The Synod on Synodality is just around the corner in October and already one can feel the excitement building among rank-and-file Catholics for what promises to be the first time the Church . . .
. . . has ever really listened to them.
At least, that is what synodal cheerleaders like Austen Ivereigh and Massimo Faggioli are breathlessly announcing, claiming that the Holy Spirit has finally broken through the cracks in the ecclesial sidewalk and is ushering in a new era of “being Church”.
Larry Chapp to the rescue:
Never mind that only 1-2% of Catholics worldwide participated in the listening sessions. Never mind that the potted-questions they were handed were not the result of the scientific, well-established protocols for poll taking or opinion gathering.
Instead, they were the product of ecclesiastics out of their depth who thus framed leading questions such as: “What is your experience of exclusion and inclusion in the Church?”
Ask yourself, what’s your main complaint?
Besides . . . the vast majority of Catholics probably do not even know that such a Synod on Synods is even taking place.
My sacramentally verified life partner, daily mass-going and all, knew nothing of it until an excellent sermon-time explanation we both listened to the other day. First ever on the subject, my friend!
Yes, and the headline was in jest, my friend. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are not availing themselves of the once-in-a-lifetime chance to sound off to the finally (! first time in how many years?) listening church! All these years of it doing all the talking, telling us what to do and think!
Now is clearly the hour for the rise of the listening church, this “conversation in the Spirit” and “pneumatological reconfiguration of the Church.” Glory be.
Of course, the e-world is full of the sound of praise from officialdom, with even a goodly amount of — may we say it? — damnation, or at least gainsaying. You could start by consulting the very horses’ mouth of it all, the synod’s working paper, “instrumentum laboris,” in which, says our man Chapp, “the Holy Spirit is assigned a role as enormous as it is vague and smoky, devoid as it is of criteria that would attest to the authenticity and validity of what is meant to be said and done in His name.”
Vague and smoky, is it? devoid of criteria that would attest to the authenticity and validity of what is meant to be said and done in His name, is it?
God knows what will come of it, you might say — fervently and confidently or sardonically and dismissively as the case may be.
It is to wonder about this process, which Chapp finds in this working paper a “rather pallid Christological vision.”
So much for Chapp for now. What about our holy father? Consider what he said in more recent comments on synodality, compliments of the National Catholic Register:
“Speaking of a ‘Synod on Synodality’ may seem something abstruse, self-referential, excessively technical, of little interest to the general public,” but it is “something truly important for the Church.”
We’re listening. It’s what we do.
“Precisely at this time, when there is much talk and little listening, and when the sense of the common good is in danger of weakening, the Church as a whole has embarked on a journey to rediscover the word together,” he said to media representatives on Aug. 26.
Sense of the common good. Hmm. They don’t call him the political pope for nothing. It’s a key to his thinking.
“Walk together. Question together. Take responsibility together for community discernment, which for us is prayer, as the first Apostles did: this is synodality, which we would like to make a daily habit in all its expressions,” he added.
Details to come, to be sure, especially in re: the “first Apostles” part.
Here are some of the other things Pope Francis has said about synodality during his papacy:
Yes?
Oct. 17, 2015: Address marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Synod of Bishops
“The world in which we live, and which we are called to love and serve, even with its contradictions, demands that the Church strengthen cooperation in all areas of her mission. It is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the third millennium.
By golly, he’s a community organizer. We are called to serve the world. Strengthen cooperation, i.e. more of it. Tighten up the ties that bind. God wants it. Whispers sweet nothings. Makes a body suspicious. OK words abound.
Synodality . . . offers us the most appropriate interpretive framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself. . . . no one can be ‘raised up’ higher than others. . . . in the Church, . . . each person [has to] ‘lower’ himself or herself, so as to serve our brothers and sisters along the way.
So much for hierarchical ministry, flattened “along the way” to make room for some other ministry. (Deliver us from the bad poetry, please. Try “in this life” or “while we’re still alive” or something else of which the meaning is clear. By their language ye shall know them. Straight talk matters.)
In a synodal Church, the Synod of Bishops is only the most evident manifestation of a dynamism of communion which inspires all ecclesial decisions.”
Ditto for dynamism of communion. He should calm down. Trying to inspire us, ok, but you can overdo it. And “which inspires all ecclesial decisions”? It does?
Nov. 29, 2019: Address to the International Theological Commission
You have shown how the practice of synodality, . . . is the implementation,. . . of the Church as a mystery of communion, . . .
And for this I thank you . . . because today one [inaccurately] thinks that synodality is taking each other by the hand and setting out on a journey, celebrating with the young, or carrying out an opinion poll: ‘What do you think about the priesthood for women?’
But puffery about the synod, like the hills with music, are full of this journey business. He’s surprised it’s seen as such a big thing?
He continued:
That is mostly what is done, isn’t it? [But] Synodality is [not that, but] an ecclesial journey [with] a soul, which is the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit there is no synodality.”
Glad to hear it. But we’re back to Chapp’s “vague and smoky, devoid of criteria” slam. Still listening, however, needless to say. He’s the only holy father we got.
more more more later . . .