheless, as the old saying goes, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Similarly, just because the Synod has been an occasion of endless criticism, it does not follow that the criticism is not justified. I had to remind myself of this as I was flying to Rome and feeling a bit jaded about the cottage industry of synodal criticism of which I’ve been a part. As soon as I got here to Rome, however, I was given a bracing ice bath of mind-clearing shock therapy in the form of the penance service held at the Vatican at the end of the pre-Synod retreat.   

I will not dilate on the easy target of the call to overcome our sins against synodality—a self-caricaturing chimera of intellectual vacuity and adolescent bravado—and would like to mention instead something I think is of far greater importance. And that is the penitential prayer of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, O.P., which asked forgiveness for the many times we may have used doctrine in uncharitable ways as a weapon against our neighbor. This is important, because it gives us a window into what “synodality” actually connotes in the minds of its chief protagonists.

Critics of the now three-year-old synodal process have pointed to the similarities in language and style between much of the synodal literature and the thought-forms and vocabulary of the progressive theologies that emerged in the aftermath of Vatican II. In and of itself, this is not necessarily alarming; it may even be mere coincidence. And the use of terms like “dialogue” and “inclusive listening” are capable of a thoroughly Catholic understanding of things. However, the Ariadne’s thread that runs throughout the labyrinth of progressive theologies is precisely a view of doctrine as largely an ecclesial social construct, invented almost entirely by white celibate men for the purpose of super-imposing a hierarchical, pyramidal authority structure on a Church that is in its essence—and by contrast—an egalitarian, democratic polity of the baptized.  

Like a palimpsest in need of a repristinating restoration, in this view the Church must be engaged in a “second Reformation,” wherein the varnished layers of ecclesial hierarchy are scraped away in order to reveal the true Church from beneath the surface. This is, by all metrics, a version of the Protestant historiography of the Church as a sad history of the slow decline from apostolic purity, to Constantinian corruption, to the imposition of a medieval-Gothic-Baroque inflation of the monarchical court model of governance on the entire Church. 

Those of us of a certain age remember these theologies well and suffered under them in the almost total control such narratives had in the Catholic academy and in seminaries. This is not a figment of our imagination nor did these theologies disappear from the Church, despite the best efforts of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Like a cancer in remission, it has now returned and threatens to metastasize throughout the Church, via the dulcet tones of prelates who speak of the sin of using doctrine as a weapon against the simple.  

People might say that I’m making too much of such language. But I am not. Because who is using doctrine as a weapon? Seriously, who? I suppose one can point to a few so-called traditionalists, who have freeze-framed the Tridentine Church as the apex of all things holy and good, as an example of weaponized doctrine. But they are an extreme minority, and therefore one is thoroughly justified in suspecting that the idea of doctrine being wielded as a weapon—and then foregrounded as one of the sins against synodality in a Vatican penance service—is a major red flag, a caution that worse things may come.

Pope Benedict often spoke of our era as marked by a crisis of truth, and more specifically as a crisis within the Church about the truth of her core evangel. He spoke of the crisis of faith in the very concept of an absolute revelation from God in Christ, now vouchsafed to his Church and underwritten in Word and Sacrament by Christ himself. He warned that in its place was a new ecclesiology grounded in largely sociological and political categories, wherein Church doctrines are treated as expressions of power that need deconstruction. In short, he spoke of the dangers associated with pitting “lived praxis” against truth, and “mercy” against doctrine.  

Pope Francis has thrown fuel on this fire throughout his papacy. He has spoken often of the obfuscating and unnecessary complexification of the faith by theology. He has spoken of the need for doctrine—especially moral doctrine—to be held up as an asymptotic goal which no one achieves, and which therefore justifies an almost simul iustus et peccator approach to pastoral practice. We have seen “accompaniment” and “discernment” used as weaponized terms in their own right, in order to caricature and dismiss those who, like John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, resist the conversion of the law of gradualism into a gradualism of the law.   

These are not idle fears. Pastoral sensitivity is indeed needed across the board in all phases of the Church’s life. But can anyone seriously argue that the thing that most characterizes the modern Church in the West is a draconian moral scrupulosity and an oppressive adherence to narrow construals of doctrinal definitions? Is it not true instead that our culture is marked by an excessive moral latitudinarianism, if not relativism, and a disdain for doctrine as useless pharisaism? 

As the Synod proceeds, watch for the false binary of opposition between doctrine and pastoral praxis. When it rears its head, know that there is more going on than meets the eye.

Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology at De Sales University and the co-founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Pennsylvania.

For Further Reading

Massimo Faggioli suggests that “it is well known that the diaconate for women is not and never has been doctrinally precluded”—a claim that will surely be contested if others raise it in the Paul VI Audience Hall over the next month, despite the pope having taken this debate off Synod-2024’s agenda: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/management-ministry.

Many have noted the absence of “LGBTQ” language from the Instrumentum Laboris for Synod-2024, some with satisfaction, others with dismay. Two rather different views on same-sex attraction and the call to constant conversion, which of course applies to all Christians, may be found here and here. The latter makes for powerful spiritual reading. 

On synodally weaponizing the abuse crisis, the seeming monolingualism of the Holy Spirit, and other issues raised for Synod-2024 by the German “Synodal Way”: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/german-synodality-and-the-world-church 

—XR II

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image by Fabio Poggi, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.