Vatican City, Oct 20, 2023 / 12:00 pm (CNA).
During the Synod on Synodality, we must be careful about “blaming everything on the Holy Spirit,” Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney has said, noting that if a proposal is radically at odds with the Gospel then “that’s not of the Holy Spirit.”
“The Holy Spirit is Christ’s Spirit. He is the Spirit of the Father and the Son, and so he is only ever going to be saying things that are consistent with what Christ has revealed to us in the apostolic tradition,” Fisher told CNA in an interview in Rome this week.
Much emphasis has been placed on listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit during the October assembly with synod delegates gathering for nearly daily small-group “conversations in the Spirit,” described on the synod website as “a dynamic of discernment in a synodal Church.”
The Australian Dominican explained that if some synod proposal is “radically at odds” with the Gospel and the apostolic tradition, “that’s not of the Holy Spirit because we cannot have Christ and the Holy Spirit at war with each other.”
“We’ve got to be careful about blaming everything — all our opinions, our interests, lobbies, and factions — putting all that on the Holy Spirit,” Fisher said.
“Catholics like to think that the Holy Spirit elects the pope, the Holy Spirit chooses our bishops and priests for us, the Holy Spirit does this and that. And there’s no doubt that God’s hand, God’s providence, is there in all those important things in our lives and in the life of the Church. But we’ve also had some terrible popes in history. We’ve had some awful priests and bishops and awful things happen in people’s lives. And was the Holy Spirit absent? No, but he permitted those things to happen.”
“So let’s not pin everything on the Holy Spirit that happens at the synod or anywhere else in our lives. I think that’s actually superstitious to do that,” he added.
The challenge of the synod is to listen and ask what God is saying to us and to the Church at this time, he explained, adding that the Church has already provided helpful “guideposts” when trying to discern the will of God.
“Christ has given us everything we need for our salvation, already revealed. We hand that on from generation to generation, the Gospel and the teachings of the Church,” he said.
“We already have a whole body of teaching, of reflection, by thousands and thousands of people down through the generations, guided by the Holy Spirit on all sorts of questions there to help us, the deposit of faith as we call it, it’s there to be mined.”
“So we’re not just left to our own devices, our own thinking — whatever the mood is in the assembly on a particular matter. We’ve actually got something solid to rely on and to test the moods and the intuitions against,” he said.
Synod discussion of women’s ordination
The 62-year-old archbishop of Sydney noted that there has been “a long discussion about the ordination of women” in the synod assembly.
“I don’t think that’s revealing anything that people didn’t know already,” he added. “And there’s a lot of tension and emotion around an issue like that.”
He said that it is hard to know what the assembly as a whole feels on this issue because people hear a report from each of the 35 tables in the hall, but “you don’t know whether that report is reporting what one person said or what all 12 people that table [said].”
“So you don’t know if that’s the enthusiasm of one or two people at each table or an enthusiasm that’s really held by nearly the whole room,” he said.
Speaking in a 25-minute interview on the television news program “EWTN News In-Depth” that will air on Oct. 20, Fisher said he thinks the synod could be an opportunity to talk about bigger issues in the Church today, like how many young people are saying that they have no religion at all.
“It is much more urgent, in the end, so much more serious than tinkering at the edges about whether 0.001% of women might be deaconesses or lady women deacons,” he said.
“It’s trivial compared to the huge loss of faith that we have happening particularly in whole generations at the moment.”
He added that when people lose their faith, they go elsewhere to look for meaning, and “people go to a lot of very destructive places searching for meaning and hope and happiness.”
“For their sake, we’ve got to be much more active in evangelizing our culture and especially our young adults,” he added.
“What I’d love to come out of the synod would be an enthusiasm for bringing the faith back to people that should have it and for whatever reason are disconnected,” he said.
‘This synod is an experiment’
Fisher, who has served as the archbishop of Sydney for nearly a decade, noted that the Synod on Synodality is “quite different” from the previous Synod of Bishops that he attended.
He described the entire process as “an experiment,” adding: “It raises all sorts of quite serious theological questions.”
The Synod of Bishops set up by Paul VI after the Second Vatican Council was “intended to be an expression of episcopal collegiality of the college of bishops together,” he explained, “like the group of the apostles together … and in particular their magisterium, their teaching together.”
Whereas the Synod on Synodality is more like “a hybrid” of the Synod of Bishops and other types of Church gatherings and meetings with bishops, priests, religious sisters, and laypeople.
“It’s both being a Synod of Bishops and being an ecclesial gathering all in one. And there are questions that it raises. So what is its ecclesial nature? What is its authority? … Is it trying to be the bishops like the gathering of the apostles? Or is it trying to be the gathering of all the baptized?”
“I think we need to do probably a lot more thinking about, well, what does all that mean ecclesiologically, canonically, practically?”
Fisher said that there is also discussion about the proportion of laypeople, particularly women, in the Synod on Synodality.
“There’s more women than there’s ever been before and yet [the synod] is still copping a lot of criticism that it still doesn’t have enough women,” he noted.
The Australian archbishop added that one of the upsides of the Synod on Synodality has been the wide range of Catholics from across the globe gathered together at the Vatican this month.
“I’ve met a bigger range of bishops in the last two weeks than probably in my previous 20 years. And that has to be a positive,” he said.
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Another good criticism, but the preplanned hostility to orthodoxy and contrived approbation of this Synod has been self-evident to every Catholic who hasn’t lost his mind. Some high prelate needs to take the gloves off with a frontal attack on this evilness and find a way to have it heard around the world before it’s too late.
PRAISE GOD!!!
At last, here’s an Aussie Archbishop speaking truth true Catholics can say “Amen!” to.
THANK YOU for an encouraging interview, and NOT to disagree, but only to suggest more of an edge on things—how about these questions:
Did the Synod on Synodality cease to be merely an “experiment” when the VOTING STRUCTURE was merged –thereby importing the worst of what was imposed on the German “non-synod” Synodal Way)?
Of the DEACONESS agenda, even after two study commissions, wasn’t it Hegel who said “if the facts don’t fit the theory, too bad for the facts”?
And, as a “hybrid,” should the Church adopt as a MASCOT the duck-billed platypus—a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal endemic to Archbishop Fisher’s (eastern) Australia—both mammal and amphibian? That is, if synodalism is neither a “synod of bishops” nor a combined TOWN HALL “ecclesial gathering”—but both at once—then what’s the difference from the merged 1789 Tennis Court Oath?
Of 1789, some dead white dude named Edmund Burke observed: “those who DESTROY everything will likely remove some abuse.”
What does it really mean (as in “meaning” something) to say “it’s hard to know what the assembly as a whole feels on this issue.” FEELING? ISSUE? Is the synod engaged in platypus identity, with feelings cross-dressed as thoughts and “issues”?
SO, YES, not to blame our fantasies on the Holy Spirit.
As for the LOSS OF FAITH of most of the younger generation, embedded in synodality is there the substitute belief that this catastrophe can be groomed back into the Church by replacing faith-content with “concreteness”?
Or, INSTEAD, there’s the less foggy vision of simply looking up into the stars…As another dead white dude, a believing ex-communist and father, prepared his own son for the global “mess” we are handing on:
“I want him to remember that God Who is a God of Love is also the God of a world that includes the atom bomb and virus, the minds that contrived and use or those that suffer them, and that the problem of good and evil is NOT more simple than the immensity of worlds. I want him to understand that evil is NOT something that can be condescended to, waved aside or smiled away, for it is NOT merely an uninvited guest, but lies coiled in foro interno [that is] at home with good within ourselves [!]. Evil can ONLY be fought. . . .I want him to know that it is his soul [soul?], and his soul alone, that makes it possible for him to bear, without dying of his own mortality, the faint light of Hercules’ fifty thousand suns” (Whittaker Chambers, Witness, 1952).
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GOULASH SYNODALITY? Where the “feeling” process, itself, is said to be of the Holy Spirit? And, where the forthcoming script, “compiled and synthesized” by star “experts,” is not so stupid as to deny anything, butt nuanced enough to concretely and locally enable everything?
Hoping for the best, but just some questions, here, from the back bleachers…
I think that the Roman Church, and I say this as an Eastern Christian, misunderstands the nature of synodality, because synodality is not about introducing innovations into the Church’s doctrine or practice. Rather, synodality properly understood is about governing the Church in line with all that Christ has revealed to us, that is, it is about keeping the Church faithful to the Dominical Tradition. Finally, it is vitally necessary for the Church today to bring the teaching of Christ into a world that is sadly (at practically all levels of society) devoid of truth as it concerns the nature of man and his need for communion with the Triune God.
Many thanks, dear T. Kaster.
Excellent to have The Truth perceived & presented so clearly, by another wise man from the East. Matthew 2:1
Always in the grace & mercy of King Jesus Christ; love & blessings from marty