It’s sometimes said that synodality has never been properly defined, perhaps because modern ecclesiastical texts are not written by Schoolmen. A suitable definition might run, ‘Synodality is a spirit of co-responsibility for the life and mission of the Church which finds expression in decision-making processes or events and is applicable in an analogous way at the local (meaning parochial or diocesan), regional (meaning provincial, national, or patriarchal), and universal (meaning global) level of the Church body’.
Synodality, so understood, is coming to you soon.
The Office of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops announced on 15 March, 2025 that, in preparation for an ‘Ecclesial Assembly’ in October 2028, there will be, starting in June of this year, a phase of implementation in local churches of the proposals contained in the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality insofar as these are currently compatible with existing Church law. That phase will run till December 2026, after which, in the first six months of 2027, there will be held ‘evaluative assemblies’ in every diocese to consider the results of the implementation so far achieved.
Then, in the second six months of 2026, similar evaluative assemblies on the territory of national or international Bishops’ Conferences will consider the reports of the diocesan evaluative assemblies, while in the first six months of 2028 evaluative assemblies will take place at the Continental level, coordinating the results of the national or international assembles and enabling the production in June 2028 of an Instrumentum laboris to guide the deliberations of the Great Ecclesial Assembly billed for October of that same year. That final Assembly, which will also consider the ten reports of the study groups on particular topics set up in the second, 2024, phase of the Synod on Synodality, is then to determine the manner whereby synodality will be introduced into the universal Church.
It was further explained that, to begin this entire process, each diocese must decide on the membership of ‘synodal teams’ consisting of priests, deacons, consecrated men and women, and laity, accompanied by the local bishop.
Ecumenical roots and focus
In naming the worldwide ‘Ecclesial Assembly’ I added the prefatory adjective ‘Great’. That was because it is already being trumpeted as of comparable importance to Vatican II. If so, it is an attempt by the Papacy to claim the consensus of the entire Catholic Church without needing to count the votes of the global episcopate at an Ecumenical Council–or by some more informal method. In terms of Catholic ecclesiology, for which the College of Bishops is the successor to the ‘College’ of the Apostles, that would be a dubious proceeding. But one thing at least is plain. Whereas the notion of synodality might suggest that the content of the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality, reached in episcopal gatherings expanded by the presence of layfolk, priests, deacons, and religious, and adopted as an authentic text of his magisterium by the Pope, should now be handed over to bishops, to do with as they and their clergy and people think fit, the reality is that Rome wishes to keep control of the entire exercise in its own hands.
That is neither hard to understand nor difficult to sympathize with. One element in synodality on the universal level is decentralization. Patently, there is an awareness in Rome–how, in the light of events in Germany, could there not be?–that synodality may turn into a runaway horse, or even a whole string of them. The late ex-Jesuit journalist Peter Hebblethwaite called his study of immediately post-Conciliar Catholicism The Runaway Church.1 Those like myself who lived through most, if not all, of the pontificate of Paul VI, remember it well.
But where does ‘synodality’, suitably defined and equipped with its newly announced programme for the years 2025-28, actually come from?
It derives from the twentieth-century Ecumenical Movement, with a possible rather minor subsidiary contribution from more recent political observation: namely, an anxiety that participatory democracy is currently under threat and to spread its spirit in the Church would usefully bolster its fortunes. Thus the International Theological Commission’s 2018 document on ‘Synodality in the life and mission of the Church’ included these words:
The emergence of a new climate in ecumenical relationships with the other Churches and ecclesial communities, and a more careful discernment of the advanced demands of modern consciousness concerning the participation of every citizen in running society, call for a new and deeper experience and presentation of the mystery of the Church as intrinsically synodal. (38)
But the ecumenical factor is surely primary. As Pope Francis told the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, Mar Awa III, in November 2022, ‘The journey of synodality undertaken by the Catholic Church is and must be ecumenical, just as the ecumenical journey is synodal.’
As early as 1927–and thus almost a century since–the first Faith and Order Conference of the (Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox) Ecumenical Movement of that time proposed that the divisions between Congregationalist-type Church governance, Presbyterian-type Church governance, and Episcopal- or Orthodox-type Church governance might be overcome if authority were seen to be distributed between local congregations, ministerial synods covering a wider area, and primates. This was a very rough sketch of what emerged much more clearly, nearly a century later, in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century ecumenism, to some degree in dialogue with the Anglican Communion but more extensively in the bilateral dialogues between Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox.
Church governance–and indeed everything concerning the life and mission of the Church—is, for these ecumenical dialogues, all three of local, regional, and universal. Each of these levels builds on the one below it, and in so doing, the agency of decision-making narrows or, as Synodalists might prefer to say, becomes more focused or concentrated. In Catholic terms, that translates as all the people, the bishops, and the pope, or in the simplest possible vocabulary–so runs the title of a new book on synodality by Hyacinthe Destivelle, a Dominican of the Province of Toulouse—One, All, Some.2
The sub-title of Destivelle’s book, The Synodal Dynamic and the Unity of Christians, is well-suited to his basic thesis. Synodality must become a reality throughout all levels of the Catholic Church if there is to be any hope for bringing about unity with non-Catholic Christians. It is the only way to overcome the aversion of the separated Easterners to a specifically papal Catholicism, just as, likewise, it is the only way to overcome the aversion of separated Western Christians (classical Anglo-Catholics aside, one might think) to a clerically governed Church.
Conciliarity, synodality, and koinonia
The language of synodality is a language which, in documents from the bilateral ecumenical dialogues, above all those with the Eastern Orthodox (Chieti, 2016; Alexandria, 2023), has emerged from an earlier vocabulary of ‘conciliarity’ (Ravenna, 2007) which for the Orthodox was the preferred language for what in the texts of Vatican II was termed ‘collegiality’—meaning the proper inter-relations of bishops both amongst themselves, and also (for in Roman law a ‘collegium’ always requires a head) with the pope. Since, to the Orthodox, ‘collegium’ was a theologically unfamiliar use of Roman legal language and implied something suspiciously like the Catholic concept of the Petrine office, bilateral dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox churches eventually abandoned the term ‘collegiality’ for ‘conciliarity’—and subsequently, then, ‘synodality’—instead.
What was new for the Orthodox, as for Catholics, was seeking to apply the term ‘conciliarity’, or its replacement term ‘synodality’, to the life and mission of a particular (i.e. diocesan) church in the form of local synodality. Regional synodality, by contrast, was perfectly familiar to them. In a Church province, decisions should not be made by a presiding bishop without the other bishops’ consent, nor by the suffragans without the metropolitan’s consent. Those are almost the exact words of Canon 34 of the Apostolic Canons, a fourth-century document from Antioch much used by the Orthodox but not well known to Catholics. Obviously enough, that properly pertains to the regional, not the local, level of the Church and, for this reason, it concerns only bishops. At the 2023 Synod on Synodality the invited delegate from the Patriarchate of Moscow said so in as many words. For us, ‘synod’ denotes bishops and no one else.
In the case of Russia, this statement was not entirely true—not only because, after Peter the Great’s abolition of the patriarchal office, the Church there was governed by a ‘Holy Synod’ functioning as a Department of State under a lay Procurator. In 2006, Hyacinthe Destivelle, for a number of years ‘Mr Orthodoxy’ at the Christian Unity Dicastery and an influential figure in Catholic-Orthodox dialogue, published the standard account of the 1917-18 Moscow Sobor or Council that restored the patriarchal dignity. The shape of that Revolutionary-age council, with its patriarch, bishops, and substantial tranches of the lower clergy, monastics, and laity, all furnished with voting rights, uncannily prefigures the structure of Pope Francis’s planned 2028 Ecclesial Assembly.3 It was in researching the Sobor, Destivelle tells us, that he first found the formula ‘one, all, some’—standing there for the Moscow patriarch, the various ranks of Church-people, and the bishops—long before the Catholic Church began to consider it.4 That suggests it was Destivelle who brought the phrase to the notice of the International Theological Commission, which deployed it when writing ‘Synodality in the life and mission of the Church’, the document already referred to, dated 2018.
If Catholics, for their part, were unaccustomed to applying collegiality-type language to people other than bishops both locally and regionally, they were equally unused to applying such terms as ‘conciliarity’—during the period of Destivelle’s research this was displacing ‘collegiality’—at the universal level too. In the context of the Church universal, the word ‘conciliarity’ might well strike Catholics as too close for comfort to ‘Conciliarism’, for Conciliarism had been regarded since the late Middle Ages as the erroneous view that a General Council is superior to the pope. ‘Synodality’ avoided semantic contagion from the term ‘Conciliarism’ and hence was preferable to ‘conciliarity’ where the worldwide Church was concerned.
For diametrically opposite reasons, the Moscow Patriarchate also objected to universal conciliarity and found the replacement term ‘synodality’ no better. Such an extension of the scope of Apostolic Canon 34 from the regional to the universal level would require there to be a universally primatial bishop, someone analogous on the global scale to the metropolitan with his suffragans, and this is a notion the Russians repudiate not only in dialogue with Catholics but even within Orthodoxy. In the Russian view there is no bishop who, as has been claimed for the ecumenical patriarch in the current spat between Constantinople and Moscow, is not just a ‘first among equals’, primus inter pares (something they would allow), but a ‘first without equals’, primus sine paribus, the title of an essay defending Constantinople by a member of Patriarch Bartholomew’s Permanent Synod.
This early twenty-first century deployment of the language of first ‘conciliarity’ and then ’synodality’ to all levels of the Church had a precedent in late twentieth century ecumenical agreements, namely the language of koinonia or ‘communion’, which really took off once the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on Vatican II had declared that an ‘ecclesiology of communion’ was the key to unlocking the various statements made about the Church in the Council documents. Koinonia, too, in agreed ecumenical statements of the 1980s and 1990s, was seen as local, regional, and universal. Another Francophone Dominican, Jean-Marie Tillard, was especially influential through his inputs into the dialogues with Canterbury and Constantinople, as well as in the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission.5 But the language of ‘communion’ was too close to that of the sacramental life and even the life of mystical participation in the Holy Trinity, to be really serviceable when the heart of the matter was questions of practical decision-making. That at least would appear to be the chief reason for its sudden displacement.
By comparison with koinonia, ‘conciliarity’ was a comparatively short-lived enthusiasm and not pressed outside the bilateral dialogues. But ‘synodality’ has now acquired, both ecumenically and within the Catholic Church at its highest echelons, a comparable kudos to koinonia, which at one time was on all lips. In the words of Archbishop Kevin McDonald to the present writer at a time when, in the later 1980s, McDonald occupied the ‘Mr Anglicanism’ desk at the Unity Secretariat, ‘Ubi “koinonia” et “substantial agreement” ibi Deus est.’ Synodality has since undergone the same apotheosis. The 2013 Faith and Order Commission document entitled ‘The Church: Towards a Common Vision’ has this to say of it. ‘The quality of synodality or conciliarity reflects the mystery of the trinitarian life of God.’ When the authors went on to add that the ‘structures of the Church express this quality so as to actualize the community’s life as a communion’, they neatly joined up the old koinonia-talk with the new vocabulary.6
The backdrop of sensus fidei
For Synodalists in the Catholic Church, the word ‘synodality’ is, then, three things.
Firstly, it is a replacement for ‘co-responsibility’ of clergy and laity at the parochial or diocesan level. Secondly, it is another name for ‘collegiality’ at the regional level (that of Episcopal Conferences or the standing Synods of Eastern Catholic churches). And lastly, it is a welcome way of presenting the universal primacy of the pope to non-Catholic Christians, namely as the facilitator or mediator of a process of decision-making in governance and magisterium that respects while also subsuming within itself regional collegiality and thereby does the same for local co-responsibility within particular churches. That threefold power makes it something of a magic talisman.
To see how the present Roman authorities have come to employ ‘synodality’ outside the ecumenical context it will be best to sum up a recent history, which starts with the production under Cardinal Gerhard Müller in 2014 of a document of the International Theological Commission on ‘Sensus fidei in the life of the Church’, a text that discusses both the sensus fidei fidelis of the individual believer and the sensus fidei fidelium of the whole Church. As is evident from the date, it was in the pipeline prior to the election of Pope Francis. We may reasonably assume it was commissioned by the late Pope Benedict concerned, no doubt, for how appeal to the ‘sense of the faithful’ was currently exploited by theologians and indeed for the health (or otherwise) of the present-day functioning of the sensus fidelium in the Church at large.
Though the document admits that ‘Not all the ideas which circulate among the People of God are compatible with the faith’ (55), it goes on to adopt a view of consulting the faithful which exceeds that of Newman in his famous 1859 treatise on that topic. It accepts Newman’s notion of bishops inquiring into the fact of the belief of the faithful, compared by Newman with looking into a mirror where the doctrine of the teaching Church finds reflection. But it also moves beyond Newman’s conception in one important respect. ‘{I]n matters of governance or pastoral issues’, we read, the ‘pastors of the Church should consult the faithful in certain cases in the sense of asking for their advice or their judgments’ (121) and not merely that of contemplating the fact of teaching earlier received.
The International Theological Commission document gave a further hostage to fortune when it suggested that such consultation might well extend to non-Catholic Christians since, according to Lumen gentium 8, ‘many elements of sanctification and truth’ exist in Churches or ecclesial communities separated from the Catholic Church (cited 86). For the Commission, the Catholic Church needs to ‘attend to what the Spirit may be saying through [the faith of such] believers’. Faith, the Commission explained, does not necessarily ‘imply an explicit knowledge of the whole of revealed truth’—from which the authors inferred that a ‘certain type of sensus fidei can exist among the baptized’ even when the latter are in only imperfect communion with the Church (56). After all, in Ut unum sint, his 1995 encyclical on ecumenism, Pope John Paul II had himself admitted that ‘certain features of the Christian mystery have at times been more effectively emphasized in other communities’ (14). This concession by the Commission would license the inclusion of non-Catholic Christians in the process of synodal consultation. Begun in October 2021, that led up to the two-part Synod on Synodality in 2023-24.
The International Theological Commission did not, however, venture to justify the inclusion of non-Christians in any future exercise of consultation—something subsequently done by reference to the statement of Vatican II’s Nostra aetate that reflections of the ‘ray of the Truth that enlightens all men’ may be found in non-Christian religions (2). It seems plausible to suggest that the one idea, from Christian ecumenism, triggered the thought of the other, from inter-religious dialogue. But even aside from the widely different status of Lumen gentium and Nostra aetate, the first of which is a Dogmatic Constitution and the second a mere Declaration, the cases are not really comparable. The sensus fidei, based on connaturality with the Word of God, is a unique form of divinely enabled cognition confined to the revelation of the Old and New Covenants. Moreover, the bilateral dialogues from which synodality-language emerges based synodality entirely on the baptismal priesthood.
The crucial year of 2018
In retrospect, ‘Sensus fidei in the life of the Church’, from 2014, can be seen, then, as a significant backdrop. But 2018, a year marked by several convergent developments in the Holy See, is the really crucial year for the inner-Catholic Synodality Project.
‘Synodality’ cropped up that year in the Final Document of the Synod on Youth, Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment. ‘The experience they shared has made the Synod participants aware of the importance of the synodal form of the Church for the proclamation and transmission of the faith’ (121), the document confidently declared, although the topic had never been discussed in the assembly. Participants might not have remembered, or, for the young present, even heard of the Pope’s Address on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, on 17 October 2015. On that occasion, appealing to the idea of the sensus fidei of the People of God, Pope Francis embraced the notion of a ‘synodal Church’ understood as a ‘Church which listens, which realizes that listening is… a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn’.
In the same crucial year, 2018, Pope Francis issued the Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis communio. Opening up the Synod of Bishops to non-episcopal participants (8), the Pope cited the precedent of the periti, auditores, ‘fraternal delegates’ and invitati speciales at Vatican II, where, however, no one in those categories had voting rights. Yet such rights, it soon transpired, would be awarded to non-episcopal appointees–seventy of them–as envisaged by Francis at the first Synod operating by the new rules. Furthermore, article 18 of the new Constitution allowed for the possibility of a pope simply incorporating the Final Document of a Synod of Bishops–whether or not expanded by non-episcopal voters–into his magisterial output. In that case, says Episcopalis communio, the adopted text ‘participates in the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter’.
Most important was the unexploded bomb planted in the Constitution’s opening article. ‘If he considers it opportune, especially for reasons of an ecumenical nature, the Roman Pontiff may summon a synodal Assembly according to other formulas established by himself.’ This provision was what made possible the decision to hold the 2028 ‘Ecclesial Assembly’ as announced in March 2025.
Also in 2018, the International Theological Commission, under Cardinal Luis Ladaria, produced its text on ‘Synodality in the life and mission of the Church’. The text opens on a rather gushing note. ‘What a momentous and new teaching the Magisterium has offered us in the wake of Vatican II’ (2). The authors admit that ‘synodality’ is a linguistic innovation. But the reality it denotes has been, they say, ‘maturing in ecclesial consciousness’ since the Second Vatican Council (5). As this is not a text meant for Eastern Orthodox eyes, they reclaim for bishops the language of collegiality (7) while also saying, by appeal to the sensus fidei fidelium, that it is synodality that offers the ’most appropriate framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself’, here echoing the Pope’s address on the semicentennial of the Synod of Bishops.
In other words, the wider synodality is the proper context for episcopal collegiality. That is vital, the authors go on, since ‘making a synodal Church a reality is an indispensable precondition for a new missionary energy that will involve the entire People of God’ (9).
The Commission members ventured a historical conspectus of the forms synodality has taken. Seeking to go back beyond Apostolic Canon 34 to ante-Nicene Christianity, they claimed that for a local synod in the ancient Church, the ‘whole community took part, each grouping according to its respective roles’ (30), a footnote offering evidence to that effect from Origen of Alexandria and Cyprian of Carthage. A relic of this desirable state of affairs in the post-Nicene age was the possibility of presbyters and monks contributing to provincial synods of bishops. The authors admit that only bishops took part in the Ecumenical Councils of the first millennium, and they were unenthusiastic about the Western medieval Councils where non-bishops—not only abbots and Religious superiors but representatives of the emperor or kings and other high dignitaries—had a place. That is because these councils doubled up as gatherings of Christendom in its temporal as well as spiritual aspect: not a precedent the Commission wanted to follow. With Trent, legates of princes lost the right to vote, though superiors of Religious Orders and monastic Congregations retained it, a significant breach in the otherwise unbroken episcopal wall.
Lastly, in the modern period, a modest revival of the wider synodal concept had occurred when Christus Dominus, the Decree of the Second Vatican Council on the Pastoral Office of Bishops, promulgated in 1965, recommended the setting up of Pastoral Councils in each diocese where presbyters, Religious, and laypeople would have seats. Now, in 2018, when synodality, broadening out the concept of collegiality, is increasingly recognized as the ‘specific modus vivendi et operandi’ of the Church, the ‘renewal of the Church’s synodal life demands that we initiate processes for consulting the entire People of God’ (65). Naturally, this is a far more ambitious project.
Whereas the previous International Theological Commission’s document on the sensus fidei had restricted seeking the advice of the faithful to questions of governance and pastoral matters, thus excluding doctrine, the new Commission did not differentiate explicitly between those two overall areas. Instead, they preferred to demarcate the difference between non-episcopal and episcopal roles in terms of a distinction between decision-making and decision-taking. The former is a process of ‘discernment, consultation, and cooperation’, the latter belongs to the ‘competence of the Bishop, the guarantor of apostolicity and Catholicity’ (69). Addressing in turn the local, regional, and universal levels of the Church, the Commission asked that at the local level, parochial pastoral councils be made mandatory (84). At the regional level, it recalled the promise of Pope Francis in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium that ‘synodal discernment’ would ‘spark new processes for evangelizing culture’ (85, citing Evangelii Gaudium 69). And at the universal level, it recommended that before any Synod of Bishops there should be a fuller consultation of the faithful than has been the case hitherto.
The Commission warned that
[p]astoral conversion for the implementation of synodality means that some paradigms often still present in ecclesiastical culture need to be quashed, because they express an understanding of the Church that has not been renewed by the ecclesiology of communion. These include: the concentration of responsibility for mission in the ministry of pastors; insufficient appreciation of the consecrated life and charismatic gifts; rarely making use of the specific and qualified contribution of the lay faithful, including women, in their areas of expertise. (105)
The Final Document of the Synod on Young People, Episcopalis communio, and the document ‘Synodality in the life and mission of the Church’ thus set the scene for Pope Francis’s announcement in 2020 of a Synod on Synodality, whose sessions were held in October 2023 and October 2024, after a local, national or inter-national, and Continental process of consultation in which it is estimated that about one percent of Catholics took part. Its ‘Instrumentum laboris’, issued in June 2023, and interim report (‘Relazione di sintesi’) after the first session, issued in October 2023, have since been overtaken by the Final Document already alluded to and confirmed by the Pope on the day of its publication, 26 October 2024.
In an ‘Accompanying Note by the Holy Father Francis’, Vatican-watchers could read that the content of this Final Document ‘is not strictly normative’ and its ‘application will need further mediations’, probably a caveat entered by the Pope’s canonist, Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda. But the Accompanying Note adds that ‘this does not mean it does not commit the Churches from now on to make choices consistent with what is stated in it‘, which I take to be the Pope’s comeback to his fellow Jesuit.
Subhead
The authors of For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission had to admit, presumably through gritted teeth, that ten topics were removed from the Synod on Synodality’s remit while it was still in progress. These were: relations between the Eastern Catholic and Latin churches; hearing the ‘cry of the poor and of the earth’: the Pope’s special interests—the poor and the stewardship of creation—as exhibited in his own encyclicals, Fratelli tutti and Laudato si’; mission in a digital environment; revision of the Ratio fundamentalis for diocesan ordinands in a ’missionary synodal perspective’; ‘some theological and canonical matters regarding specific ministerial forms’, possibly a reference to the female diaconate; the relation between bishops, institutes of consecrated life and ecclesial associations; procedures for the selection of bishops, their judicial functions and the future character of their ad limina visits, and the role of nuncios–all, once again in ‘synodal’ perspective; ‘theological criteria and synodal methodologies for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues’, and the reception of the fruits of ecumenism.
These so-called ‘hot’ topics were not, however, reserved to the Holy See. Instead, they were submitted to consideration by ten study groups, which would report back to what became in March 2025 the prospective 2028 Ecclesial Assembly—the body devised according to that new formula of whose possible emergence Episcopalis communio had forewarned.
The Final Document also noted as beyond its pay grade the setting up of a Canonical Commission to consider new canons required by ‘synodal’ innovations. Last but not least, it recorded the delegating of the issue of polygamous marriages to the joint Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar. Polygamous marriages are not unknown elsewhere (what, for example, of rural Utah, when backwoods Mormons still holding to their ancestral tradition turn Catholic?). The decision echoed the ‘Africa is Different!’ response to the rather wider geographical spread of episcopal disavowal, which greeted the promulgation of the ‘Declaration’ Fiducia supplicans in 2023.
Slicing away large areas of the Synod on Synodality’s possible remit (and Fiducia supplicans itself had been a precedent for that) drew most of the Final Document’s teeth, leading to the over-hasty judgment that it was a ‘nothing burger’. But For a Synodal Church contained some demands that can bite, owing not least to its papal ratification.
Paragraph 9: Episcopal Conferences and Synods of the sui juris Churches are asked to allocate personnel and resources to accompany the ‘pathway of growth as a synodal Church in mission’. When both may be in short supply, that is justified by the conviction that synodality, as newly defined, is a sine qua non for the future of the Church. Paragraph 60: ‘The question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open’. There is a seeming contradiction with reported offhand remarks of the Pope himself—unless the question be of the non-sacramental ‘deaconess’.
Paragraph 77: There should be ‘increased participation of the laity in Church discernment processes and decision-making processes (drafting, making, and confirming decisions)’. The request is inseparable from the very definition of synodality whose logic sweeps aside the 2018 International Theological Commission’s valiant attempt to distinguish ‘making’ from ‘taking’ where decisions are in play.
Paragraph 92 adds an important clarification. ‘In a synodal Church, the authority of the Bishop, of the Episcopal College and of the Bishop of Rome in regard to decision-making is inviolate as it is grounded in the hierarchical structure of the Church established by Christ.’ The document straightway goes on, however, to enter a caveat to its own note of caution. Such an exercise of authority is ‘not without limits’. After those words, one might reasonably have expected some reference to Scripture, Tradition, and the trajectory set by the preceding Magisterium. But the text continues on a different track and in a rather peremptory manner. The current Magisterium ‘may not ignore a direction which emerges through proper discernment within a consultative process, especially if this is done by participatory bodies’.
Some further notable passages merit highlighting. In paragraph 104, the authors ‘insist’ (a strong word) that the institution of parish pastoral councils, like diocesan pastoral councils, and the holding of diocesan synods (not forgetting the Eastern Catholic versions of these bodies or happenings) be made mandatory. Indeed, synodality definitionally requires not just processes but also events. Paragraph 124 remarks that ‘a synodal style allows local Churches to move at different paces’, which, if taken with paragraph 125, on the need to ‘specify the domain of the doctrinal and disciplinary competences of Episcopal Conferences’ raises the possibility of yet more contrasting regimes of the kind already introduced in, for example, Poland and Germany by way of response to the 2016 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia. Yet paragraph 134—citing the 2022 Apostolic Constitution on the reform of the Roman Curia – lays it down that decentralization only concerns issues that ’do not affect the Church’s unity of doctrine, discipline and communion’, thus belatedly recovering the distinction once found in ‘Sensus fidei in the life of the Church’ but abandoned, at least by omission, in the subsequent ‘Synodality in the life and mission of the Church’. That is reassuring if we can assume synodal discussion of ‘governance and pastoral issues’ will always take care not to trespass on the territory of the ‘doctrine, discipline and communion’ concerned. Perhaps a large assumption.
Conclusion
What will eventually emerge from the forthcoming Ecclesial Assembly remains, of course, to be seen. Meanwhile, writing in The Catholic Thing on 21 March 2025, the American canon lawyer Father Gerald E. Murray asked whether it was ‘synodal’ that the idea of such an ‘Ecclesial Assembly’ had not been mooted at the Synod on Synodality itself. And was it authentically Catholic, he went on, that the global episcopate was not consulted about it first? What, he wondered, will be the percentage membership of bishops, priests, deacons, monastics, and laity taking part, and, not least, who will select them? And if in the name of a listening Church the learning Church is prioritized over the teaching Church (for it is assumed that bishops will be in a minority), is not this a democratization of authority which severs magisterium from ordination? Presumably, the answer to that is ‘No, not if a pope has the last word’. But then we would have a papacy so ultramontane in its carelessness of the universal episcopate as to outdo the extravagances of Pio Nono.
Where decisions arrived at by deliberative vote in an ‘Ecclesial Assembly’ selected from all the ‘orders’ of Church membership (episcopal, presbyteral, diaconal, monastic, lay) touch on the ‘Church’s unity of doctrine, discipline, communion’, they surely need to be serially confirmed (or accepted iuxta modum, or met with a plain Non placet) by the episcopate as a whole—and only in that way presented to the pope for a final sealing based on the distinctive Petrine charism.
If not, a strange fate is in store for synodality. For via the staging-posts of koinonia and conciliarity, the principle of synodality has emerged, or re-emerged, from no other starting-point than the doctrine of the universal collegiality of bishops. The historian will want to note that at the Moscow Sobor while bishops—a minority—voted with others during the ‘General Assembly’, after such voting they reconstituted themselves as a ‘Conference’ to judge, under the presidency of the patriarch and in their capacity as guardians of doctrine and doctrinally related discipline, the compatibility of the Assembly’s preferences with the ‘Word of God, the dogmas, the canons and the tradition of the Church’.7 Must that not be a requirement of Catholic ecclesiology too?
Endnotes:
2 Hyacinthe Destivelle, Un, tous, quelques-uns. Dynamique synodale et unité des chrétiens (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2025).
3 Idem., Le Concile de Moscou, 1917-1918. La création des institutions conciliaires de l’Eglise orthodoxe russe (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2006).
4 Idem., Un, tous, quelques-uns, op. cit., p. 11.
5 Brian P. Flanagan, Communion, Diversity, and Salvation. The Contribution of Jean-Marie Tillard to Systematic Ecclesiology (New York, NY and London: T. & T. Clark, 2011).
6 World Council of Churches, The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2013), p. 53, cited International Theological Commission, Synodality in the life and mission of the Church, 116).
7 Hyacinthe Destivelle, Le Concile de Moscou, 1917-1918, op. cit., p. 103.
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Well done! But, three additional footnotes with a summary:
FIRST, other critical and now “displaced” wording from the International Theological Commission preparatory document (“For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission,” Sept. 9, 2021) affirms the irreducible personal and institutional responsibility of each diocesan bishop as a successor of the Apostles:
“…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).
Is Synodality in its current form simplistically a nostalgic attempt to invert the “hierarchical communion” of the Church (Lumen Gentium), now by blurring the bishops—“sent” by Christ—within a bottoms-up assembly echoing the Tennis Court Oath of 1789?
SECOND, mentioned more in passing is Vatican II’s “Nostra aetate” and the “ray of the Truth that enlightens all men” that may be found in non-Christian religions. Just as the Synod on Youth gratuitously annexed the notion of “synodality,” now will the “Ecclesial Assembly of 2028” likewise annex the “fraternal” notion that the world religions are more-or-less equivalent expressions and converging toward a cosmopolitan unity?
On the precise nature of that exploitable “ray of the Truth”—and the limit of fraternity—is found in the fact that the “non-Christian religion” of Islam is a natural and cosmopolitan religion—while Catholic Christianity is supernatural and a unity. Consider the “germ” of Islam as being an intuition of Natural Law, as contrasted with the “germ” of revealed Triune Christianity as being in the Holy Spirit:
Natural Islam: “There is not a child that he or she is born upon this ‘fitrah,’ this original state of the knowledge of God [intuition of natural law?]. And his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian . . . and if they are Muslims, Muslim” (From the hadith as reported by Bukhari, Sahih, I 34). From Islamic scholars, various translations of “fitrah” are “natural disposition, constitution, temperament, e.g., what is in a man at his creation, a sound nature, natural religion (and) the GERM of Islam.” An embryonic appreciation natural law as then embedded in the package-deal Qur’an—where the Law of Moses (the natural law) is folded-in countless times but, incidentally, where the prohibitive last six commandments escape explicit mention (just as elsewhere the moral absolutes of “Veritatis Splendor” are often downplayed?).
Supernatural Christianity: “The grace of the Holy Spirit as we possess it in the present life, is not equal to that achieved (in actu) glory, but it is in GERM (in virtute): as the seed of the tree that contains within it the whole tree. Similarly, through grace the Holy Spirit dwells in us, who is the sufficient cause of eternal life: that is why the Apostle calls it ‘the downpayment of our inheritance’ (2 Cor. 1:22)” (Thomas Aquinas, e.g., ST la IIae q. 114 a. 3 ad 3; cited in Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., “St. Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master,” Vol. 2, CUA, 2003).
THIRD, just as Pope Paul VI had the choice to either continue the fledgling Second Vatican Council, or not; the next conclave will select a new pope who can choose either to proceed with the upcoming Assembly as displacing past and future councils, or not. Are we reminded of St. Paul: “I wish that those who are troubling you [by teaching that circumcision is necessary for salvation, or that the Mystical Body of Christ belongs in a reliquary] would even [go all the way and] castrate themselves!” (Galatians, 5:12)?
SUMMARY: About displacing the “hierarchical communion,” and even about possible interreligious convergence—Fiducia Supplicans isn’t the only fly in the ointment.
I’ll be honest. I couldn’t get beyond the fourth paragraph without groaning. Is this really necessary? Ad quid bonum?
Amen Ken T. You got it right.
Thank you Fr. Aidan Nichols for being a priest but spare us a lecture, just the facts please
Another strange remark. Fr. Nichols is widely recognized as one of the finest theologians of the past several decades. His deep study and understanding of Eastern Orthodox theology and thought provides some important insights in this piece (along with plenty of others). Your snarky remark about “just the facts” is, frankly, insulting. And silly. Thank you, Samuel, for being a layman, but keep in mind that priests have every right to comment on things going on in the Church today.
Thanks, Carl. Always read, respect and value your views and commentaries.
And based on your comment, I did go back and try to read through this entire piece, having bypassed it the first time I scanned it. Certainly not an easy read for a non theologian layman. But it seemed to come together in his last few sentences where he stated, if I interpret him correctly, that anything coming out of the synodaling process must be judged for its compatibility with the “Word of God, the dogmas, the canons and the tradition of the Church.”
Certainly and wholeheartedly agree with that conclusion while seriously doubting whether the actual synodaler insiders and participants would agree with it as well. It appears that Fr. Nichols may share this doubt.
I’ll be honest. I read your entire comment and thought: is this really necessary?
Honestly, I stopped reading this article.
I am a simple man with a simple but clear grasp of the Catholic religion. This uber-long description of an already convoluted and very unnecessary concept is the product of over educated minds with way too much time on their hands.
I pray synodality fails and fails hard.
I think you expressed well the way I feel, although as a convert from Protestantism, I also have in mind the Protestants who still need to “come home to Rome. If synodality will help them to do that, I’m willing to go along with it if I could figure out what exactly it is and what effect it will have on our outreach to Protestants and others who need God and His Church and what exactly I need to do to be part of “synodality.”
Thank you Fr. Nichols. It is an unexpected joy to hear from you again.
The heteropraxy of Amoralist Laetitia has metastasized. Synodaling seeks to drown out the Word of God in every diocese, like the crowd calling for the crucifixion of Our Lord.
Happy Lent! All are welcome to repent.
Early morning blurry vision. I first read the title of the article as :” Surviving Synodality. ”
🙂
This too shall pass.
“This too shall pass.” There is coming a final trial upon the Church. The issues of the Church will not pass as things will only get worse and Christ cuts the time short and intervenes for the elect. “Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” –Catechism 675
Every time I read an article on Synodality, I find myself drifting off to sleep. Chloroform in print.
Happy anniversary of The First Council of Nicaea!
Perhaps ecclesial Synodaling is The First Council of Niceness…
Ecclesial Synodaling is an attempt to talk Catholicism to death.
I am not educated enough to have read past “the backdrop”.
Christ’s ministry lasted three years.
Hasn’t this synod push already lasted longer than that? And we still don’t get it?
And they’re still giving it three more years?! And they still aren’t clear?
I think I’ll stick to the Sermon on the Mount, thank you.
I have also been learning from a Catechism for the young in which the list of popes ends with Pius XII…
Thank God what it teaches hasn’t changed.
Disturbingly frank but refreshing for one like me who has her doubts. And this made me laugh out loud: ‘Ubi “koinonia” et “substantial agreement” ibi Deus est.’ (I’m on a Churches Together committee.) Thank you for that!
Well, I didn’t make it through the entire article and I’m an avid reader of classics (not just magazines and novels!). A lot of “stuff” to digest and much of it is beyond me (and I graduated from a university with honors!, and I think that if people are honest, many will say the same. We Americans are more concerned with making sure that we get to Mass on time and that we didn’t forget our offering, our phones, and our children at home!
With humble respect, I do not believe that average Americans will “get” synodality.
If someone could boil it down to a simple phrase or even a few sentences that don’t use any Latin or “ecclesial” language, we’ll do a little better. E.g., “Have a Coke and a smile” or “No pain, no gain” or “Get your ducks in a row!”. We’re better at approaches that keep it simple and at around a 5th grade level. I wish that were not true, but…well, if someone doesn’t simplify it, synodality will probably drive many Catholics away from involvement with their churches other than Masses, and they’ll just stay home and stream movies (that they DO understand!) during “synodality activities.”
Maybe the video gamers would have an easier time with synodality? My college-aged nephew spends hours every day and when he explains his games to me, it sounds like a complex foreign language–just like synodality!
I’m guessing that there are college-educated people who go to “synodality classes” in their diocese to learn more and come out of the class feeling like they would definitely fail a final exam if one were given.
From what I understand of synodality, in the simplest terms, it means, “working together.” I’m not sure how practical that is in the U.S. or in any other large, reasonably modern nation at this time in history. I wish it were practical, but honestly, I don’t even know most of the people in my parish, let alone other parishes.
I’m also not sure how–or if—synodality involves non-Catholic Christians–there are many Protestant sects that are convinced that the Catholic Church is “the whore of Babylon,” and there are other Protestant sects that celebrate various human sexuality choices and consider it a blessing to have a female bisexual pastor who is “married” to another female bisexual partner–how does “synodality” apply to these groups? (Or perhaps it doesn’t?)
And even bringing Catholic parishes together–well, we have bishops over many churches, and they seem to get along, but there are a lot of differences in these churches; e.g., the African American Catholic parishes in my city utilize “black” music with instruments other than the pipe organ and musical styles that may include hints of Gregorian chant and Palestrina, but definitely are NOT these styles! Is that part of synodality? Or does this “endanger” synodality? (There are many Catholics I know who insist that the only appropriate music for Mass is Gregorian chant or sacred polyphony–not that they know how to sing this style themselves, but that’s not the point–we should be hearing that music in our parishes and someone (but not the one making the proclamation) is going to have to LEARN these sacred styles of music and cut out the St. Louis Jesuit hymns, dag nabbit!)
Or does music get the same place in Catholic parishes in the U.S. that it has now–kinda “there” but in general, pretty low-key so that no one is offended other tham musicians who sigh and long for at least one hymn sung and played with spirit?
Again–synodality? What does it actually MEAN for daily parish and Catholic life in the U.S.? Will someone please explain it in plain American English at a level that even a non-intellectual can understand and make sure to include some concrete examples of how Catholic parish life will change when synodality takes over?
You ask for a one-sentence definition in English. Here, at least, is one compound sentence:
Synodality has been deformed by theologians into a strategy to place the Germaniac der Synodal Weg on Vatican letterhead;
…it’s the agenda to substitute a layered and worldwide “Ecclesial Assembly” for the “hierarchical communion” of the Catholic Church (Lumen Gentium) within the Apostolic Succession, to substitute process, itself, for the living Deposit of Faith and Church Councils and “synods of bishops”, and even to displace the inborn natural law and moral absolutes (Catechism, Veritatis Splendor) with flat-earth process theology…all this under the guise of “listening” selectively to an often docile, uninformed, unformed and sometimes functionally illiterate laity who thusly are rendered both useful and used.
Don’t worry, very soon every parish will be forced to participate in synodality whether or not they understand or like it. It will lead to the death of the priesthood as Catholics know it to be and disunity in the church.
Must be very discouraging to write a serious and well thought out article, well researched, and have others dismiss it after four paragraphs, and then proceed to lecture you on the importance of synodality—that it has no importance. If you admit you can’t read it by virtue of a short attention span, at least show a degree of epistemic humility and remain open to learning something new. But this is the kind of arrogance we get on these comment sections. They have all the answers, and they all boil down to “no need to change”.
Stat crux dum volvitur orbis.
Catholicism has no need of Post-Conciliarism’s, James Martin, pedophilia etc.
Traditional Catholicism has no need to change.
Precisely. Yet that seems to be precisely someone’s beef. He wants the church to change and wants us to want the church to change. Here he actually seems to defend Aidan Nichols whom he wrongly thinks is in favor of synodality! So the joke is on whomever the two-first-name boy may be.
Some humble folk admit in all sincerity their failure to delve deep into what Aidan Nichols posits, with his carefully chosen words and his theologically, politically careful style. Speaking plainly against Amoris Laetitia and Abu Dhabi landed Fr. Nichols out of papal favor, costing him some loss of priestly privileges, positions, and even a home in a monastery.
Yet some will defend Fr. Nichols, for all the wrong reasons, in order to blame the faithful, the sincere, the honest, the humble, all while accusing them of epistemic pride! The ignorance of some must be borne by others this Holy Week.
Mr. James, I’m very open to learning “something new”, but…I’m not sure of what “synodality” means on a practical, day-to-day, parish life level and for the lives of individual Catholics and their families. I’m not sure whether it will draw in non-Catholic Christians or send them away confused from Catholicism. I would be very grateful if you could perhaps describe some concrete scenarios of various changes that will occur with synodality and/or examples of what will happen and what we will need to do as parishioners in our local parishes. Thank you! 🙂
I am a convert from Evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism, BTW. My late husband and I converted in 2004, our older daughter converted a year later, and our son-in-law and daughter converted in 2022, a few years after my husband passed away of COVID–my daughter is now an active participant in the Mass music (cantor), and my son-in-law and daughter have worked as RCIA sponsors since they converted. My grandson was born a few months after my husband passed away and they had him baptized Catholic–he will be attending his parish pre-school this coming school year. They attend the largest parish in our state–18 thousand (not a typo!)members! In our home parish, I was a regular organist/pianist in my parish and several other parishes, and my husband was a very willing Eucharistic minister who also made Rosaries from semi-precious gemstones and also made cord rosaries and gave them away free to whoever wanted one. I truly do want to understand and support “synodality”, but in a practical, day-to-day Catholic life way. I’m not really an “esoteric” thinker–after working in a hospital lab for 41 years before retiring, I like to hear “just the facts and how they will affect me, my family, and the parishes, especially my own parish. Thanks for any help!
And I’ll be honest–considering what religion surveys say about the U.S., I fear for our parishes and for other Christian churches of Protestant denominations. It seems that less and less people are actually practicing their religion or adhering to “traditional” Christianity, even if they are attending a church once a week, which many, including Catholics, are not. I would love to see synodality help change this.
Again, thanks for help by describing some practical daily life scenarios.
Thomas James, the word “effete” comes to mind with every post I see that you’ve made. You’re insufferable.
This reads as a bunch of company lawyers and managers, who couldn’t find God with two hands and a flashlight, trying to ram through some mergers and acquistions and change company direction and policies couched in such impenetrable phrases as to avoid a revolt of stock holders.
Bingo.
Struggling to stay in a State of Grace is hard enough without the theological gymnastics of….whatever this is about.
Fr Nichols’ thesis reduces to his endline, that the Russian Orthodox Sobor demands the body of bishops in unison judge whether Synodal findings contrast with revealed doctrine.
That places a stopgap on heresies that the supreme pontiff is unwilling to address and left hanging [keep the Dubia in mind]. He recommends we should adopt this Eastern Orthodox wisdom.
Hmmm, “Russian Orthodox Sobor”. Is that a Jeopardy Champions, Final Jeopardy Catagory?
Conciliarity, synodality, and plain outright Apostasy
I agree with commenters who consider this article beyond the scope of a general audience.
I’m not exactly a slouch as a reader but I skimmed the article by reading the first line of each paragraph. It’s doubtful that I will be going back to fill in the rest.
There is a place for a fairly lengthy, sophisticated article like this one but I’m not sure CWR is that place.
“There is a place for a fairly lengthy, sophisticated article like this one but I’m not sure CWR is that place.”
Huh? Really? Where have you been for the past 30+ years of CWR? Goodness.
Well, as editor, I have no problem with short and even “simple” articles, but I’m not interested in dumbing things down. There’s other sites for that.
“Where does ‘synodality’, suitably defined and equipped with its newly announced programme for the years 2025-28, actually come from? And where is it heading?”
Synodality, as practiced so far under this papacy, comes from the minds of heterodox and modernist clergy and laity who will never allow “synodality” to be suitably defined and implemented. Instead, they will twist “synodality” to mean whatever they want it to mean so they can use it to abolish the faith and morals of Divine Revelation.
It is heading toward hell!