Synodality and Church History
A Response to Ulrich Lehner
At Church Life Journal, a publication of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, the prolific historical theologian Ulrich Lehner has a provocative essay on what synodality could mean for the practice of church history and historical theology. Lehner proposes two ways that the theological concept of synodality could provide a hermeneutical lens for these two interrelated disciplines:
Synodality suggests giving greater attention to those voices from the past that were marginalized in their own day or that have since been marginalized;
It likewise suggests that more focus should be given to the social and cultural history of the Christian faithful rather than exclusively focusing on the history of doctrine and the acts of popes, bishops, and other ecclesiastical leaders.
I think the value in Lehner’s argument is not so much that these are innovative proposals for the disciplines of church history and historical theology—those disciplines have been trending in the directions Lehner outlines for a long time. Rather, I think the more interesting point is his proposal that the concept of synodality—which, guided by the initiative of Pope Francis, is becoming the framework for understanding Church life today—can also serve as a lens for helping us better understand the Church’s past. In other words, synodality offers a hermeneutical framework that allows the past to speak to the present, not by imposing the questions and concerns of the present on the past, but precisely by letting the voices of the past speak for themselves, and indeed, as Lehner notes, recovering those voices that have been marginalized but that nevertheless represent members of the Body of Christ.
Before exploring Lehner’s argument further, I want to provide a rough definition of synodality and describe how the concept is being used in contemporary ecclesial discourse. As readers know, I have been working on a survey of the different continental documents that have been written in preparation for October’s Synod on Synodality, and these documents are a rich resource for understanding synodality.
Synodality is the sense that the members of the Church are given by the Spirit different charisms or gifts, and live out distinct vocations, but all share in the life and mission of the Church, although carrying out that mission in ways proper to their gifts and vocations. The continental document from the Middle East appeals to the Pauline image of the Church as the Body of Christ, linking synodality with the Spirit that unites the different parts of the Body and gives them life. The document from Latin America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, draws on the image of the People of God. The members of the Church are on a journey, or pilgrimage together, called to mission in virtue of their baptism.
The Middle East document reminds us that synodality is first of all expressed in the Church’s worship, particularly in the sacrament of the Eucharist. All of the faithful actively participate in the sacrament as one Body, although playing distinct roles as clergy or lay faithful. In its ancient sense, synodality was also a principle of governance and decision-making. When a decision was made by the bishops, it had to be ratified by a body of representatives of all the faithful, including the laity and religious.
This ancient sense of synodality is reflected in contemporary concerns over clericalism, a problem universally acknowledged in the continental documents. For example, the document from Oceania notes that the dominance of the clergy in governance and decision-making can be understood as “impeding laity in the exercise of their gifts.” As I noted, some of the regional documents written in preparation for the Continental Assembly for Latin America and the Caribbean speak of clericalism as a “listening deficit” in which the voices of the laity are not heard.
The evolving contemporary understanding of synodality expands this sense of “unity-in-diversity” in the Church beyond the consideration of ecclesial roles like bishops, clergy, religious, and laity. For example, the continental documents link synodality with inculturation, the notion that diverse cultures ought to find expression in the life of the Church. For example, the document from Asia calls for the greater inculturation of the liturgy to promote the “integration of culture in the life and worship of the Church.” The document from Oceania likewise celebrates the ways the Church’s worship and theology have been inculturated among Pacific islanders, while also noting that sometimes tensions arise between traditional cultural practices and Catholic teaching. The document from Africa makes a similar point.
Synodality also means acknowledging those who have been excluded from full participation in the mission and governance of the Church. For example, one of the major themes of the ongoing synodal process is to assess the participation of women in the mission and leadership of the Church. Both the continental documents from Asia and Africa point out that in many countries women make up the majority of active members of the Church and yet are often excluded from positions of leadership or decision-making. The continental documents have also uniformly called for greater acknowledgement and opportunities for participation for youth and young adults.
Finally, the ongoing synodal process has also focused on how the Church can integrate populations that for different reasons have been marginalized from the life of the Church. This includes LGBTQ persons, migrants and refugees, the divorced and remarried, people living in poverty, and indigenous peoples, among others.
While the contemporary discussion of synodality has expanded its scope beyond the traditional focus on the different states of life within the Church, it has also made clear that synodality is a characteristic of the Church that is not always fully present and must be developed. In a 2015 address, Pope Francis stated that synodality is “a constitutive element of the Church,” but in a recent interview he claimed that the sense of synodality had been “lost” in the West. How can that be? I think we must think of it in much the same way that we can say that the Church is One, and yet the historical divisions arising from the split between East and West and the Protestant Reformation are a scandal against that unity. The continental document from Asia speaks of synodality as a “natural and organic inclination” of the Church, something that is part of the makeup of the Church, but likewise something that must be nurtured and developed.
Lehner’s proposal suggests that this developing notion of synodality should guide not just how we think about the contemporary life of the Church, but likewise how we understand the Church’s history. The study of church history should focus on the religious and cultural practices of the majority of the faithful, not just ecclesiastical leaders and theologians, and should recognize the stunning diversity of expressions these practices could take. This synodal approach to church history is not just important for understanding the historical past, but also for informing the present. As Lehner reminds us, the Christian faithful of the past are still members of the Church: “a hermeneutic of synodality invites the whole Church to be on the way, with all those in the Church Militant, but also those in the Church Suffering and Triumphant.” Christians of the past are the “cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1) that surround us, sharers in the sensus fidelium that guides the contemporary Church.
Lehner offers three historical vignettes that illustrate how a hermeneutic of synodality could enrich our understanding of the past and inform the present. In one, he describes how 18th-century canon law dealt with cases of intersex individuals who had taken religious vows or who had married. In cases where an individual was not clearly identifiable as either sex, they could choose the sex with which they identified. In other cases, it was recognized that an individual could change sexes, due to what we now understand as hormonal changes. In practical terms, an intersex religious sister could be dispensed of her vows if she developed masculine characteristics. An intersex person who identified as a woman and who had been widowed, who then experienced a change in her sexual organs, could enter a new marriage as a man! Lehner’s point is not that we should adopt an 18th-century framework in our own time, but rather that there is a diversity in the tradition that contemporary discussions tend to obfuscate. Likewise, he points out that these cases show that in the past, the Church was more comfortable with a certain ambiguity regarding gender than seems to be the case today, and that we might learn from that tolerance for ambiguity.
I definitely resonate with the overall project Lehner is proposing here. In my own book Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy, I begin by noting that the Church’s social mission, particularly when it comes to economic life, has reached a certain impasse: despite the riches of Catholic social teaching at the doctrinal level, pastoral initiatives for living out that teaching in the world of business and work have mostly dried up. To address that impasse, throughout the book, I explore how 20th and 21st-century Catholics across several continents have attempted to live out their faith in economic life, placing them in their economic and political context. Although they represent a bewildering diversity of approaches, ranging from agrarians, to Latin American liberation theologians, to American neoconservative capitalists, I identified common strands that have been overlooked in contemporary debates on the economy but that provide resources for a faithful approach to economic life for today. And again, the point is not that we should reproduce any of these models from the past, but rather that they enrich our understanding of the sensus fidelium when it comes to the Church’s social thought.
In his essay, Lehner also captures the sense that I mentioned earlier that synodality is a fundamental inclination of the Church that needs to be nurtured and developed, and one that it constantly fails to fully live up to. He expresses this point in terms of the “challenge” of synodality, a term he borrows from Pope Francis. Lehner reminds us of the older meaning of the word “challenge” as an accusation, in this case a self-accusation, much like an examination of conscience. As we have seen, part of the synodal process is recognizing the many ways the Church has fallen short of fully realizing what it means to be a synodal Church, for example through the exclusion of women from full participation in the mission of the Church or the sin of clericalism.
Part of the task of a church historian or historical theologian guided by the hermeneutical lens of synodality, then, is to recover the voices of those who were marginalized in the past or who continued to be marginalized from the Church’s narrative of its own past. In another vignette, Lehner describes how, in seventeenth-century Spain, conversos, or Jews who had converted to Catholicism, were held in suspicion, and influential factions within the Church and the Spanish state began to think in terms of “purity of blood” when it came to excluding conversos from ecclesiastical or governmental positions, one of the key factors in the development of the modern notion of “race.” Lehner notes that a confraternity devoted to the Immaculate Conception of Mary challenged this dominant view of blood purity, particularly through the images of Mary they produced. For example:
In one of the paintings, one can therefore find the allegorical depiction of the Church in a corner, breastfeeding children with different skin colors. The message was clear: Through the milk of Our Lady, all people receive a new identity as members of the Church, regardless of their social, economic, or ethnic background. This image was especially bold, because many Catholics at the time had deep-seated prejudices against Jewish midwives feeding Christian children. In many countries, the practice of hiring a non-Christian wet nurse was even outlawed. Thus, the painting transforms the antisemitic prejudice by pointing to the Church as a mother for all of her children (see Gal 3: 28).
The seventeenth-century confraternity responsible for this vision remained marginalized in its own time, but Lehner argues that it is important for us to recover this history today. For one, it helps us recognize how the Church has fallen short by becoming complicit with evils such as racism and antisemitism, but it also calls us to look at how the Church today may be engaging in new forms of marginalization that ought to be challenged.
Lehner’s hermeneutical lens of synodality, and particularly its emphasis on lifting up historically marginalized voices, reminds me of another essay with which I recently engaged, Hoon Choi’s “The Case for Intersectional Theology: An Asian American Catholic Perspective,” published in the Journal of Moral Theology. I wrote a response to Choi’s essay at the Catholic Moral Theology blog and offered some further reflections on intersectionality here.
As I noted in my blog post, much like Lehner, Choi argues that if we are to take the doctrine of the sensus fidelium seriously, we must recognize that the marginalization of different voices in the Church’s history, whether women, certain social classes, certain ethnic or cultural groups, and so on, has wounded our understanding of the faith, and that therefore one of the tasks of historical theology is, to the extent that we can, to recover those voices and critique dominant interpretations of the Tradition.
Choi describes this project of recovery as a development of the 20th-century movement of ressourcement, originally focused on the recovery of the “sources” of the Church’s theological and doctrinal tradition, particularly the Church Fathers. Choi references Joseph Flipper’s articulation of a liberationist approach to ressourcement. Flipper, in turn, points to Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.’s historical work on Black Catholics in the United States as a paradigmatic example. Indeed, Davis’s painstaking recovery of the lives of 18th and 19th-century Black Catholic lives by using parish records and other historical artifacts is a perfect illustration of the approach recommended by Lehner, focused on social and cultural history and highlighting historically marginalized believers.
Lehner and Choi have quite different personal and scholarly backgrounds, and are engaged in very different scholarly projects, so this convergence in thinking, whether expressed in terms of ressourcement or synodality, is noteworthy.
For my own part, I am interested in the way that the stories we tell about the past can distort our understanding of the past. Sometimes these stories can distort the past by further obscuring voices that were already historically marginalized or even justifying the continuing marginalization of different social groups. The way the story of racism’s legacy in the United States has been told is a perfect example and continues to be contentious, as the recent controversy over how slavery is portrayed in the State of Florida’s public-school curriculum illustrates. Similarly, there is still a lot of work to be done in addressing how we tell the story of the Catholic Church’s place in the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States.
Sometimes the stories we tell about the past not only distort our understanding of that history but also hinder our understanding of the present. For example, in earlier articles, I described how the dominant narratives of the development of theology from the medieval period to modern times have blinded us to the theological diversity and vitality of that period, and in turn have made it more difficult for us to understand the Second Vatican Council’s place in the development of theology and doctrine.
I think that Lehner’s proposal for a hermeneutical lens of synodality provides us with a way of telling the Church’s story that acknowledges the diversity within the Church, both historically and currently, and that seeks to recover and recognize voices that have been marginalized, with the aim of enriching our understanding of the Church’s identity and mission. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the Church’s history is in fact a diversity of stories, all interwoven with each other, and the task of the church historian or historical theologian is to identify these different strands without losing the sense of the whole. I have certainly found Lehner’s essay helpful for understanding my own work as a theologian, including the project of this newsletter.
What are some historical or theological works that have focused on recovering marginalized voices from the past that you have found valuable? Share your thoughts in the Comments.
Of Interest…
I didn’t note it at the time it was published, but a few weeks ago ethicist Tobias Winright had an excellent essay in the National Catholic Reporter looking at how the understanding of self-defense developed in the tradition of Catholic ethics can inform contemporary discussions of gun violence. For example, he notes that the understanding of self-defense behind so-called “stand your ground” laws cuts against the traditional Catholic view that self-defense can only be justified when strictly necessary, and that using lethal force when it is not necessary ought to be categorized as murder. I found the essay particularly interesting because he acknowledges that a number of recent incidents of gun violence illustrate the pervasive sense of fear in our society, a point I had also raised in an earlier post where I also argued that these incidents suggest a diminishing sense of human dignity.
Speaking of self-defense, Mike Lewis writing at Where Peter Is sets out to take seriously Pope John Paul II’s claim in Evangelium Vitae (1995) that the death penalty can be understood as “a kind of legitimate defense on the part of society” (27), but that cases in which it is necessary “are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (56). Lewis, like Winright, points out that in the traditional Catholic understanding of self-defense, lethal force is only justified when strictly necessary, which confirms the wisdom of both John Paul’s prudential judgment that the need for the death penalty is “practically non-existent” today, and more importantly, Pope Francis’s revision of the Catechism to teach that the death penalty is “inadmissible.” Where Peter Is has also published a four-part series by the theologian Robert Fastiggi on capital punishment and the authentic development of doctrine that is also worth checking out.
At America, theologian Leo Guardado has an excellent essay celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s pathbreaking book A Theology of Liberation. Echoing Lehner’s sense of synodality as a challenge to the Church, Guardado links Gutiérrez’s recognition of the irruption of the poor in history as a theological category to the contemporary synodal process “that is bringing to the surface ecclesial conflicts and confrontations that have been suppressed for far too long.” In a future post, I will try to write about my own engagement with Gutiérrez’s work, which has been more than scholarly, but in some ways very personal.
I forgot to highlight it last week, but Peter Steinfels at Commonweal has a trenchant response to a critique of the Instrumentum Laboris for October’s Synod on Synodality by Robert Imbelli, the latter published in First Things. For my own analysis of the Instrumentum Laboris, including some mild critiques, see here.
Over the past several days, the Ortega government in Nicaragua has closed down the Jesuit-run Central American University in Managua and expropriated the university’s assets, and similarly seized the nearby Jesuit residence. The government has also arrested two student leaders, Adela Espinoza Tercero and Gabriela Morales, the former from the Central American University and the latter from John Paul II University, which had likewise been closed earlier. The Ortega government has gone after student leaders in the past; in 2022, Lesther Alemán was sentenced to 13 years in prison after being arrested in 2021 for his role in protests in 2018.
Coming Soon…
Last week, I published my reflections on the African continental document as part of my Synod on Synodality World Tour. I think the follow-up, looking at Synod participants from Africa, will have to wait until next week. I will get to the last stop on the tour, Europe, either at the very end of August or in early September. At some point later in September, my plan is to remove the paywall from those articles in the series that are currently for paid subscribers only and to publish all of the articles in the series in one place as a resource as the Synod approaches.