Highlights from the Synod

Fernández's Fiasco, The Authority of Bishops' Conferences, and Finding Common Ground in the Mess

From here in Iowa, this year’s gathering of the Synod on Synodality feels like it has flown by. When I wrote my first update on what’s happening at the Synod just over a week ago, the delegates had just started their discussions of the themes in the first part of the Instrumentum Laboris, the document serving as the organizing structure for the meeting’s agenda. Since then, the participants have moved on through the second and third parts of the agenda, as well. Starting this weekend, the theological experts present at the Synod and a commission elected by the delegates will work on a draft of a final document, and next week the delegates will read and comment on the draft, eventually voting on a final version.

Perhaps the time flew by in part because I’ve been occupied by a few things, including not just my usual home and work responsibilities, but also working through the nine presentations given in the Synod’s two public fora given on October 9, which I summarized here, and some other projects I will mention below. Despite that, it does seem like the Synod assembly is completing its work at a crisp pace, although it is certainly a grueling effort for the participants, who have been engaging in discussions and listening to presentations for long hours each day.

In a recent interview on the Jesuitical podcast, George Weigel, who has been a consistent critic of the synodal process, raised the concern that the pace of the Synod gathering, and the structure of the conversations, will make it difficult for the delegates to develop concrete proposals on topics like consultative decision-making in the Church, updating the baptismal preparation process, or re-imagining the relationship between the pope and the bishops. I have to admit, I’ve had the same thought. At the conversation tables, the participants are each given three minutes to speak, followed by a period of prayerful silence, and then the participants at the table are given a brief opportunity to respond to what has been said previously. This arrangement may be excellent for breaking down barriers and building trust in the Church, but it’s not particularly suited for working out detailed, concrete solutions to problems. I suspect, however, that the conversations have been sufficient to enable the drafters to put together a handful of more general proposals in the final document, the specifics of which can be worked out by more specialized groups in the future.

Weigel also suggests that many of the Synod delegates don’t necessarily have the theological expertise to tackle some of the thornier issues on the agenda, such as the magisterial authority of regional or national episcopal conferences. At a lengthier gathering, the participants could be advised by theological experts and have time to thoroughly study the issue, but given the duration and structure of the Synod, there is little opportunity for the participants to delve into the complexities of these issues. Admittedly, some of the more complex issues were taken off the agenda of the Synod by Pope Francis and given to ten study groups back in March in part for this very reason. But I think Weigel underestimates the theological acumen of the participants, and anyway there are several theological experts on hand, as well. I think the participants have more than sufficient theological resources to put together the sorts of proposals we are likely to see in the final document.

In a contribution to America’s Synod Diaries series, associate editor Zac Davis describes some of the messiness in the proceedings of the Synod. Although he notes that the table discussions generally run smoothly, and the facilitators have done a good job of synthesizing the conversations and reporting them to the wider group, the “free interventions” interspersed throughout the day have sometimes tended to stray off topic. At points throughout the daily schedule, delegates are allowed to speak to the entire assembly on a topic of their choice, which does not necessarily correspond to the topics that are being discussed at the tables. Davis notes:

The Vatican gave an overview of some of the topics that came up in the free interventions: the role of laity, women in the church, listening to parents and families, young people, digital ministry, the poor, the Vatican-China agreement on the appointment of bishops, the burdens facing priests, parish councils and more.

Although some of those topics are closely related to themes on the agenda, others are not. Davis also points out that there can be several dozen interventions each day, taking up a significant amount of time.

While this could certainly be frustrating, I think this is just a reality of a more dialogical approach to carrying on the Church’s business. People want to be heard, and the issues of concern to them may not always exactly line up with what’s on the agenda. If attitudes of mutual respect and listening are developed, however, even “messy” conversations can be fruitful, perhaps even more so than a tightly managed and less open discussion.

---

Hagan Lío

I was especially interested in Davis’s observations about the difficulties of keeping the Synod assembly on topic since that same day I had written about how the Synod got off to a rocky start. That was because on the first official day of the Synod, representatives of the ten previously mentioned study groups gave presentations to the delegates on their work so far, presentations which proved to be inadequate, both in terms of their length and the level of detail provided. This was particularly true of the study group whose work includes the topic of the ordination of women to the diaconate and which is headed by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF). Because the delegates were dissatisfied with these presentations, the Synod organizers set aside an afternoon during which the delegates could meet with members of the study groups to discuss their work in greater detail.

Those meetings took place this past Friday, and apparently the event was a fiasco. Synod participants were able to choose with which study group they wanted to meet, and around 100, or about one-third of those present, chose to meet with study group five, Cardinal Fernández’s group. When they arrived, according to Colleen Dulle’s detailed account at America, they did not find members of the study group, but rather two officials from the DDF who admitted they were not authorized to answer questions about the study group’s work and who began distributing pieces of paper with an email address where those present could submit their opinions on the questions being considered by the study group. As Dulle describes it, the participants—who included bishops, cardinals, and Vatican officials—reacted with what one described as “palpable outrage and frustration”:

One woman theologian, a non-voting member of the synod, stood up and offered to distribute the papers herself to allow delegates to pose their questions to officials in front of the entire group. For the remainder of the 75-minute meeting, delegates directed their questions at the two officials. Initially, the representatives of the dicastery attempted to answer the questions. However, before long, they simply began writing down each question posed and thanking delegates for their feedback.

Later that day, Cardinal Fernández apologized to the delegates and other participants, particularly for his own absence from the meeting, which he said was due to “my objective inability to participate on the day and at the scheduled time.” He added that he had previously announced on October 9 that only two DDF officials would be present at the meeting, but he agreed to a later meeting on October 24 in which he would personally meet with interested delegates. Those present, however, claimed that it had not been clearly communicated to them that the meeting would be so limited in scope.

The failure of communication, however, is only part of the problem. Even if it had been clearly expressed to the delegates that they would not be able to have a conversation with the members of the study group and would only be provided an email address where they could submit their thoughts, we still lack an explanation of why the delegates were denied this opportunity, and why this study group was treated differently than the others. Indeed, many of the questions posed by the delegates to the DDF officials revolved around why the identities of the members of this particular study group had been kept secret, and why the findings of two earlier commissions established by Pope Francis on the issue of women deacons had not been made public. As I noted last week, some Synod participants have publicly faulted Fernández for the lack of consultation involved in the drafting of Fiducia Supplicans, the DDF document permitting the blessing of same-sex couples, and his handling of this study group demonstrates the same lack of transparency.

It’s also worth pointing out that anger over these proceedings was not limited to those in support of ordaining women deacons. In her reporting, Dulle cites Austen Ivereigh, the British journalist and biographer of Pope Francis serving as a delegate at the Synod:

The other thing that was rather special about it was that everybody felt the same. I don’t mean that everybody felt the same about the issue [of ordaining women deacons], but everybody felt the same about the way they were being treated, whether they were a priest or a bishop or a religious or a lay person. I was quite struck by that.

I don’t think this misstep will impact the work of the Synod assembly on the final document, but it will be important to see its ramifications in the days and weeks ahead.

(Photo: ©synod.va/Lagarica)

---

The Local and the Universal

Over the past week, the Synod conversations have touched on the themes that I thought would be the hallmarks of the gathering: fostering the greater participation of lay people in the mission of the Church, developing more consultative decision-making in the Church, and creating means of holding Church leaders accountable for their decisions. We don’t have much information about the conversations on these topics other than the brief summaries given at the daily press briefings, but the public fora on October 9 and October 16 likely gave a window into the themes being discussed.

One topic that has likewise become a major focus on the conversations but that I failed to include in my preview of the gathering is the question of how the Church’s teachings and practices can be adapted in diverse global contexts, and in particular whether regional or national episcopal conferences can be considered, in the words of the Instrumentum Laboris, “ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority” (#97) responsible for articulating expressions of the faith appropriate to the local context. Interestingly enough, this topic has become the focus of those Catholics who have been critical or suspicious of the Synod all along, particularly after some of the more “hot button” topics were taken off the Synod’s agenda and given to the study groups for consideration. As Weigel wrote just before the opening of the Synod:

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”?

Some Synod participants have echoed these concerns. For example, in an interview with EWTN, Anthony Fisher, O.P., the Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, stated:

[Do bishops’ conferences] have the authority to teach a different Catholicism in different countries or to decide a different liturgy in different countries or different Mass for different countries? Do they bring their own local culture to questions in the area of morals, for instance?

Could we, for instance, envision a Church where you have ordination of women in some countries but not in other countries, or you have same-sex marriages in some countries but not in other countries, or you have an Arian Christology in some countries and a Nicene Christology in others? You might guess, I think no.

But this is simply a strawman. What the Instrumentum Laboris is proposing is not that regional episcopal conferences can define their own dogmas or adopt their own sacraments, or that “they have the teaching authority of the pontiff,” but something more subtle. As Archbishop Fisher himself admits, for example:

We know [the Eastern Catholic Churches] bring different spiritualities . . . a different Mass and different prayer forms, but also often a different understanding of synodality, of the roles of bishops, of the way you choose bishops, they have different canon law and a different Church order while still being part of the one Catholic Church.

If these different liturgical and theological traditions can exist within the organic unity of the Catholic Church, is it really out of the question that diverse liturgies reflecting Latin American, Asian, or African cultures (such as the already-existing Zaire Rite) could be developed under the aegis of a regional body? And as I noted last week, the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), the network of regional episcopal conferences in Africa, has taken on the task of developing a continent-wide pastoral approach to persons in polygamous marriages, a question of both doctrine and pastoral practice important to (although not unique to) the African Church. Would it really be inappropriate to consider what authority episcopal conferences have to autonomously address questions like these?

Still, there are legitimate concerns. As Weigel points out, churches with decentralized teaching authority, particularly the Anglican Communion, have in recent decades experienced regional fragmentation, and it would be devastating for the Catholic Church to experience similar disunity. Similarly, the Instrumentum Laboris proposes that “Adopting a synodal style enables us to overcome the idea that all Churches must necessarily move at the same pace on every issue” (#95). What exactly would that mean? For example, the Vatican’s apparent approval of the African bishops’ decision not to implement Fiducia Supplicans seems like a risky precedent to set.

But these sorts of questions are precisely why the topic of the authority of bishops’ conferences needs to be on the table, not a reason to avoid it. The question of the relationship between the local and the universal Church was one of the topics covered in this week’s public fora, which I’ll discuss in my next post for paid subscribers. And then we’ll see how this topic is treated in the final document once it becomes available.

---

Of Interest…

• I’ve been busy talking and writing about the Catholic faith and voting. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to listen to my interview with Paul Fahey on Catholic voting in the upcoming election and the U.S. bishops’ voting guide, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, which I included as an episode of the Window Light podcast. But I also wrote an essay for the Catholic Moral Theology blog on Pope Francis’s comments last month that American Catholics should vote for the “lesser evil” in the upcoming presidential election. In the essay, I explore how the notion of the “lesser evil” is used in Catholic moral theology and where it shows up in Forming Consciences, even though it’s never mentioned by name. This essay is the first in a series at the Catholic Moral Theology blog on Forming Consciences in the weeks leading up to the election. Finally, for US Catholic magazine, I wrote a piece on the ethics of voting for a third-party candidate, looking at the arguments both in favor and against. The article can already be found in the November print edition, and the web version should be posted any day now.

• For some reason this only recently came to my attention, but about a year ago, the Vatican created, for the first time, an employment web site where potential applicants can apply for jobs in the Vatican bureaucracy. As the reporters at Crux point out, many jobs at the Vatican have traditionally been handed out on the basis of personal relationships or even family ties, and applicants often had little information about what positions were available, instead submitting a general application in the hopes of being offered a position. The new web site is meant to modernize the Vatican’s efforts to find qualified applicants matched to specific jobs, but it also has the advantage of providing information about these positions to jobseekers around the world. That being said, the majority of the positions currently open (understandably) require the ability to speak Italian, which limits the number of potential applicants. In general, I am not a big fan of job web sites. For example, why do they so often ask you to submit a resume, but then require you to type in your employment history anyway? And don’t get me started on using “AI” to screen applications. But this seems like a positive move by the Vatican, and perhaps an exciting opportunity for anyone who could see themselves serving the Church by working in a Vatican office someday.

---

Coming Soon…

• The essays in Window Light will continue to focus on the Synod for the next couple of weeks. In the next article for paid subscribers, I’ll provide a commentary on the two public theological-pastoral fora that took place this past Wednesday, one on the question of the relationship between the local and universal Church I mentioned above, and the other on the primacy of the pope in light of synodality. Then later in the week, barring a copy of the draft of the final document being made public or major repercussions from Friday’s fiasco, I want to write in response to another major criticism of the Synod, that it is too “self-referential” (to use Pope Francis’s term) and not focused enough on evangelization, on proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ. By the following week, we should have the Synod’s final document, so I’ll read through that and offer my first thoughts.

• I’m also working on some really interesting interviews for upcoming episodes of the Window Light podcast, so stay tuned for those.