Is the Synod "Self-Referential"?

A Response to Synodal Critics

Even as I write, news has broken that the final document of the Synod on Synodality has been voted on by the participants and made public. Not only that, but Pope Francis has also decided to forego writing his own document summarizing the themes discussed at the Synod, an apostolic exhortation, instead putting forward the Synod’s final document to the Church for implementation. This unprecedented decision suggests that Francis is placing his authority behind the proposals in the final document.

Because it is so fresh, and because the document is currently only available in Italian, I won’t comment on it yet, although Fr. James Martin, one of the Synod delegates from the United States, has published what he considers five key takeaways from the document at America.

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While we wait for the dust to settle, I want to respond to one of the most persistent criticisms of the Synod, and even the entire synodal process: that it is a “self-referential” undertaking that has neglected the Church’s evangelizing mission. If true, this is a particularly stinging criticism because it is Pope Francis who has repeatedly warned against the dangers of a self-referential Church, but also Francis who initiated the synodal process.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio cautioned against a self-referential Church in an address to his fellow cardinals right before the 2013 papal conclave that some believe convinced many of the cardinals to elect him pope. Rather than being self-referential, Cardinal Bergoglio insisted, the Church must go outside of itself to fulfill its mission to the world. Francis has repeatedly returned to this theme throughout his papacy.

The accusation that the Synod is self-referential was made even before the synodal process got off the ground in 2021. For example, in March 2020, when the Vatican first signaled that the next synod would focus on the theme of “synodality,” Fr. Raymond da Souza argued that this decision “threaten[ed] to lock the entire Church in the sacristy discussing how to order internal affairs.” Admittedly, everyone probably chuckled a bit when the Vatican announced the upcoming “Synod on Synodality,” but da Souza went further, however, suggesting that this turn inward represented the failure or exhaustion of Pope Francis’s efforts to transform the Church .

Da Souza returned to this criticism earlier this year, claiming that:

The synod on synodality invites the Church to look inward, self-referential rather than understood in reference to Christ. She thus finds herself going around in circles.

George Weigel had already raised this criticism of the lack of focus on Christ in the lead up to the first session of the Synod last year. Noting the paucity of references to Jesus Christ in the Instrumentum Laboris written in preparation for that gathering, compared to other terms such as “Church,” “Synod,” and “synodality,” Weigel concludes:

In the early period of his pontificate, Pope Francis warned the Church against “self-referentiality”—always talking about ourselves—which the pope rightly declared an obstacle to bringing Christ, the light of the nations, to the world. Yet the world synodal process since 2021 has been a colossal exercise in self-referentiality, as the word count of Synod 2023’s IL (which sums up that process) makes unmistakably clear.

Weigel likewise accused the Synod of being self-referential in a recent interview with the hosts of the Jesuitical podcast, suggesting that the Church should focus less on its internal structures and more on its evangelical mission of proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ. This criticism has also been taken up by theologian Larry Chapp, who writes:

The working document of the Synod on Synodality, meeting in Rome through Oct. 27, has repeated assertions that the Church is fundamentally missional and evangelizing and therefore, that this is one of the primary purposes behind the synod. And yet there is, in reality, both last year and so far this year, little focus on this topic at all.

This is a shame and, in my view, a wasted opportunity to emphasize once again that evangelization is not one task among many others but the product of a mandate from Christ and the very essence of the Church’s reason for existing.

Phil Lawler is more ambiguous in his assessment of the Synod, but nevertheless remains skeptical of its focus on the Gospel:

Try to imagine what would happen if, per impossibile, this Synod delivered on its promises, as the Pope and the Instrumentum now describe them. The Catholic Church would then boast a new and improved decision-making process; the faithful and the hierarchy would “walk together” in harmony. All very good in theory. But what would it mean in practice, as applied to the evangelical mission? Could we expect to draw people toward the Catholic faith by promising them an efficient decision-making structure, or a more robust dialogue?

What could be said in response to these criticisms?

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First, it’s important to understand what Pope Francis means by the term “self-referential.” As I’ve mentioned before, I think it’s safe to say that the concept is rooted in Francis’s Ignatian background. As disciples of Jesus, we are called to love and serve God, but Ignatian spirituality insists that we need to exercise discernment in figuring out how to respond to that call, a process that requires listening for the Spirit in the inner promptings of our heart. As part of the discernment process, we are asked to adopt an attitude of “indifference,” which in this case doesn’t mean a lack of caring (on the contrary!), but rather a capacity to let go. We must let go of whatever possessions, titles, and relationships are holding us back from serving God in the way in which we are called, but we also may need to let go of intangibles like our self-identity, our assumptions about what God is calling us to, and our beliefs about how best to serve God. We tend to place our trust in those things, to be attached to them. That is what it means to be self-referential, but to really be open to following God’s will, we need to “get outside of our heads” and trust that God will reveal to us the path we are called to take.

Francis is simply applying this approach to the life of the Church as a whole. Of course, the critics are right that all the Church’s efforts must ultimately center on its evangelizing mission in the world. But as Bishop Lúcio Andrice Muandula of the Diocese of Xai-Xai, Mozambique explained in one of the public fora held during the course of the Synod, the Church’s mission is a participation in the salvific mission of the Trinity in the world. Because this mission most fundamentally belongs to God, the Church must continuously discern if it is responding to the promptings of God in its service to the world or if it is held down by attachments—attachments to its possessions, the maintenance of its institutions, or the prestige it once held in society, but also to organizational structures, evangelizing strategies, and theological formulas that may have served a purpose in the past but that no longer serve the Gospel in the current context. What Francis is asking of the Church is something like what philosopher and theologian Tomáš Halík suggested in an address opening the European Continental Assembly prior to last year’s session of the Synod (which I discussed here):

We must not be afraid that some forms of the Church are dying: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit." (Jn. 12:24)

We must not look for the Living among the dead. In every period of the Church's history, we must exercise the art of spiritual discernment, distinguishing on the tree of the Church the branches that are alive and those that are dry and dead.

Many of Pope Francis’s critics, however, conflate being self-referential with being self-aware or exercising introspection, and then proceed as if the pope meant to treat looking inward and going outside oneself as polar opposites. But consider, for example, the Ignatian practice of the Daily Examen. The Examen is an introspective process in which you reflect on God’s presence during the day that has passed, the ways you fell short in responding to God, and to what God may be prompting you in the day to come. This introspection is not a retreat from engaging with the world, though, but rather at the service of more faithfully carrying out God’s will in the world. And likewise, in the Examen, reflecting on your faults is in part meant to help you become a better witness of the Gospel to the world. In fact, being self-referential is often the result of not looking inward, assuming one knows what God wants without listening, preaching to others without reflecting on how one’s own attitudes and behaviors create obstacles to others’ truly hearing the Word and becoming disciples.

The synodal process can be understood in an analogous way. Much of the focus has been on aspects of the inner life of the Church, such as the relationship between the laity and the clergy, decision-making processes in the Church, and the relationship between the pope and the bishops. But these conversations are being held to discern how the Church can best carry out its mission to the world—how it can most effectively share in God’s salvific action in the world-and therefore are not at all what Francis means by self-referential. As the Instrumentum Laboris states, at the heart of the synodal process is “the renewal of the People of God in following the Lord and in their commitment to serving His mission” (Intro.). This call to mission is woven throughout the document and has been central to the discussions at the Synod.

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A Synod participant reads the first draft of the final document (Photo: ©synod.va/Lagarica)

To a certain extent, I think these criticisms of the Synod arise from different, although perhaps not ultimately incompatible, views on how to understand the evangelizing mission of the Church. For example, both Chapp and Lawler point to the Great Commission given by Jesus to his disciples at the end of Matthew’s Gospel as the key to the Church’s mission:

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. (Mt. 28:19-20, NAB)

Both suggest that the synodal process has lost its focus on this task. As Lawler writes:

Synodality, whatever that term means, is at best a means, not an end: an aid to mission, not the mission itself. At worst it is a distraction from that mission. A “synodal” Church might speak with a single voice, but it would still need something to say.

For Lawler, then, the mission of the Church is to communicate a message, to proclaim the Gospel to the nations. Note, however, that Jesus’ command is not to go to all nations to say something, but to “make disciples.” Of course, the proclamation of the Gospel is crucial to making disciples—"How can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach?” (Rom. 10:14)—but it’s only the beginning of the process of making someone into a disciple.

Similarly, Chapp suggests that the synodal process has lost sight of the kerygma, the saving truth that through his Resurrection, Christ has overcome the power of sin and death and definitively transformed the world. But what does this Good News mean for the person who hears it? Upon hearing that proclamation, each person is called to be baptized and to themselves participate in Christ’s mission, which is also the Church’s mission.

Understood in this broad sense, then, it seems indisputable that the central purpose of the synodal process has been to consider how the Church can more effectively “make disciples.” The Synod’s focus has been on how the Church could change its manner of doing things so that every member is encouraged to take up their vocation as a baptized Christian to be a missionary disciple. For example, it has focused on how baptismal preparation can better instill in the faithful a sense of this vocation. It has suggested that we deepen our understanding of the Eucharist as the participation of all the faithful, with their distinct vocations and gifts, in the saving mission of Christ. When the Synod proposes a more consultative form of decision-making in the Church at the parish and diocesan levels, again the point is to empower all the faithful, as disciples of the Lord, to participate in guiding the mission of the Church. And so on.

Therefore, if we understand synodality as the active participation of all the faithful in the mission of the Church, by virtue of their baptism and in light of their distinct vocations and gifts, then, contra Lawler, synodality is both the means and the end. The Church needs to draw on the gifts and service of all the faithful to carry out its mission and bring the Gospel to the world, but sharing in that communal life of worship, faith, and service is the very thing to which the Church calls the world.

Chapp himself recognizes that the Church is “first and foremost the mysterious sacrament of God’s presence to the entire world, in and through Christ.” But the Church is a sign of God’s Kingdom in the world precisely when every member takes up the task of discipleship, when we seek unity centered around our faith in Christ, and when we include those who are excluded, the very tasks the Synod has taken on.

The concern that the Synod could give greater attention to how to effectively and persuasively communicate the truth of the Gospel in the diverse, pluralistic cultures of today and in the midst of corrosive relativism is not out of place, but it’s also undeniable that the work of the Synod has been grounded in a deep desire to “make disciples” and to create space in the Church where everyone can fulfill the vocation to be missionary disciples.

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Of Interest…

• Last week, I described the disastrous meeting between two officials of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) and about a hundred Synod participants seeking clarification regarding the work of a study group that had been considering women’s leadership in the Church, including the question of whether women could be ordained as deacons. Despite being promised a chance to discuss the study group’s work with its members, the DDF officials could offer few answers and suggested that those present send their opinions to an email address they provided. Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the DDF, apologized for the misunderstanding and offered to meet with interested participants this past Thursday. The Vatican provided an audio recording of that latter meeting after it took place, providing the public an unusual glimpse into the goings on at the Synod. Fernández offered some helpful clarifications into the workings of the study group, but also made some surprising assertions. For example, Pope Francis had established two commissions to study the issue of women deacons, but neither’s conclusions have been made public. Fernández mentioned that “I haven’t studied the reports, but I’ve glanced at them a bit.” It seems shocking that the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, who is heading up a papal appointed study group on the issue, has not yet studied the work of these commissions. He also added that the second commission, established in 2020, will be “revived.” It’s not clear what its work will entail or what its relationship to Fernández’s study group will be. Perhaps most interestingly, he explained that neither his nor Pope Francis’s earlier remarks on the issue should be understood to mean the question of ordaining women to the diaconate is closed, but rather “he does not want to close the question; he says you can continue to study it patiently without obsession, without rushing, you can continue to study.” Continued study is of course good, but the mixed messages here are frustrating.

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Coming Soon…

• The other day I interviewed my old friend Dr. Kent Lasnoski, a moral theologian and now the president of the College of San Damiano for the Trades, a new institution of higher education set to open in the fall of 2025 and established in partnership with the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois, led by Bishop Thomas Paprocki. We talked about his personal journey from the classroom to the board room, why he thinks it’s important to focus on the trades, and the Catholic mission of the college, among other things. Our interview will be included in an upcoming episode of the Window Light podcast, hopefully in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

• Now that the Synod’s final document has been published and approved by Pope Francis, I hope to read through it soon and offer some commentary on its key themes and proposals.

• For paid subscribers, I also hope to write one more piece on the election prior to Election Day. Earlier this month, the National Catholic Reporter published the results of a poll of Catholic voters, and I want to pore over those numbers and offer some reflections on those results in light of the bishops’ document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship and my earlier articles on Catholics and voting.

• Finally, this past Thursday, Pope Francis published his fourth encyclical, Dilexit Nos, on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I plan to read through it carefully and eventually write some reflections on the document. October has been a busy month for the Catholic Church, and I’m sure it will spill into November. I’m trying to keep up!