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Synodality documents and The Diary of a Country Priest

The juxtaposition of two wildly different texts set me pondering.

(Image: abebooks and Kelen Loewen/Unsplash.com)

Recently, without intending it, I found myself reading at the same time the latest document from the Vatican’s Synod office and The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos.

The juxtaposition of these two wildly different texts set me pondering.

The Synod document is a typical product of bureaucracy—wordy and jargon-ridden, that is. The 1936 Bernanos novel is a minor classic and a landmark of religious fiction. (I also highly recommend the film version directed by Robert Bresson.) Comparing the Synod document with the book from a literary perspective would be like comparing the artwork on a box of dry cereal with the Mona Lisa.

That said, however, a comparison is not only possible but significantly illuminating in one area—the vision of the Church presented by each.

Before I go further, fairness requires that I say a cautionary word about The Diary of a Country Priest. This book is no bit of literary fluff fit only to fill a couple of hours while waiting for the next football game to start. It’s the story of a young priest dying of undiagnosed stomach cancer while struggling to cope with the inertia and ill will of people in a dreary French village. Frequently disturbing, its message of faith and hope only emerges at the end in the dying priest’s last words: “Does it matter? Everything is grace.”

As Bernanos sees it, the Church is essentially, irrevocably linked to sin, suffering, redemption and joy. A tough old priest who has stayed faithful through thick and thin puts it like this: “I’m bringing you joy. I’ll give it to you for nothing, you have only to ask. Joy is in the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share. Whatever you did against the Church has been done against joy.”

The document from the Synod office describes the current “continental” phase of this project—which, as time passes, more and more resembles an intricate contraption clanking and wheezing to produce ever more meetings and more words. In the weeks ahead, representatives of the world’s hierarchies and invited guests will join in continental groupings, leading to still more meetings and words. A synod of bishops convening in Rome next October, and again by order of Pope Francis in October 2024, will meet and … talk some more.

So how does the Synod office view the Synodal Church? Like this: “The message of our synodal way is simple: we are learning to walk together, and sit together to break the one bread, in such a way that each is able to find their place. Everyone is called to take part in this journey, no one is excluded. To this we feel called so that we can credibly proclaim the Gospel of Jesus to all people.”

I’m glad proclaiming the Gospel gets a mention, but the Synod office’s formulation could be read as implying that no one proclaimed the Gospel until the Synod came along.

Summarizing input from diocesan consultations as reported by national bishops’ conferences, the document notes calls for such “progressive” favorites as married priests, women priests, a permissive view of non-marital sex, and blessings for same-sex couples.

So far I’ve been mildly hopeful for the Synod, but now I’m having doubts: Will this be simply an officially sanctioned sounding board echoing calls for the Church to join the sexual revolution? There’s still time to save the Synod and make it something worthwhile. For now, though, I’ll stick with the Church as Georges Bernanos presents it.


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About Russell Shaw 303 Articles
Russell Shaw was secretary for public affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference from 1969 to 1987. He is the author of 20 books, including Nothing to Hide, American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America, Eight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity, and, most recently, The Life of Jesus Christ (Our Sunday Visitor, 2021).

22 Comments

  1. In addition to his novel, which reads less like fiction than does the rhetoric of synodality, is Bernanos’ very early and direct assessment of today’s sleepwalking sinod-ism, voiced already back in the 1940s:

    “The modern world will shortly no longer possess sufficient spiritual reserves to commit genuine evil. Already . . . we can witness a lethal slackening of men’s conscience that is attacking not only their moral life, but also their very heart and mind, altering and decomposing even their imagination . . . The menacing crisis is one of infantilism.”

    (Interview with Samedi-Soir, Nov. 8, 1947, cited in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence, Ignatius, 1996, p. 457).

    • Sleepwalking reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk, more than hubris would. He was pressuring More to sign on the Act of Succession “like the rest of us” as THE way to keep out and conquer the devil. More simply said he’d give the devil his own fair chance, meaning it’s only just. And if you recollect, God gave the devil his own chances at Job.

      More then rebuked Norfolk for over-stepping into his conscience. Perhaps this would bring Norfolk into hubris, for hereafter he still persisted in the wrong way.

  2. I can think of no other word to describe this Synod, its documents, its participants and its leader than this: HUBRIS.

    I’ve taken up oil painting in my latter years. I can imagine painting a scene of Pontiff Francis and all his cronies standing in front of a gigantic, larger than life mirror with their mouths all agape, staring at themselves flapping their jaws. Much talk, many words, few listeners.

    • Dear Deacon,
      That’s a gem! Thank you! But please, don’t paint that! Only paint what is beautiful! Our Lord is the culmination of all beauty and the world is now
      obsessed with the culture of ugliness. And the saddest part is that the ugly is deemed wonderful, even beautiful. 10 minutes in any public place with obscene music at ear-splitting decibels says it all.

      • Dear Kathleen, There is such beauty in silence and mental prayer. And, yet, the thought of How the heck did we get here? keeps intruding the peace. The Daleiden video which I viewed before they were censored proves the lack of “spiritual reserves to commit genuine evil”. Callousness is a meager start to describe them.

  3. “Summarizing input from diocesan consultations as reported by national bishops’ conferences, the document notes calls for such ‘progressive’ favorites as married priests, women priests, a permissive view of non-marital sex, and blessings for same-sex couples.”

    Like most all of the issues of the Catholic Right, these all reflect a certain navel-gazing. Adoration, confession, dress codes for women–they all reveal a Church whose gaze is inward: maintain the flock, maximize membership, cultivate loyalty and team spirit. The exact opposite is needed: an evangelical spirit.

    People outside the sheep gate want to see a certain heroism and attraction. Yes, the Church has a problem with women. Ordaining those who are gifted in preaching, administration, and teaching won’t solve the problem. Too few clergy and lay people have a full and proper sense of their baptism. It’s not about a chosen few–men or women–being ordained for a clerical caste. It’s about the elevation of baptism as a vocation and way of life.

    All that said, I have no worries about the synod. The Church’s main loss is that it wasn’t done two generations ago.

    • “Adoration, confession, dress codes for women…”

      How the heck is adoration and worship of God, and the sacrament of Confession, somehow reflective of “a certain navel-gazing”? You’ve said some strange things here, but this might take the proverbial cake.

      “God’s first call and just demand is that man accept him and worship him.” (CCC 2084). “And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.'” (Lk 4:8).

      That’s Christianity 101–and it is The Basis for an evangelical spirit, missions, witness, etc. If you don’t get that, well, you’re part of the problem.

      Good grief.

      • Absolutely on the mark, Mr Olson!
        Surely that is the critical beginning. What matters if the subject isn’t our Lord? But that poor person who wrote you hasn’t a clue. He has bought the zeitgeist; I’ve met dozens of them. And as a Deacon mentioned elsewhere, they, like the prelates, spend their time gazing at themselves in mirrors. “Alas,” they grieve, “would that those miserable sinners were as enlightened as I am.” Oddly enough, the Synodal Soul doesn’t seem to be aware of the glorious Church with its “rigid” priests, facing the altar, not putting on a show, drawing the huge and growing crowds with their many children, on their knees, receiving the living Christ on their tongues. It’s what they’re there for. Young men and women, young families galore, presenting their infants before Our Lady’s side altar. They are proud at first Communion, proud of their little altar boys and older sons serving with the priest. Talk of backward! The congregation prays the Rosary before Mass! They ask St Michael to pray for them to the Father as they battle the Prince of this world. More’s the pity that when they pray, they know that their prelates want to be rid of them.

    • How do you draw the conclusion that childishly selfish demanands to have matters one’s own way constitutes being “gifted” at anything other than self-worship?

    • The sin-nod of sin-nods is just too funny….a self lampooning bit of bureaucratize. Isn’t it just window dressing for the apostates to take the church down the broad path of the anything goes church of What’s Happening Now?
      Lord have Mercy on your Suffering Church as we recall it was the religious leaders who murdered The Beloved One. They justified themselves saying one man must die that a nation might live. Great is the irony:
      One God/man Incarnate would give His Life that all of mankind might live in eternal Paradise if only they would love the Almighty.
      The High Priest accused the Son of God of blasphemy.
      Pontius Pilate asked, cynically, of incarnate Truth, our Beloved Savior King, “what is Truth?” .., as if Truth did not exist while He stood before him..shackled.

    • Walking with Todd Flowerday:
      Methinks thou might be both right and wrong…

      FIRST, had synodality been done two generations ago as you suggest, it might not have been so upstaged (literally) by clown Masses, then mass exoduses and carnival Kumbaya sorts-a-stuff. The term “synod” might still have had a backbone structure as it did, say, in the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in 1985. Oh, wait, that WAS a synod—almost two generations ago—with the balanced insight that the Vatican II Church is both a hierarchical communion and evangelical.

      So, SECOND, and moving on…..your worthy “elevation of baptism as a vocation and way of life;” this approach was already advanced not two generations ago, but myopically distorted and five centuries back. Luther retained the sacrament of Baptism (and the Eucharist which he redefined), but eliminated all the rest including Holy Orders and Matrimony. That went well.

      So, today’s groundbreaking synod-ism is old hat on steroids, and not so much about your caricatured “clerical caste.” Though itself is a good example of clericalism, now in the hands of Batzing, Grech and Hollerich and other company men, or whatever.

    • You need to read the book of Acts. Christ told the Apostles that they needed to wait until they received the Holy Spirit. While they were waiting for the Holy Spirit at Pentecost they devoted themselves to prayer. It was only when they received the Holy Spirit that they had the empowerment needed to go out and evangelize. You cannot give what you do not have. Even Jesus, the Son of God, made a practice of withdrawing and praying in solitude. Union with God is a part of the interior spiritual life of contemplative prayer. One of the books written by St. Teresa of Avila is titled “The Interior Castle” which covers the interior spiritual life. Another book that covers the interplay between the interior spiritual life and the exterior active life is “The Soul of the Apostolate” by Jean-Baptiste Chautard, O.C.S.O. Without an interior spiritual life attempting the exterior active life is like trying to run on empty.

      • Thing is, Pentecost was almost twenty centuries ago. The early Church certainly worshipped and beheld the Risen Lord in the Breaking of the Bread. As do many Catholics on the Left, even the far Left. But the first Christians had the missionary impulse lacking in many people who adhere to their sub-doctrines of the Left and Right.

        No, it’s an unfortunate commonality. Time to grow up, Church, and tackle the fishing endeavor in the deeps. The low-hanging fruit is for amateurs.

        • Flowerday: You write “Pentecost was almost 20 centuries ago”. Are you inferring that the Gifts of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost were a one and done or that the Gifts have manifest throughout the world since the Apostles received them? Clarification, please?

        • “[Pentecost] almost twenty centuries ago”?
          What, then, of the Holy Spirit today in the sacrament of Baptism, or Confirmation, or Holy Orders, or, yes, the Breaking of the Bread–or any other sacrament now made possible by His continued indwelling (!) the Church itself as a whole, through the Apostolic Succession?

          Instead, it must be that eternity has not really entered into time after all, and that doctrinal memory-jogs/remembrances are essentially misleading artifacts—and that the relentless funeral pyre of history still is God!

          And as for the spirit-filled “on the Left, even the far Left,” at least Mark Bauerlein (author of the “Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future”, 2008) had none of these in mind when asked by the Atlantic Monthly to explain himself: “Millennials in America today are the most socially conscious, hard-working, knowledgeable, skilled and savvy, globally aware, workforce-ready, and downright interesting generation in human history. Just ask them.”

          But, with you and within our remembering Tradition, yes to the sacramental “Breaking of the Bread.” “Do this in remembrance of Me.”

  4. I have had the experience of teaching Bernanos and Mauriac to students at my Catholic university, only to have them say: “What’s Catholic about this? It’s so… DEPRESSING!” They are so used to the emotional high of upbeat, saccharine liturgies and homilies, so fond of serving as “ministers” of this and that, so looking forward to going on “youth missions” and “World Days…” that they have not the faintest idea of crosses and joys of daily Christian life, and the heroic drama of being Catholic in a neopagan world. Our bishops are the same.

  5. The synod is a living contradiction to the oath that a bishop takes: “A catholic bishop upon taking this office takes an oath of fidelity :

    “In fulfilling the charge entrusted to me in the name of the Church, I shall hold fast to the deposit of faith in its entirety; I shall faithfully hand it on and explain it, and I shall avoid any teachings contrary to it.”

  6. Nearing Thanksgiving …and the uplifting tender words of the Holy Father can be a good start…
    There is Zachaeus, up on the tree ..and most could have seen him as a child of that first agent that was up on the wrong tree in The Garden ..The New Adam already had sensed the hunger in that lost son to be restored to dignity … and in one compassionate gaze telling him that The Lord already saw what he was going to be –
    who wanted to show his gratitude, in acts of reparation and communion , valuing very much how The Lord would want to even stay with him ..the Holy Father too likely still yearning for a similar experience – as in those days of spending time with the poor in the slums in Argtentina … sensing that Holy Spirit wants the whole Church too
    have similar times …for the ‘poor ‘, the laity who have lost hope, to be restored too .. for the joy that comes from contemplating the goodness of God –

    https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2022-10/pope-francis-angelus-jesus-zacchaeus-catechesis.html#:~:text=Pope%20Francis%20noted%20that%20Zacchaeus,everyone%20and%20branded%20a%20sinner.

    The desire to make reparations too – that the loudest decibels in The Church have often belonged to the far ends – as the voice of those who would rather choose to look down – that sacredness is possible only within the context of the old wine or those who clamor for the birth rights to go the way of the prodigal …

    Glad that there are prayerful contemplative hearts who can hear the whisper of The Spirit –
    https://wherepeteris.com/wholly-sacrifice/

    and the next article on the topic by Sr.Gabriela might be ready in time for Thanksgiving , for the little domestic synods too to be one of seeing each other beyond turkey labels , instead offering reparations for such pasts ..

    Came across just the other day about the Sisters of Reparation in Stuebnville who seems to have a wonderful menu fit for our times –

    http://www.sistersofreparation.org/act-of-reparation.html

    Reparation as in Fatima , inlcuding as prayerful support for the Holy Father ,
    Divine Mercy and the Passion meditations as narrated in Divine Will ..

    May the good intentions of our Holy Father to help The Church to walk together in the joy of the dignity in sacredness – as did Adam with The Father ..with The Mother’s gaze to remind that the creation too is being transformed as the Temple of The Spirit .. and every effort to hasten same in hearts and lands to bear much fruit !

    Blessings !

  7. “Walk and sit together to break the one bread, that everyone is able to find their place. No one is excluded. So that we can credibly proclaim the Gospel of Jesus to all people.”
    Proclaimed with sharp edges cutting both ways. One cuts away undue exclusivity. The other the commandment to repent. How then do we interpret the Synodal journey? The answer seems left to suggestion. That is, if we preclude that which our faith is convinced of. Key to resolution then are the words, No one is excluded.
    If we relinquish exclusion with addition of repentance for the disenfranchised we have a continuity with what is revealed by the Word. Otherwise we have unity and discontinuity with the Word. Bread is symbolic of the Body of Christ as Church and Eucharist. Only that the bread of Christ is unity of faith and practice – not a new revelation to be found in a journey.

  8. The next Pope will hopefully take all the documents issued by the Goat Rodeo Synod of Goat Rodeo Synods and have a big public bonfire to show how contemptible and useless the whole clownfest has been.

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