LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2024: #7

In 1827 or thereabouts, Felix Mendelssohn attended G. W. F. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics at the University of Berlin. Those were the days in which Mendelssohn was writing the charming overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, while pondering how he might revive Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which hadn’t been performed since Bach died in 1750—a feat Mendelssohn pulled off in 1829, earning the everlasting gratitude of all musically-inclined humanity. In that same period, Mendelssohn was attending a glittering dinner party in Berlin when a bejeweled woman sitting beside him asked, “Who is that gentleman across the table, speaking so intensely?” “That, my dear lady,” the young composer replied, “is the great philosopher, Hegel.”

A similar lack of recognition might be said to characterize the Synods of 2014, 2015, 2018, 2023, and now 2024. In each of these exercises, claims have been made, redolent of some aspects of Hegel’s thought, that we live in the raging torrent of history, trying to stay afloat and navigate without stable reference points. The matter is never quite put so baldly. What is said—and ever more intensely at Synod-2024—is that “lived experience” is the starting point for the Church’s doctrine, theology, and pastoral practice. And if that “lived experience” contradicts what had seemed to be the Church’s settled understanding of God’s revealed will for humanity’s flourishing and, ultimately, salvation, then what once seemed settled must be tossed overboard to keep the Barque of Peter afloat: or to use one of Synod-2024’s preferred buzzwords, “credible.”    

It’s almost certainly the case that the great majority of the 368 participants in the Synod proper, and those who make up the Off-Broadway parallel “synod” of interest groups and lobbies—the two groups intersect in the energetic person and synodal activity of Fr. James Martin, S.J.—would not recognize this quasi-Hegelian privileging of history over revelation for what it is. Nonetheless, that was one of the dynamics at work in the 2014–15 Synod’s discussion on reception of Holy Communion by the divorced and remarried, in Synod-2018’s discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in the context of Catholic youth ministry, and now in the 2023–2024 Synod’s discussions on “synodality.” If John Henry Newman, now canonized, was the hidden father of the Second Vatican Council, then Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is not going to be canonized, may well be the hidden father of recent synodal history.

If Christianity is not revealed religion, then it is false religion. If the Church’s understanding of the meaning of divine revelation can change so fundamentally that what was true teaching in the letters of St. Paul, and even in the teaching of the Lord himself, can now be modified or altered by the flow of history and “lived experience,” then the Catholic Church is incoherent. And if the Church is incoherent, it cannot evangelize.  

If the Church cannot say that X is true over time, irrespective of historical and cultural circumstances, then it becomes the Church of Maybe, the Church of Perhaps, in which no one will be seriously interested. Evangelization is short-circuited and Catholicism becomes simply another international non-governmental organization in the good works business. 

Today’s LETTER offers reflections on this crucial issue in two contrasting but complementary keys. XR II  

He Is the Paradigm of the Invisible God,
the First-Born of All Creation

by Robert P. Imbelli

Years back, when Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its notion of “paradigm shifts,” was all the rage, the New Yorker featured one of its wry cartoon commentaries. It showed a businessman, returning from a three-martini lunch, greeted by his secretary with the portentous announcement: “While you were gone, the following paradigm shifts have taken place!”

The cartoon emerged unbidden from my memory as I tried to parse the preliminary report presented to the Synod by Study Group 9, tasked with elaborating “Synodal theological and methodological criteria for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues.” I have already commented on the numbing overuse of the word “synodal” in the rash of documents churned out by the “synodal process.” How refreshing, had Study Group 9 straightforwardly declared their intention to elaborate “Gospel criteria for shared discernment.” But then it would have had to confront squarely the determinative question of where ultimate authority resides. What criterion governs authentic discernment in the Spirit? And this question Study Group 9’s report unfortunately and crucially fudges.

Early on, the report does speak of “contextual fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus, who is ‘the same yesterday today and always’ (Heb. 13:8).” But as one reads further it is the “contextual” that seems to prevail, buttressed by rhetorical flourishes like “innovative and creative,” “vitally inhabiting the experience of faith in its personal and social relevance,” and “in keeping with reality.” All the above marshaled toward endorsing “the invention (in the original meaning of ‘finding’ and ‘testing’) of both theological criteria and conditions of operational possibility involved in the paradigm shift being propagated by the synodal process” [italics in original]. One may be excused if one discerns, amidst the verbiage, an option for “invention” in its rather ordinary and not “original” sense.

Woefully missing in the report is any intimation of the living presence of the Lord Jesus who is both bridegroom and judge of his Church, as the Book of Revelation attests. Missing is the living presence of the One who declares that “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given me”—with the subsequent injunction to “go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:18, 20).

At issue, then, is not the report’s concern against “applying abstract doctrinal principles” or its lament over “the barren scleroticism of verbal pronouncements.” Rather, at stake is its failure to illuminate and proclaim to a confused and conflicted postmodernity the true freedom of new life in and through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of the Church and Savior of the world.

One cannot help but contrast the report’s calculated meanderings with the bold confidence of the writings of the Apostle Paul who proclaims “Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5). Paul’s life-changing conviction is that since “one has died for all . . . those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor. 5:14, 15). Nor does one find in the report any hint of Paul’s confident consequence: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17).

Absent from the report is any sense of the transformative newness that permeates the New Testament, any sense of the Christ who transforms and does not canonize culture. And this flows directly from the absence in the report of a substantive engagement, not with contemporary experience or the contextual Zeitgeist, but with the Paschal Mystery of Christ.

So, the report urges that “we must begin in history and its narration—that is, from experiences, relationships and events—in order to recognise in them an invitation for the good.” But there is no acknowledgement that with “the good” there is inevitably mixed “the evil,” that the potential hearer of the Word is ineluctably a sinner. Thus, we are indeed called, as the report says, to a “complete and challenging conversion.” But what the report fails to say, and what is at the heart of the New Testament, is that the conversion in question is a conversion to Christ.

The report several times references “God’s universal salvific will.” Though not cited, presumably the appeal is to First Timothy: “God desires all to be saved”; but, though often omitted, the verse continues, “and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). The truth: not that to which Jesus nods or which he dimly limns, but the truth who is Jesus himself (John 14:6). It is into this paschal truth that the Christian is baptized and assumes a new identity in Christ. And the Christian life is an ever-fuller immersion into this new life in Christ. Here Paul’s prayer is indeed paradigmatic. “That I may know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that, if possible, I may attain the resurrection of the dead” (Phil. 3:10, 11).

Paul certainly realizes that the Christian journey, the “process” of transformation in Christ, is not yet “perfected” even in him, but he (and we) “press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil. 3:12). And what Paul desires for himself, he ardently desires for all those to whom he proclaims Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24): namely, by God’s grace, he “may present everyone mature (teleios) in Christ” (Col. 1:28).

The New Testament articulates the uniqueness and originality of the One who is “the first-born of all creation,” “in whom all things hold together,” and who is “head” of the new reality that is the Church (see Colossians 1:15–20) in many and diverse ways. It confesses Jesus Christ as the very “Word [logos] who is God” (John 1:1). It celebrates him as “the image [eikon] of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). It designates him as the “stamp [charaktēr] of God’s being” (Heb. 1:3). And literally at the end he pronounces himself “Alpha and Omega” (Rev. 22:13). It does not, however, speak of him as “paradigm” (paradeigma = pattern or model)—though I don’t think that need in principle be excluded. But, in all these forays into the ineffable, what emerges forcefully is that, for the disciples, there is no going beyond Jesus, only the ever-renewed striving to catch up to him, to his love and truth, his mercy and justice. Not to “appropriate” Jesus Christ, but to be appropriated by him.

It is noteworthy that the one place where a derivative of “paradigm” does appear in the New Testament is in the Letter to the Hebrews. And there it assumes a decidedly negative coloration. The context is instructive.

The author of Hebrews chastises certain members of his community for having become “dull of hearing.” He discerns that they need to learn anew “the first principles of God’s word,” still, sadly, requiring the milk of neophytes rather than the solid food of adults in faith (see Hebrews 5:11–15). And he warns that those who had once been enlightened (evidently in baptism) and have fallen away, in effect are “crucifying once again the Son of God and holding him up to contempt [paradeigmatizontas]” (Heb. 6:6). By their inattention and infidelity, they belittle the One who is “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb. 5:9).

Thus, the only “paradigm shift” worth pursuing, for the author of Hebrews, is the one that turns again to “Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2). And he would surely join his brother Paul in exhorting all on the Way, whether synodal or simply Christian, “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:1, 2).

May we each, whatever our “context,” hear and heed the apostolic voice!

Robert Peter Imbelli is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and author of Rekindling the Christic Imagination (Liturgical Press) and Christ Brings All Newness (Word on Fire Academic).

Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary

October 13, 2024

Whenever my wife and I come to Rome, we always make a pilgrimage to the Church of St. Augustine to pray at the tomb of St. Augustine’s mother, St. Monica. We bring with us innumerable prayer petitions from friends and relatives asking us to pray for their children who have either strayed from the faith or are trending in that direction. We repeated this pilgrimage last week, whereupon I posted to social media a photo of my wife, Carrie, praying at St. Monica’s tomb. That post garnered the largest response I have ever gotten to anything I have ever posted on social media, and that is saying a lot.  

Evidently, the topic of young people falling away from the faith struck a nerve which is, as almost everyone knows these days, corroborated by the sad statistics of how much the Church is hemorrhaging young people from her pews. The causes of this sad reality are, no doubt, multi-focal but one thing is certain: This phenomenon is not limited to the Catholic Church and there is a steep decline in religiosity among the young in Western liberal cultures across the spectrum of differing belief systems. Therefore, one is justified in identifying secularity as such as a key contributing factor—if not the central factor—in this erosion of religious faith in the West.  

This is a sociological reality that, strangely, usually goes unmentioned by progressive Catholics, who continue to press the argument that the only way for the Church to staunch the hemorrhaging of young people is to agitate for the Church to change many of her more “unpopular” teachings in order to bring them into conformity with secular modernity. For example, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, Germany (president of the German episcopal conference), has stated, in response to the fact that the German Church has lost almost 1.7 million adherents over the past five years, that this proves the necessity of following through on the putative reforms of the German Synodale Weg (Synodal Path). Never mind that the German Protestant churches—all whom have already instituted these secularizing changes for decades now—have suffered even steeper declines. Never mind all of this, because the narrative of “reform as secular liberalization” must go forward at all costs, even if its effectiveness as a pastoral strategy has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a null set.

We saw this same argument put forward yet again the other day, at a Synod-2024 press briefing where Deacon Geert De Cubber of Belgium made the claim that, unless the Church pursues a “synodal path” without turning back, the Church in Belgium will not survive. As per usual at this Synod, he did not bother to define what he meant by synodality. Nor did he address the causes for why the Belgian Church, which is by all outward metrics already moribund and on life support, is in such dire straits already. Indeed, one cannot but be amazed by the outsized influence of Europeans at the Synod, since the dioceses they represent constitute a living witness to what should not be done pastorally. 

What is emerging at this Synod is that the goal of progressive Catholics is not simply a Church that “listens” more to the laity, but a Church that listens only to those lay people who seek changes to the Church’s perennial teachings on sexual morality and women’s ordination. Anything short of this is deemed a “disappointment” and a “failure” of the synodal process. Latent within these assertions is the idea that a listening Church is a more “democratic” Church, wherein the majority opinion of lay people in the secular West should be taken as indicators of the Holy Spirit speaking to the Church. Therefore, failure to act on these allegedly populist impulses is also a failure to obey the promptings of the “Spirit.”  

Further evidence of this progressive narrative and its project may be found in the report given to the synodal assembly by the Study Group on controversial issues in moral theology established by Pope Francis. Space precludes a lengthy rehearsal of its various arguments. Suffice it to say that it is a call for a return to the proportionalist moral theologies that were definitively rejected by Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor. What this amounts to, as we saw in past iterations of these theologies, is a baptizing of the sexual revolution via the path of reducing all moral decision making to a consideration of “lived experiences” in all our “complex circumstances.” In other words, and to stay on my main point, it is a call for a radical shift away from the Church’s perennial teachings grounded in natural law, and toward a more capacious embrace of the sexual values of modern secularity.

Returning then to where I began, the question arises as to the pastoral strategy involved here for regaining some evangelical traction with young Catholics. And from where I stand, there are far too many simplistic answers to this problem being proffered on both sides of the ecclesial aisle. The path of doubling-down on secularity is clearly a dead-end, and one hopes that Synod-2024 resists the siren song of worldly popularity that important synodal leaders seem to be singing. But equally problematic is the assertion of many so-called traditionalists that the dead-end of secularity means that we must engage in a scorched-earth rejection of all things modern—a rejection that includes Vatican II and the post-Vatican II magisterium—and return to a largely High Medieval/Tridentine/Baroque Church of Latin Masses and a claustrophobically narrow reading of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation). 

I had a conversation the other day with a religious sister who works in Rome, who pointed out that “average Catholics” simply do not care about Synod-2024. They do not know what it is or, in most cases, even that it is. She stated that the concerns of most, hidden underneath their opinions on various “issues,” are the perennial concerns to see in the Church something supernatural, something of God, and something that shows that Christ is indeed real and alive.  

But is our synodal “listening” attuned to this tonality? The tones of the supernatural? I am reminded of a brief interview I saw the other day with the popular historian Tom Holland (author of the wonderful book Dominion), who stated boldly that the only true path forward for the Church is to make Christianity “weird” again by way of emphasizing, in every way imaginable, the reality of the supernatural. And to go on from there to a reiteration of the Church’s core message: that all things in this world are a sacramental, iconic, and epiphanic eruption into time and space of a “Kingdom not of this world.” 

The re-weirding of Christianity would make for a great Synod. Because the current one is a colossal bore and a monumental pastoral exercise in missing the point.

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 Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania.

Image in the public domain.