Published October 17, 2024
Is “Shared Responsibility” the Answer? It Depends.
by George Weigel
Parish priests were in very short supply at Synod-2023; if memory serves, there was one present. Questions were raised about this, some of them acerbic; the Synod General Secretariat was evidently irked; and so an “International Meeting of Parish Priests for the Synod” was hastily summoned and met in Rome last spring.
One of those attending later described the meeting in these pungent terms: “excessively wordy, procedurally disorganized, inordinately focused on the interventions of experts and not those of pastors, rife with inappropriate agendas, and unclear about how its conversations would be synthesized.” In short, the International Meeting of Priests was a microcosm of the entire synodal “process” as led, managed, massaged, and manipulated by the Synod General Secretariat. But the meeting was not without value, according to that priest-reporter: “in the context of a warm spirit of priestly fraternity, many pastors who were inexperienced in synodality and co-responsibility for the Church’s mission embraced the concepts and practices.”
This observation underscored the diversity of pastoral situations in a Church of almost 1.4 billion members that includes—if I may cite four situations with which I’m personally familiar—parishes in war zones (Ukraine), massive parishes with thousands of members (the urban and suburban parts of the United States), rural parish centers with numerous missions in agricultural hinterlands (Togo), and dying parishes with 2 percent Sunday Mass attendance (Germany). In such a Church, the notion that there is a one-size-fits-all model for the embodiment of “synodality” is fatuous. The vast disparities in financial resources, technology, and trained personnel throughout the world Church also caution against cookie-cutter approaches to implementing shared responsibility in local churches.
That shared responsibility is imperative within the Church is not a deduction from management theory but an implication of the sacrament of Baptism, which does not call the faithful into discussion groups but into mission. As John Paul II taught in his epic 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), every Christian is baptized into a missionary vocation. At his or her baptism, every one of those 1.4 billion Catholics was given the Great Commission (“Go . . . and make disciples of all nations” [Matt. 28:19]). Every Catholic is thus called to measure his or her discipleship by an evangelical criterion: “How, in the particular circumstances of my life, am I bringing others to, or back to, the Lord Jesus?” That is a universal aspect of the Christian life. Still, shared responsibility will be lived in quite different ways in different parts of the world Church.
According to an unstated premise running through the entire “synodal process,” from 2021 through this October, there is insufficient shared responsibility in the Catholic Church today—which is doubtless true in some parts of the world Church, and for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. Nonetheless, ample structures for the exercise of shared responsibility exist in some local Churches: among them, the Church in the United States. A priest attending the International Meeting of Priests for the Synod prepared a memorandum on the “best practices” of “synodality” in his diocese, most of which, he noted, had been in place for some time and were not a response to the “Synod on Synodality.” That memo, which was distributed to interested brother-priests, cited the following:
SYNODAL PRACTICES AT THE DIOCESAN LEVEL
Strategic Planning – From 2021–2023 the bishop and his staff consulted widely with the clergy and with lay faithful of different demographics to develop a Strategic Plan based on a consensus regarding pastoral priorities.
Diocesan Finance Council – As required by Canon Law (Can. 492), the bishop and his staff regularly consult this council, and have established three subsidiary bodies (Audit & Budget Committee, Savings & Loan Corporation Committee, and Investment Committee) of expert lay faithful with whom to consult further.
Diocesan Pastoral Council – Although not strictly mandated by Canon Law (Can. 511), the bishop has established this council, which advises him on the pastoral works of the diocese.
College of Consultors – Required by Canon Law (Can. 502), the bishop meets regularly with this college.
Presbyteral Council – Mandated by Canon Law (Can. 495), the bishop meets regularly to seek the counsel of this body.
Building Commission – The bishop has established this group of clergy and lay experts to advise him on major construction projects.
Catholic Charities Board – The bishop leads this board which advises him on the charitable works of the diocese.
Annual Meetings with Priests – The bishop gathers with his priests in Advent and in Lent for Days of Prayer, during an annual week-long Convocation in the spring, at a Fall Meeting of Priests, and on other occasions, both formal and informal, at which he receives the counsel of his clergy (see Can. 384).
Bishop’s Advisory Council on Racism – The bishop meets yearly with this group comprised of black clergy and lay men and women from across the Diocese who advise him on issues related to race.
Bishop’s Annual Listening Session with Victims of Sexual Abuse – The bishop meets yearly with victims of sexual abuse to hear their testimony and to offer his and diocesan support.
Bishop’s Listening Sessions in the Wake of the Clergy Abuse Scandals – In 2019, the bishop met several times with the lay faithful to understand the pain caused by the scandals and to assure them of the diocese’s conscientious response.
SYNODAL PRACTICES AT THE VICARIATE LEVEL
Regular Meetings of Vicars Forane with Priests of the Deanery – The vicars forane, according to law (Can. 555), meet with the priests of their vicariate to seek their counsel and to ensure their well-being.
Annual Visits by Vicars Forane to Parishes– As established by universal (Can. 555) and particular law, the vicars forane make annual visitations to the parishes in their vicariates during which they consult with the clergy and lay staff of those parishes.
SYNODAL PRACTICES AT THE PARISH LEVEL
Finance Councils – As required by Canon Law (Can. 537), pastors regularly consult these parochial councils composed of expert lay faithful.
Pastoral Councils – Although not required by universal law (Can. 511), parish pastoral councils are required by particular law and meet regularly in each parish, with the lay faithful members advising pastors on the pastoral works of the parish.
Staff Meetings – Most parishes have regular staff meetings at which pastors consult their lay staff regarding the pastoral and administrative works of the parish.
To which might be added, in most American dioceses, diocesan school boards and school boards in parishes that sponsor a Catholic school. Then there is the shared responsibility for various dimensions of the Church’s life displayed in sodality chapters, Knights of Columbus councils, sports leagues, marriage preparation programs, campus ministries, and the programs by which adult converts are led through the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults.
In sum: There is a great deal of shared responsibility and “listening”—that Synod buzzword—already underway in the Church, which might have been acknowledged in Synod-2024’s Instrumentum Laboris. Alas, the Working Document drafters seemed not to notice, wallowing as they were in caricatures about a “static” and “pyramidal” Church that once suffered—and in some cases still suffers—from an “abstract,” “homogenizing,” “hegemonic,” and “reductionist” universalism leading to “fatal immobilism,” “pastoral redundancy,” and irrelevance to the young.
According to the priest-author of that memo on synodal best practices, more than a few of his fellow-priests were surprised at the extent to which these structures of co-responsibility existed in an American diocese—which is, I might add, one of the most flourishing in the United States. How such mechanisms of co-responsibility might be modified or adapted to meet the pastoral needs of different social and cultural circumstances throughout the diverse world Church might have been a useful exercise for a Synod. It isn’t happening here in Rome this October, however, and it didn’t happen in Rome last October, either. An opportunity for a genuine “exchange of gifts” within the one body of the Church was thus missed and continues to be missed.
Another point should be stressed in reflecting on this one diocesan template for synodal co-responsibility in the Church: It isn’t self-implementing in advancing the Church’s evangelical mission to spread the gospel and heal a broken world. Structures can help facilitate that mission, but structures by themselves cannot energize or animate that mission. The Catholic Church in Germany has structures upon structures on top of structures. According to one estimate, more people work in the structures of German Catholicism that attend Mass in Germany on some Sundays (which, if true, tells you something about the sacramental fidelity of many of those Church employees). So what is the difference between this American diocese and the Church in Germany? Let me count the ways.
The American diocese in question has been self-consciously faithful to the teaching of the Church since the Second Vatican Council, including the period of disciplinary meltdown that followed the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae; Germany has been one of the centers—perhaps the epicenter—of Catholic dissent.
The American diocese has been led by a series of able, orthodox bishops committed to growing the Church during a period in which the German hierarchy, with notable and noble exceptions, has seemed resigned to leading a process of managed decline.
The American diocese and its parishes actively encourage priestly vocations and vocations to the consecrated life, which is rarely the case in the German Church.
The American diocese includes several fine institutions of high learning that are academically rigorous while being self-consciously and proudly Catholic, which is hardly the case in the German academy.
The American diocese has encouraged and supported innovative and independent lay initiatives to implement the New Evangelization; in Germany the vast, clotted Church bureaucracy tends to fill up an enormous amount of the available Catholic “space” in the country.
The American diocese has experienced its share of the sins and crimes of clerical sexual abuse, but it has not weaponized those scandals in the pursuit of a progressive Catholic agenda; rather, it has dealt with this scandal through outreach to victims, appropriate structures (including a review board of lay leaders to assess claims of abuse), and episcopal support of seminary reform. Weaponization of clerical sexual abuse to advance various progressive agendas has long been a rationale for the German “Synodal Path.”
And at the bottom of the bottom line: The American diocese, while facing stiff cultural headwinds, has nonetheless held firm to the faith and to the idea of the Church as a culture-reforming counterculture, while the German Church has, in many cases, abjectly surrendered to the Zeitgeist, taking its cues from wokery and political correctness.
Structures of shared responsibility in the Church can facilitate Catholicism being a Church of “communion, participation, and mission,” as Synod-2024 bids us be. Those structures cannot do that, and will not do that, in the Church of Maybe: the Church of Catholic Lite.
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.