Never much interested in religious news, unless it also concerns money or sex, the British press showed barely any interest in what was happening in Rome last month. But it was momentous, and all church people should take note. It was an extraordinary opening-up of process and consultation in the Catholic Church. It may be remembered as the summit of Francis’s papacy.
The title, ‘Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops’ is not, admittedly, going to get pulses racing. It sounds like just one more of those meetings of hierarchs we hear about every so often, which appear to bring weight and gravitas but little change to the life of the Church. As a Synod of bishops, it was not, of course, like our own General Synod. The Synod of Bishops is a select gathering of representative bishops from across the world, convened from time to time for consultation by the Pope. In the past, these meetings have been little more than a show of episcopal solidarity behind the leadership of the Pope. They have scarcely touched the power and authority of the Papal office, and the way it is exercised in the Church.
But Francis, as in so much else, has transformed the spirit of the institution. In his apostolic constitution, Episcopalis communio (Episcopal communion) of 2018 he signalled two radical departures from the established way of doing things. One was to give added force to the deliberations of the Synod, by strengthening its connection to the magisterium of the Catholic Church, its teaching authority: instead of the Pope over the Synod, Francis has attempted here to embed a doctrine of Pope in Synod. All very well, you might think, but doesn’t that simply reinforce the existing hierarchy of the Church?
That is where the second innovation comes in. Francis widened the consultative process to include the voices of the laity for the first time in the modern history of the Catholic Church, bringing their opinions directly to the secretary general of the Synod. For the first time ever, women were appointed as consultors to the process, with the French nun Nathalie Becquart also appointed as under-secretary to the Synod, which brought with it (again a first for a woman) the power to vote in the Synod.
Under the diocesan phase of the ‘synodical way’, or ‘synodical process’, across the world the Catholic faithful were consulted in 2021-2 for their views on what ought to be the priorities for the Catholic Church today. The results were something of a shock to more traditional voices. Largely absent – though emphases and priorities varied enormously across the globe – were preoccupations with traditional doctrine. Instead, pastoral exigencies featured particularly strongly, with especial concern for excluded or marginalised voices, including the LGBTQ+ community, the young, and divorced and remarried people. These concerns helped to shape the working agenda of the Synod. Some 70 non-episcopal representatives were appointed to the Synod, alongside the near-300 bishops, with laity, women, religious, as well as male clergy. A further 12 ‘Fraternal Delegates’ from ecumenical partners, including Bishop Martin Warner from the Church of England, were – in a remarkable show of respect – accorded speaking rights.
How significant might this all turn out to be? The theological justification, laid out in two documents from the Catholic Church’s International Theological Commission in 2014 and 2018, repeats the pastoral, participative theme of the Second Vatican Council’s key text, Lumen Gentium, with its emphasis on the ‘whole people of God’. English observers might be tempted to trace a longer lineage, encompassing for example St John Henry Newman’s famous article ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’. The Church is not just constituted hierarchically, with authority flowing outwards and downwards from Pope to people, but horizontally and even from ground up, by the ability of the people of God to recognise, confirm, and even criticise the processes by which the Church is governed, and so in turn (and this almost certainly goes beyond Newman’s sense) actively to shape them.
If this impulse is really, and permanently, embodied in Catholic structures, the Synod may mark the beginning of a revolution in the Church. But it is too early to say. This October’s meeting was only the first of two. Next October the Assembly will meet again in Rome to consider how what has been discussed this year can be translated into action and into structures. And we do not yet know the outcome of this year’s Assembly, for its meetings were mostly in private. I was privileged to attend one of the few sessions open to a handful of observers. There was a great deal of talk of synodality and what it meant for the Church, and a sense of deep listening, but no votes were actually taken. The closed nature of the sessions was, I presume, deemed essential to free expression of opinion.
Possibilities range from radical transformation (with some even speaking of the end of compulsory clerical celibacy, the ordination of women as deacons, and pastoral acceptance of same-sex relationships) to…well, not very much. The Catholic Church is unlikely to embark on the wholesale creation of a synodical structure akin to ours, with houses of laity and clergy, parliamentary-style procedure, lobbying groups, and so on. Progressives have seen this as the opening of a door, traditionalists as froth which will be blown away by a change of papacy. But even if the structural legacy eventually process to be somewhat limited, the sense of fresh air – or more positively the free breath of the Spirit – blowing through the Catholic Church at this juncture is palpable. In one of a number of addresses to the Assembly, Timothy Radcliffe OP reiterated the powerful sense of what synodality really means about the voice of the whole people of God: ‘Every baptised person is a prophet’. If only we in the Church of England could really grasp that!
Ad fontes 