Published October 1, 2024
Reports and Commentary on the Synod on Synodality: “For a Synodal Church – Communion, Participation, Mission”. Edited by Xavier Rynne II.
Letters from the Synod began in 2015 at the request of Cardinal George Pell, then the Prefect of the Holy See’s Secretariat for the Economy. During Synod-2014, called by Pope Francis to discuss issues of marriage and the family, Cardinal Pell had been dissatisfied with what he regarded as the spin, bordering on propaganda, coming out of the Holy See Press Office, and thought that alternatives ought to be available during Synod-2015, to aid the Synod fathers in their deliberations and to inform the Anglosphere of what was going on in Rome.
Letters from the Synod-2015 was then followed by Letters from the Synod-2018, Letters from the Vatican during the February 2019 global summit on the sexual abuse crisis, Letters from the Synod-2019, and Letters from the Synod-2023. As in its five previous iterations, Letters from the Synod-2024 will offer reflections on the issues raised (and the procedures enforced) in the Paul VI Audience Hall, following the theological maxim, “In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas” (Unity in essentials, freedom in disputed matters, charity in all things). Of course, the question of what, precisely, are the essentials of Catholic faith has been disputed in every Synod since 2014, and fraternal charity can, in those controversies, require fraternal correction.
Welcome back, then, to our veteran readers, and a hearty welcome to those of you engaging Letters from the Synod for the first time. XR II
The Issues, This Time Around the Synodal Track
In his September 27, 2024, “Houses of Worship” column in the Wall Street Journal, the estimable Fr. Gerald Murray of the Archdiocese of New York noted that Pope Francis had taken virtually all the so-called “hot-button issues” agitated at Synod-2023 off Synod-2024’s agenda, assigning them to “study groups” that will issue reports to this October’s synodal assembly, but which won’t finish their work until months after Synod-2024 ends. Fr. Murray suggested that this reduces the hundreds of participant-delegates in Synod-2024 to spectators, at least insofar as those “hot-button issues” (such as the ordination of women to the diaconate and the LGBTQ agenda) are concerned. That may well be the case, although it seems certain that “progressive” Catholic lobbyists within and outside the Synod will continue to press their causes, not least through a global media obsessed with such matters.
A close reading of Synod-2024’s Instrumentum Laboris (Working Document, or IL), however, suggests that other issues of considerable consequence may well be engaged.
Episcopal Conferences with Doctrinal Authority?
Paragraph 97 of the IL is a case in point—and perhaps the case in point. Here is the money quote, described as a “proposal” that has “emerged” from “this synodal process”:
[R]ecognition of Episcopal Conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church, and favoring the appreciation of liturgical, disciplinary, theological, and spiritual expressions appropriate to different socio-cultural contexts.
By one Synod delegate’s count, this proposal to declare that national bishops’ conferences have doctrinal teaching authority appears in Synod-2024’s IL eighteen times, in one form or another. That ubiquity suggests that something more is afoot here than a lack of editorial rigor in the final redaction of the IL. But before exploring that, consider some of the problems that this proposal raises:
(1) Bishops’ conferences around the world differ vastly in scale. Some have hundreds of members, others but a few. Does a national episcopal conference with eight members have the same teaching authority or magisterial “weight” as a bishops’ conference with 250 members?
(2) National borders are historical contingencies, often determined by war (think of the southwestern dioceses in the United States). How does a contingent, potentially changeable political marker—a national border—constitute an ecclesial reality? More than a few Polish dioceses are part of the Polish bishops’ conference today because Poland was moved several hundred kilometers west by the victors of World War II; were they still among us, it would likely surprise Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and “Uncle Joe” Stalin to learn that, according to this proposal, they were creating new ecclesial realities at the Tehran and Yalta “Big Three” conferences.
(3) We know, and will be reminded again over the next month, that bishops’ conferences in the Church have been traveling in different directions over the past eleven and a half years, guided by diverging theological roadmaps. This diversity might well be intensified if bishops’ conferences were declared to have doctrinal teaching authority. Yet this diversification cuts against Pope Francis’s declared intention that “synodality” foster the Church’s unity. How to square that circle?
(4) What is the relationship between doctrinally authoritative bishops’ conferences and the settled tradition of the Catholic Church? Or is there a settled tradition, given different cultural “contexts,” a word used with striking frequency in the IL (see below)? Will doctrinally authoritative conferences have a blank slate on which to write?
(5) Doesn’t this proposal suggest a dramatic revision, even repudiation, of the teaching of Pope John Paul II’s 1998 apostolic letter Apostolos Suos (His Apostles) on the character and limits of the authority of national episcopal conferences?
The Real Game: Local-Option Catholicism?
At the outset of Synod-2015, thirteen cardinals wrote Pope Francis, requesting changes in the procedures proposed for that year’s Synod. In draft form, that letter cautioned that Catholicism risked going down the path of ecclesial fragmentation trod by the Anglican Communion, if there were not unity in doctrine and pastoral practice on the question of the worthy reception of Holy Communion by divorced Catholics in canonically irregular second marriages—that year’s hot-button issue. As finally given to the pope, the letter did not raise that concern, because the cardinals wanted to keep the focus on synodal procedures. The danger of “Anglicanization” remains, however. And it has intensified since 2015, not least because of Fiducia Supplicans, the December 2023 Declaration by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith permitting some form of blessing for people in same-sex relationships: a declaration eagerly embraced by some bishops’ conferences, warily studied by others, and flatly rejected by still others.
The proposal to declare that national episcopal conferences have doctrinal teaching authority raises a sharp but unavoidable question: Are Catholic “progressives,” disappointed that the present pope has not given them everything for which they have campaigned for decades, now proposing to achieve their goals through forms of local-option Catholicism in which the LGBTQ agenda would be eagerly pursued, women would be admitted to Holy Orders, and the indissolubility of marriage would be thought a matter of “socio-cultural diversity”?
“Context” is obviously important in evangelization, a truth the Church has recognized since the apostle Paul wrestled with the Athenians on the Areopagus in Acts 17. At Synod-2024, however, is “context” going to be used as the opening wedge for the deconstruction of Catholicism on the Anglican model? Thus the real battles this month may well be fought out on that section of the IL entitled “Foundations.”
Sharing Responsibility
IL paragraphs 73–79 discuss “Transparency, Accountability, and Evaluation,” and do so primarily in the vocabulary of modern management theory. This usage raises more questions than it may have the capacity to answer.
No one doubts that management skills are important in the Church. No one doubts that there must be accountability structures in a Church composed of fallible human beings who not infrequently require correction. And no one who has suffered through the sexual abuse crisis with a clear eye can doubt that the mismanagement of clerical sexual abuse and a lack of accountability for that mismanagement were compounded by a lack of transparency on the part of Church authorities. In an ecclesial context, however, these issues (which date back to Galatians 2:11, where Paul recalls that he rebuked Peter “to his face”) must be addressed theologically as well as in terms of modern management theory.
Which raises a further question: Do the terms “transparency, accountability, and evaluation” change their meaning in a Church context, or do they change the Church and its Christ-given structures of authority?
Which, in turn, raises still more questions not addressed in IL 73–79:
Do “transparency, accountability, and evaluation” apply only to bishops and pastors? Do they apply to lay organizations like the massive Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken (Central Committee of German Catholics)? Do they apply to the deliberations of the governing bodies of Georgetown, Notre Dame, and Fordham? Do they apply to the Vatican?
IL 79 states that “it seems necessary to guarantee . . . periodic evaluation procedures on the performance of those exercising any form of ministry and holding any position in the Church” (emphasis added). Does this apply to Cardinal Mario Grech, Sr. Nathalie Becquart, and the other leaders of the Synod General Secretariat? How could it possibly apply to the pope, when Canon 1404 of the Code of Canon Law states bluntly that “The First See is judged by no one”?
Every Catholic shares a baptismal responsibility for the Church, and especially for its mission of evangelization. That is bedrock. But how that baptismal responsibility is exercised cannot be analyzed solely through the lens of management theory: a point to be raised, one hopes, during the Synod’s discussions.
At the Bottom Line
Getting into the weeds of the Instrumentum Laboris leads to the conclusion that the fundamental issues at Synod-2024 will be those of its synodal predecessors since Synod-2014.
Does the Catholic Church have a “constitution” (in the British sense of the term) given it by Christ the Lord, whose mystical body the Church is?
Is that “constitution” a matter of divine revelation?
Does divine revelation govern the Church over time?
Does the Church have authority to modify the truths of divine revelation because of changing historical and cultural contexts?
These are questions eminently worth pursuing, should Synod-2024’s procedures permit in-depth conversation and genuine debate.
—George Weigel
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George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
