Vatican City, Oct 24, 2024 / 14:30 pm (CNA).
A year ago, at the end of the Synod on Synodality’s first general assembly, electronic versions of a draft of the confidential summary report were circulated among the media and others, as inevitably happens, in the days leading up to the delegates’ last amendments and final vote.
This year, apparently to discourage such leaks, synod organizers only provided participants with hard copies of the draft report, which aren’t as easily disseminated.
The irony is that there may not be much to share.
Internally and externally over the past several weeks, the assembly has come under intense pressure to change the Church’s governing structures and even some of its basic doctrines.
Theologian Myriam Wijlens, a synod consultant, emphasized at an Oct. 23 press briefing that Pope Francis has called for “reconfiguring the Church in a synodal way.” Doing so would require changes to canon law to, for example, make parish or diocesan councils mandatory.
But bigger changes, such as opening the diaconate to women or allowing exceptions to priestly celibacy, to cite two issues that were promoted publicly this month, appear off the table.
According to sources who have spoken to CNA, what’s left is a draft report that is generating disappointment in progressive quarters but very little buzz.
Titled “Communion, Mission, and Participation,” it’s a short document — 152 paragraphs, for the time being, covering about 47 pages. According to synod sources, it is divided into five parts.
The first part deals with the shared understanding of synodality and its theological principles. The second concerns what is called a “relational conversion.” The third part speaks of ecclesial discernment, decision-making processes, the culture of transparency, accountability, and evaluation. The fourth part seeks to understand how to cultivate the exchange of gifts in new ways. Finally, the fifth part speaks of formation in and for missionary synodality.
The synod’s final document, one delegate told CNA, appears to be strongly borrowed from the document on synodality that the International Theological Commission published in 2018, titled “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church.”
After reviewing it the synod delegates can propose amendments, which the assembly will discuss and vote on this Saturday.
Two-thirds of the assembly must approve a paragraph for it to be retained. In the past, if a paragraph did not reach even two-thirds, it would not be published. It was said that it did not represent synodal communion. Pope Francis has instead wanted each paragraph of the final document to be published and that votes for or against be indicated together with the paragraph.
Beyond the talks about healthy decentrality, the draft document addresses how this decentralization should be addressed. In particular, there is a paragraph that says that in a synodal Church, the decision-making competence of the bishop and of the bishop of Rome is “inalienable” while proposing some good practices to make the diocesan and parish council representative of all the people of God, women included.
Some describe the document as interlocutory rather than definitive. One bishop observed that “the document allows everyone to manage things as they wish.” But, he added, showing some disappointment, “So what were we discussing?”
If these are the results of two synodal stages in Rome and a three-year journey of dialogue and listening before that, it’s clear that many will be disappointed. There are no revolutions, but rather a call for a change of mentality in the Church grounded in the idea that synodality has always been present in the Church.
This will be the starting point for Saturday’s concluding session.
After the publication of the final document we will have to wait for Pope Francis to act. The Holy Father could decide to adopt the final document in full as a postsynodal exhortation or he could draft a postsynodal exhortation himself, either before or after the various study groups of experts deliver their final reports in May.
In the end, everything depends on the pope.
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Instead of 152 paragraphs and 47 pages, what the progressives wanted is 11 words in one line.” Maybe this: “Synodality is to Fatherhood as Woodstock is to the Apostolic Succession”.
And, too, about now returning to what the International Theological Commission wrote about synodality in 2018, there’s this:
“…It is essential that, taken as a whole, the participants give a meaningful and balanced image of the local Church, reflecting different vocations, ministries, charisms, competencies, social status and geographical origin. The bishop, the successor of the apostles [!] and shepherd of his flock [!] who convokes and presides over the local Church synod, is called to exercise there the ministry of unity and leadership with the authority which belongs to him [!]” (n. 79).
Had Grech, Hollerich & Co. folded this foundation into their vademecum, rather than with bishops reduced “primarily as facilitators,” much ink need not have been spilled in the past few years, and today the progressives would be spared much cognitive dissonance.
So, still, yes to always better “listening” and being heard, but in a theologians’ food fight, less herding of the laity to be conned, scripted, and conscripted.
“So what were we discussing?” Indeed.
“What were we discussing?” And, what more, or less, COULD have been discussed?
Literally, just now, yours truly found a dated but possibly relevant article tucked in a book on my random and sparse shelf. On February 14, 2013, three days after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation and two weeks before the resignation took effect, and a full month before his successor was elected (March 13), he (Benedict) addressed the clergy in Rome, “without notes and from the heart.”
Writer Rev. Matthew L. Lamb recalled the purpose of the Council, reflected in the Documents, and then he quotes generously the conclusion of Benedict’s “electrifying” address:
“I would now would like to add another point: there was the Council of the fathers—the true Church—but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council unto itself, and the world perceived the Council through these, through the media. Therefore the Council that immediately and efficiently arrived to the people was that of the media, not that of the fathers. And while the Council of the father was realized within the faith, and was a Council of the faith that seeks intellectus, that seeks to understand itself and seeks to understand the signs of God at that moment, that seeks to respond to the challenge of God at that moment and to find in the word of God the word for today and tomorrow, while the whole Council—as have said—was moving within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council the journalists was not realized, naturally, within the faith, but within the categories of today’s media meaning outside of the faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic.
“For the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different currents in the Church. It was obvious that the media were taking sides with that part which seemed to them to have the most in common with their world. These were those who were seeking the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression ‘people of God,’ the power of the people, of the laity. Ther was this threefold question: the power of the pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops and to the power of all, popular sovereignty.Naturally, for them this was the side to approve of, to promulgate, to favor.
“And so also for the liturgy: the liturgy was not of interest as an act of faith, but as a matter where understandable things are done, a matter of community activity, a profane matter. And we know that there was a tendency, that was also founded historically, to say: sacrality is a pagan thing, perhaps even in the Old Testament, but in the New all that matters is that Christ died outside: that is, outside of the gates, meaning in the profane world. A sacrality therefore to be brought to an end, profanity of worship as well: worship is not worship but an act of the whole, of common participation and thus also participation as activity.
“These translations, trivialization of the idea of the Council were virulent in the praxis of the application of liturgical reform; they were born in a vision of the Council outside of its proper key, that of faith. And thus also in the question of Scripture: Scripture is a book, historical, to be treated historically and nothing else, and so on. We know how this Council of the media was accessible to all. Therefore, this was the dominant, more efficient one, and has created so much calamity, so many problems, really so much misery: seminaries closed, convents closed, liturgy trivialized….And the true Council had difficulty in becoming concrete, in realizing itself; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council.”
(Citation is from http://chiesa.espresso.republic.it/articolo/1350435?eng=y, but does not work. The above is quoted directly from Rev. Matthew L. Lamb, “Vatican II After Fifty Years: The Virtual Council versus the Real Council,” The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, Fall/Winter 2012 including early 2013).
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre refused to sign the document on religious liberty and Guadiem et Spes; the council was corrupted from within, with the media council managed from inside the council chamber by Cardinal Villot, who supplied lots of scandal to his fellow freemason running the French Newspaper LaCroix. (Information published from an interview in Catholic Catechism of the Crisis in the Church by Abbe Matthias Gaudron). This all helped their French Grande Orient lodge forment the phallic revolution of May ’68.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre refused to sign the document on religious liberty and Guadiem et Spes; the council was corrupted from within, with the media council managed from inside the council chamber by Cardinal Villot, who supplied lots of scandal to his fellow freemason running the French Newspaper LaCroix. (Information published from an interview in Catholic Catechism of the Crisis in the Church by Abbe Matthias Gaudron). This all helped their French Grande Orient lodge forment the phallic revolution of May ’68. Cardinal Villot was a Luciferian Freemason.
Thanks for this prophetic contribution. What would it take to get those at the Vatican to read it let alone respond to it?
What will church history make of this? It will probably be condemned as a huge waste of time, resources and money and have nothing to show. It is an exercise in confusion that would make the Charge of the Light Brigade seem as a sensible military decision!
I wish they’d all just go home and resume their quiet lives of anonymity. They should return to worshipping God, frequenting the Sacraments (especially Confession), aspire to lives of holiness and proclaim the Gospel as Jesus exhorted all of us. As for Francis, since he is coming to a close of his pontificate, he needs to step back and take a fearless moral inventory of the impact his papacy has had on the Church and seek to restore unity to the Body which has been dreadfully fractured by actions he’s taken and things he’s spoken. This is best done by frequent meetings with a Spiritual Director – someone specifically chosen who won’t tell him what he wants to hear but, rather, what he needs to hear. In this last regard, I think the emeritus bishop of Tyler TX is well-suited for the role.
Mr. Beaulieu above – Thanks for the passage from Pope Benedict.
It about sums up my experience of the Church in the last 59 years.
Some of us do not have a forum to express ourselves. Synod on Synodality has been the Protestant approach and we have seem how their churches scrambled within 500 years. This will certainly break the church: Even when we were given questionnaire at the level of parish, I sensed there was unclear motive.This is not the Pope’s ideas, some evil power has cropped in which needs prayer. But God helps those who help themselves – you ask for help but you run, then God will help you run faster to defeat the enemy. We read what is happening in Vatican, but out hands are tied. Can some Cardinal or Bishop or someone able to see the Pope tell him that this path is evil and has already failed the Protestants.
“This is not the Pope’s ideas…”
The Synod on Synodality surely is his idea. How can you conclude otherwise, considering he called it, etc.?
Dr OJ, you suggest somone tell the Pope that this (synodal) path is evil and has already failed the Protestants.
May I suggest that is precisely why the Pope via Cardinal C6 Marx chose it? The objective is clear to anyone who has understood the Church Institution is occupied by anti-Catholic forces. (There is no other rational explanation for the terrible destruction 1962-1965 and then the fall out.)
Francis is the culmination of currents of dissent from Catholic orthodoxy that has characterized the whole post VII era. Except for some erroneous heterodox sentiments implied in various sentences, the documents of VII were orthodox but invited an unwarranted optimistic faith in the trajectory of contemporary history, which led to a great deal of junk theology and liturgical free-for-alls. Many clerics and prelates were captivated by bad theology, but few ever believed a distorted mind could ever rise to the top and raise havoc. Not only through his own foolishness, but in resurrecting dissidents of the past, Francis’ actions serve as a rebuke to the confident loyal Catholics who baselessly assumed the era of dissent died in the seventies. Human vanity never dies.
From what can be gathered from remarks here by theologian Myriam Wijlens and exchange between Raymond Arroyo and Robert Royal, Arroyo having access to some related documentation – the major impact on the Church will be governance. The implementation of permanent parish and or Diocesan councils.
What is of interest are regional councils with a larger share of independent authority. It appears to be a restructuring of Ecclesial governance more localized and horizontal rather than leading vertically to the Roman pontiff. Some theologians perceive a beneficial return to the early conciliar Church, although the early Church trended toward consolidation centered in the papacy. Especially when doctrinal issues on the nature of Christ came to fore.
From this writer’s perspective, after 2000 years of defining doctrine the purpose apparently is to implement a variegated approach to not simply regionally interpreting doctrine but inclusive of new rules or disbandment of doctrine. A restructure of a Church unified in name only. An ironic reproduction of the person whose Catholicism is limited to name. We might add, relevant to Peter Beaulieu’s quote of Benedict XVI upon resignation of the papacy, “These were those [the media and clergy] who were seeking the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression ‘people of God” the final success of Luther’s Reformation.
A major problem was created years ago when the local parishes started writing their own Mission Statements. The result was total CHAOS (compete disorder and confusion) and misguided Roles and Activities.