The Second Week of the Synod

A Lapse in Confidentiality and Overcoming Polarization as the Process Unfolds

The second week of the Synod on Synodality is in the books. In this commentary on the proceedings, I focus on a cybersecurity problem that threatened the confidentiality of the proceedings, new details on how the Synod’s final document will be drafted, how the Synod is helping to overcome polarization in the Church, and some of the larger-than-life characters I highlighted in the Synod on Synodality World Tour series who have made an appearance at the Synod.

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A Cybersecurity Lapse at the Synod

Perhaps the strangest occurrence so far at the Synod on Synodality, taking place in the Vatican, was reported by The Pillar this past Thursday. The confidential reports submitted by the Synod’s working groups, summarizing their conversations over the first week of the gathering, had been posted to a cloud server but were accidentally left accessible via the web to anyone with the correct web address. According to a statement by Paolo Ruffini, the head of Vatican communications who has been managing the Synod’s daily press briefings, the documents were originally protected by requiring a login using a username and password, but this security was removed after some Synod participants had difficulty logging in. The password requirement was reinstated once the security lapse was made public.

At the Synod, there are 35 working groups based around the five official languages of the Synod: English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Each working group includes bishops, priests, religious, and lay people. Based on comments I have seen from Synod participants on social media, it appears that the composition of the working groups also changes as the Synod progresses through different topics. Each also includes a facilitator (a non-voting participant in the Synod) who helps guide the discussions, and each also elects a group “rapporteur” responsible for drafting the summary of the group’s conversations. It was these summaries that were exposed in the security lapse, as well as the rosters of each working group, making it possible for someone with access to the documents to identify which Synod participants were responsible for which reports, although information on who said what during the group conversations would not have been available.

The reason this breach is noteworthy is because of the emphasis that has been placed on confidentiality or secrecy at the Synod, which I briefly mentioned in last week’s Synod commentary. Synod participants are prohibited from sharing the contents of the conversations in the working groups, although each day the proceedings begin with a public reflection by a Synod participant, and Ruffini and Sheila Pires, a South African radio producer and host managing media relations at the Synod, have included various Synod participants at the regular press briefings, as well. As Colleen Dulle has explained, the point of this confidentiality is not so much that the contents of the conversations should be kept hidden from the public, but rather that the participants should feel free to engage in open conversation without fear and without pressure from the media. As Ruffini noted at Thursday’s press briefing, “It is not a question of documents that we could call 'classified', but of confidential documents in order to protect the space of common discernment.”

This episode was especially interesting to me because I am working on a research project developing a theological perspective on privacy, particularly focusing on privacy in the context of contemporary digital technology. As I have argued elsewhere (for example, here and here), we are metaphysically constituted as sharers of the truth about ourselves, a reflection of God’s self-communication in the Word, but privacy or confidentiality is the recognition that certain truths are only shared in the context of particular relationships, such as intimate relationships, professional relationships, etc. We keep information private when it exposes our vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but also when it makes us vulnerable to those who would unscrupulously exploit it.

The Synod organizers, including Pope Francis, have the unenvious task of trying to balance transparency regarding the synodal process—after all, one of the purposes of the process is to create a more open Church—and to allow the participants to engage in open and honest dialogue free from being exploited by outside narratives, whether crafted by unscrupulous actors or not. This accidental security lapse tested that balance, and I think the Synod organizers handled it well. Some have criticized the Vatican for not having better cybersecurity procedures in place. While they certainly could have been a bit more savvy, I think Ruffini is right that this was not the equivalent of leaking personally-identifying information or exposing dirty laundry the Church was trying to keep hidden. Perhaps surprisingly, the journalists who discovered the lapse did not report on the documents’ contents, respecting Pope Francis’s call for “restraint” from the media in reporting on the Synod, although it remains unclear if anyone else accessed the files. (I also wonder if this means the documents weren’t particularly “juicy”; after all, the first week’s discussions were only about the characteristics of a synodal Church—some of the more controversial topics have only been broached in the second week.)