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.
Thanks for the progressive synodal stance which resonates with the below.
The African context, particularly among the Karanga people of Chirumhanzu, provides a profound lens through which to understand the theological and cultural significance of titles like **Mwari as Tenzi** and **Christ as Mambo (Ancestor)**. These titles reflect a deep integration of faith and culture, resonating with the African worldview and spirituality.
### **Mwari as Tenzi and Christ as Mambo**
– **Mwari as Tenzi**: In Karanga culture, the term “Tenzi” (Lord) is used to denote supreme authority and divinity. It aligns with the biblical understanding of God as the ultimate creator and sustainer. The title emphasizes God’s omnipotence and role as the source of life.
– **Christ as Mambo (Ancestor)**: The title “Mambo” (King) is deeply rooted in African traditions, where kingship is associated with leadership, protection, and mediation. In the context of Christ, “Mambo” signifies His divine kingship, which transcends earthly rule. Christ is viewed as the ultimate ancestor, a mediator between humanity and God, embodying the African reverence for ancestors as spiritual guides.
### **The Word “Lord” in Karanga Context**
In Karanga, the word “Lord” can mean either **Mwari** (God) or **Mambo** (King), depending on the context. This duality reflects the richness of African linguistic and cultural expressions:
– When referring to **Mwari**, “Lord” emphasizes God’s divine nature and role as the creator.
– When referring to **Mambo**, “Lord” highlights Christ’s kingship and His role as a spiritual ancestor.
The contextual application of these terms allows for a nuanced understanding of their theological and cultural significance.
Christ as “spiritual ancestor” would be a corruption of mind and spirit, Revelation and Communion.
Mwari-Tenzi would correspond to the “most high Raman” one-God person of the regional Semitic-Sinai peoples that got overtaken by Mohammed’s Allah.
Mambo would correspond with the communal outlook on Mwari and the sense of a certain cosmology linked to ancestors. Saying it is Christ is just saying.
Dear Mr. Olson let me ask you this question? If you can sum up an article in 150 words why would you use 500? Remember Wisdom is a gift from God that helps us use knowledge Wisley. Just the facts sir.
I’m not interested in silly games. If you want to read the essay, it’s free. If you don’t want to read it, you’re free to do something else. Those are facts you are free to use.
Samuel,
Why do you use 41 words when only one would suffice? As with General McAuliffe whose eloquent response at Bastogne to the German surrender-demand was “nuts.”
Alternatively, and routinely accused of excessive prolixity, Cardinal Newman replied that his habit was the result of overflowing love for beauty and for the subject matter (I think in “The Ideal of a University”). Something like God’s effusive intricacy in all of Creation?
But, as for the new German surrender demand—the contagious der Synodal Weg as then in a Synod on Synodality and then in an “Ecclesial Assembly,” the nature of that beast requires precise brain surgery in a well-equipped lab—and this has been capably supplied by Fr. Nichols in, yes, 5612 carefully and beautifully selected and words.
Samuel would you consider allowing the Holy Spirit to do long, short or medium and sometimes on His own recognizance?
I’ll be honest. I read your entire comment and thought: is this really necessary?
My use of “this” appears to have been ambiguous. It referred not to the column but to the entire synodality process being described. My apologies!
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.
Synodaling is an attempt to make the Catholic Church accept Protestant practices.
Synodaling perverts a legitimate process of Catholic Bishops consulting with the Pope in Synods into a universal means of pressuring Catholic Bishops with crowds of the disgruntled to accept heteropraxy.
Since the Pope does not have the authority as the Vicar of a Christ to change the teachings of Christ in Sacred Scripture, Tradition and previous faithful magisteriums, he is using worldwide Synodaling to bypass Church doctrines in practice that he thinks are too rigorous. Hence, Synodaling is selling :
Faithful adultery
Blessed fornicators
Female and democratic hierarchy
Etc., ad nauseam
Eventually, Luke 18:8
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
“There is coming a final trial upon the Church.”
Unfortunately it is not coming, it is here already.
Anna I’d like your views on the final trial. Many of us have that sense, as did Cdl Caffarra, former president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, and some other high ranking churchmen.
We have now what our Catholic Catechism says is a ‘religious deception’ that falsely satisfies all issues for the Christian. If the present were the moment, it wouldn’t match some of the secondary criteria such as great exhibitions of the Antichrist’s power. Or we may be experiencing the beginning of the end.
Although the entire spectrum of revealed Christian doctrine has been seriously compromised by the finger of doubt toward the alternative. If one were to envision the moment would a fiery figure hold true, or, aware of the Evil One’s guile, something, someone far more subtle, relatively mild? An anomaly.
Father Peter,
It is a bit difficult to make a concise response about the phenomenon I have been writing about for years, “mapping” the stages so to speak. To me the process is like the grains of sand. It adds, adds, adds unnoticeably until the critical point. All those “tiny” shadowy deviations within the Church are suddenly unified, in a human figure or figures, and the believers find themselves not in the Church they used to but in something strange, blurry, undefinable that has all the right attributes (Crucifixes, altars, Bibles etc.) but feels wrong somehow. That new undefinable church cannot live without a reference to the true Church, like a double contour in the eye of a person with astigmatism without an object it perceives.
It is my conviction that we are in an Apocalypses that is an unprecedented destruction of the meaning of everything humanity has accumulated. It would not be Apocalypses if that destruction of meaning was not acted out within the Church thus bringing “small things” to a metaphysical level. The process has a very perceptible flavour of a farce, of a mockery and the Church is being employed by the world to mock humane values and even to mock Christ, swapping them with something pathetic, with fakes. The true good is swapped with “niceties”. That has never been done before.
Take for example, how readily the Church closed its buildings during the pandemic when the state governments proclaimed “all that is not of the first necessity must be closed”. And so, the pubs, take away, bottle shops and retails remained open while the churches closed down. Via doing so, the Church implicitly said “yes, Christ is not important, we agree with you, He is less important than a bottle of vodka or new socks”. The Church did it “to be nice and “caring”. To be “carrying” it left people without communion for many months, including dying people. In the past priests risked their life to give people communion, the true good. Now Christ was swapped with “nice safety”. The Church could fight but it did not.
But this is not all. The mockery grew bigger when some good-willing church officials offered their church buildings for vaccination with abortion-tainted vaccines (if the vaccines were ethical i.e. not connected with abortion there would be mockery or blasphemy). The thick blasphemy of that phenomenon can be only grasped via a reference to the Real Presence of Christ in Mass: we are closing churches for Mass = Christs’ sacrifice which gives people the Life eternal but we are opening churches for a vaccination with vaccines which own their existence to the aborted human fetuses. If one steps back and looks, he will not fail to see “the double contour”, of a reference to children sacrifice in the Old Testament and also a new “Eucharist”, partaking (in some case literally, in all – symbolically) a dead human being(s) in vaccines. It is a new communion.
Notice that a vaccination in a hospital or airport or wherever does not have that blasphemous reference. It is only when a sick worldly phenomenon finds its way into the Church it becomes diabolical, apocalyptic. Then it is not difficult to interpret the sign on the church’s building “only vaccinated are allowed to Mass” as “only those who participated in human sacrifice are allowed to receive the Body and Blood of Christ”. This is undeniably a blasphemy done “for the good of others” – but later the scientist will publish the data which proves that the vaccinated are just as contagious as non-vaccinated. Here is the mockery of the Devil – all is for nothing. Yes, the Church betrayed Christ for nothing, for no “common good” whatsoever.
The Apocalypses is a process of blessing and assimilation, by the Church of Christ, of the covertly diabolical things. This can happen only via pushing Christ away from the Church – pushing Him away is a side-effect of accepting the blurry-diabolical. If one begins measuring all those diabolical phenomena by the Person of Christ he will have to say “no” to them (like “it is an abortion-tainted = diabolical vaccine, if you scared of a virus you can take it but we cannot allow its reception in the Church; we have to press for ethical vaccines etc.”). To say “no” to such a thing is possibly only via retaining the Person of Christ as a constant reference, via an attachment to Him.
I used pandemics here as an example, however the same mechanics of pushing Christ away “for the good of others” is easily observed in other major phenomena of the Church’s life we have witnessed over years. The Devil, under the mask of “for the good of others”, attacks and destroys a believer’s attachment to Christ. As I see it, antichrist(s) are his chosen tools. Antichrist swaps Christ with himself, in the Church and in the hearts of believers.
I have written here on CWR that such a person must have a psyche which is a complete and perfect opposite of Christ’s psyche. Hence, he must be a narcissist tending towards sociopathy but, since he has to be in the Church, he must be a covert narcissist/sociopathic priest i.e. one who wears a mask of “Christ-like person”, a walking fake. It is a person with an undeveloped self; he operates via a fake self which is thoroughly empty. If Christ is the ultimate good, he is an ultimate “nice”. He exhibits a fake goodness, fake empathy, fake everything. He is very pleasing to many and loved by many Christians. He can be recognized only by those who love Christ and attached to Him. The fake is visible in “oddities” such a priest exhibits when he has to do something re: Christ. I believe that such fakes (not just one) are making the parallel church, the church of men = of antichrist which is under the same roof with the true Church. The fake cannot live without a reference to the true One. It is what is going on now. It is a necessary development of a narcissistic human psyche = a psyche which does not recognize anyone including God above itself. It forms the church according to its (antichrist’s) image and involves those of similar kind. The perfect and most mind-blowing expression of that church is a covert narcissist priest who holds the Chalice with communion. He sees One Who is in the Chalice as a mere tool for his grand power.
In my paper ‘Communion of abandonment’ (2021) I wrote the following:
“About a decade ago I had an idea of making two sculptures representing the action of God and the action of the evil in the world, made with papier-mâché. The action of God was signified, quite predictably, by the Crucifix, the vectors of God going outwards from its base like a compass rose, ordering the world around it, transforming it. Christ’s counter-figure, the figure of the evil in a human form was emerging from the “lake” or “pool”; both the figure and the lake-like shape were to be created with pieces of newspapers – fragments of news, photos of the events and so on. They represented human persons. Although they were forming the emerging, slowly incarnating evil and they were persons, they made no sense in themselves; putting those pieces together somehow reaped each one of meaning although they were becoming part of “a bigger picture”, a coherent evil represented by the emerging sculpture. Via its progressive incarnation the evil was swallowing them or better to say emptying them of their substance. I do not recall how exactly I thought those ideas through, I only drew a sketch – but the ideas definitely were there. Looking at the sketch ten years after I realised another nuance, the fact that the events there, being represented by the pieces of news and photos of human activity – which in turn represented human beings behind them – those human beings have no idea about the bigger picture which is being made with them, with their very persons. A bigger and totally soulless picture is emerging, made with the separate actions of people, their thoughts, people as incoherent pieces.”
This is what I see.
Thank you Anna. A reasonable and plausible response.
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.
On SECOND THOUGHT, how are we to weigh the fact that even Ratzinger/Benedict used the term “ecclesial assembly,” over forty years ago?
He used this possible corrective term when he reflected on the loss of the “ecclesial assembly”—or “communio”— during the Middle Ages. The restoration of the sacramentally ordained priest as more than a seeming “cult-minister”, but as a bearer of sacramentality through Holy Orders, also led to an unfortunate separation of the laity from the clergy—the loss of communio—”the problem of the laity, which arose at this time and still haunts us today.” The “original meaning of the word ‘ecclesia’—that is, a ‘coming together’” (“Successio Apostolica,” as Chapter 2 in Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius, 1982/Ignatius 1987).
TODAY, after more than forty years in the desert, and especially following the sex abuse scandal, how to rebuild “communio”?
In Germany, the final derailment came when the combined der Synodal Weg rejected the minority’s proposal to at least retain a split-level approach—with town hall “listening” as distinct from the office of being “sent” by Christ as in a real “synod of bishops.” Likewise in Rome, when the same mixed bag was imposed on the Synod and on the self-validating Synod on Synodality, and now the “Ecclesial Assembly.”
Yours truly would like very much to be proved wrong about my above definition of Synodality….As Father Nichols implies, might the bumpy road of history still show that the Holy Spirit writes straight with crooked lines? And, that the 2028 Ecclesial Assembly (no longer a “synod”?) can be the front end of a the needed course change to put Pachamama and Pandorra back in the box?
Something like drawing successfully to an “inside straight” (double entendre intended).
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.
“Here he actually seems to defend Aidan Nichols whom he wrongly thinks is in favor of synodality!”
I re-read my comment above in order to understand how it is that I inadvertently suggested that Aidan Nichols is in favor of synodality. That he would quote Fr. Gerald Murray suggests to me that he is not. The problem I had was not his article, but the lazy minds who refused to read it, and yet willing to lecture him.
You write: “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”.
Yes, clearly the Church needs to change; for we are still a very intolerant Church, a closed society. Then again, it is a bit of a dilemma we are in; we want a more tolerant Church, a more “open society”, a more listening Church, yet what do you do with those who are stuck on a certain model and just don’t have the conditions to see the need to develop beyond that old outdated model, and speak out in public? I wish I had the answer to that.
You may want a more ‘open society’ Church. Others do not because others do not see the Church as ‘intolerant.’ The Church, as the Bride of Christ, has done and taught as She has because the Absolute is the Law, and Jesus did nothing more than live it as an example to us.
Why are some people frustrated and wish the Church were more tolerant? For those who want that, there are multiple varieties of protestant denominations. One may also start one’s own. If that is not tolerant enough, there is the church of None, and there are many polytheistic pagan religions one could practice.
There is nothing more the Catholic Church need do but contemplate Him and allow His Word to speak. You ought not worry about those who are stuck on a certain model; Jesus is at the Head of His church, and His Spirit will, if it be His will, remodel Her in His own blessed Hour. It is not up to any pope to do anything but receive and then hand on the deposit of faith as he received it.
The newfangled synodal ecclesiastical assembly is nonsensical, a waste of time and money, and a scandal to what the Church should be about. A true teaching synod, according to VCII teaching, would be composed of bishops together with the pope.
“Traditional Catholicism has no need to change”
But what are the parameters of this conceptual framework referred to as “traditional Catholicism”? Do you mean first century? Or do you mean the period between Trent and 1962? Whatever it turns out to be, it already is a product of change. The Church has always been changing; it has never stopped changing. So where do you get the right to declare that at this point in history, the Church must stop changing?
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.
Well, how about the new pastor not make any changes without first meeting with a representative sample of the parish to discuss those changes, or, if such a meeting took place before his arrival, respect the decisions of that council. A new pastor comes in and decides he doesn’t like the sanctuary, doesn’t like the icon that is on the wall, so he takes it down, replaces it with an old style painting more suited to his taste, which offends so many in the parish; cuts a number of parish programs that were working very well, takes over Catechism for Confirmation and First Communion candidates and does a horrible job, because he is far less competent than the previous lay faithful who were doing this for years but is too proud to admit it, refuses to allow a qualified female theologian in the parish to do a Lenten mission, who has given retreats in other parishes of other dioceses, because women are not to teach, but to set up for coffee and cookies for socials after Mass, etc; refuses to listen to the complaints of the parishioners, that the parish is becoming a one man show and good things are being stifled, etc.,.
I could go on, but I hope you get the picture. Perhaps you don’t have such a pastor, but many of us do, and such pastors are deaf to what Pope Francis is calling for, and some bishops are just too oblivious to notice these pastors. Such pastors are not listeners; they have not been taught to listen, they have not been taught that there is a world of knowledge that is outside of their small circle of learning and that dialogue, discussion, seeking advice, seeking counsel, from everyone, especially non-clerics, is very important, because we are profoundly limited. They got the opposite message in the seminary–that they are special, the elite, the anointed ones who have all the answers. It’s a very sad state of affairs.
Thomas James, the word “effete” comes to mind with every post I see that you’ve made. You’re insufferable.
If the reference to “four paragraphs” relates to the comment I made above, please see my response to the editor’s response. It wasn’t the article that made me groan; it was the synodality process itself. Sorry for any ambiguity.
I’m not a theologian; I am a reader of a Catholic news site. Since I am not trained if I were to read it, I would be reduced to a I’ll have to trust you bro. The author maybe giving what is needed, but also understand the audience reading it.
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?
If you address with a Jeopardy analogy a given premise followed by the correct questions, a first question would be how do we insure orthodoxy [not specifically Russian Orthodoxy], which Fr Nichols does in begging the question.
The Moscow Sobor [assembly of bishops] is the pregiven answer. A simple analogy. Some among the many consternated with doctrinal duplicity emanating from this Vatican have long posed the question, Why don’t the bishops speak up collegially en masse? What the bishops have on their side is their commission as defenders of the faith.
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.
No one is asking CWR to dumb things down.
But if that is all you took from some constructive criticism to a very long article on a concept few Catholics grasp with any confidence, well, so be it, I guess.
The article didn’t need to be short. The author needed to take in mind that it wasn’t written to other theologians. Fulton Sheen could write deeply while still being understandable to his audience.
Fr. Nichols has written books and essays ranging from academic (on von Balthasar, for example) to popular (see his short book on the key documents of Vatican II)–just like Sheen. If CWR were to post a chapter from, say, Sheen’s God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy or his Philosophy of Religion (both published for popular audiences), I’m sure some readers would say it’s too difficult, long, involved, theological, philosophical, etc. This particular essay by Nichols, in my editorial estimation, is not really academic. Nor is the problem that its not understandable; the challenge is that readers have to know a bit about, say, Eastern Orthodoxy and the many various documents from Rome since 2015 on synodality and related matters.
This article was too short and years late. We need more books from Fr. Nichols.
Why is this the first time I can find commentary from Fr. Nichols since he signed the Easter Open Letter in 2019? Was Fr. Nichols muzzled for half a decade and shipped off by his superiors? And if he wasn’t, it looked like he was punished for following his conscience. If so, how is such bullying synodal? Maybe most of us in the pews are oblivious to such shenanigans, but this pontificate acts as if God cannot see.
What has Fr. Nichols to say about Sfides Supplicans and the rest since 2019?
Please publish more from him!
“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!
‘ 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’. ‘
* * * * * * * * * *
It’s not the way of the Church to be ignoring the intention in an activity and allowing surreptitious persistence of something prohibited as if the outward movements are mere shells and the associated intercourse is “innocent” and “always well-intended”. I am about to tell you that I had this to say, plus other related things, since the 1990’s.
The author supplies many facts. In addition, CWR serves many audiences not merely “general”.
“Synodalism” and its jargon was going on in my Archdiocese since the late 1990’s with a force of insistence always smiling and “joyful” expecting you “to understand the Holy Spirit”. One of the reasons for the visit to Pope Francis by the English Monarch is to input on who would be best suited as next Pope, to entrench synodalism.
The poor man is confessing the urgency attending in their hearts, “the season of hope”.
Carl above – I find your response condescending. I won’t bother you with my reading list over the past thirty (times two) years.
I believe CWR is directed to a general audience.
If there is an article that is more suited to a more specialized readership, it might be an idea to provide a link to it as a suggestion to those who are interested in further investigation.
You’re scared Thomas James will get under your skins so you’re ducking for cover.
Unless of course you’re just THE Thomas James skins hisself trying to come off as Cleo?
Huh? I’ve read that three times and I find it more unintelligible than Aiden’s article.
It wasn’t condescending. Anyhow, perhaps my December 2024 essay, “Seven challenges to the implementation of synodality,” will be helpful.
A Catholic discussion website to be true to the meaning of Catholic Christianity is obliged to represent and appeal to the whole. That has to include more studied, reasoned matter with opportunity for discussion and mutual enrichment. Otherwise it naturally settles down to schmaltz, what a portion of Catholics wish to hear, usually affirmation of their narrowed conceptions.
Even the humblest of grade school level Catholics understand that and are prepared to garner what they can and develop in the process. That’s because they’re humble and open to increase their knowledge. Instead, we find that percentage who simply seek affirmation and support. Not a bad thing except when they seek to foist their vision on the rest of us.
These who seek affirmation seem to perceive God as a Great Sponge ready to soak them up. Romanticists at heart they, like Francis Thompson, envision God a hounddog.
“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped; And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after” (The Hound of Heaven).
Whereas God expects us to strain, suffer, and make the effort demanded by the Cross. That includes our wits. Some will not like this. Feel free to fire away.
No one asked for the article to be dumbed down. A precis might be appropriate, if someone us up to the task. (Caution: precis does not equal dumbing down).
The article is sophisticated and complex. As presented here, it would be appropriate for a particular audience, say readers of First Things.
Okay, Cleo, I occasionally spend time on First Things.
Can I have access to Fr. Nichols’ work on CWR? Is that permissible?
BTW, I found the piece to be a healthy slog in terms of time. But by no means insurmountably difficult.
As a back-bleacher layman who is not a cleric nor a theologian, and never attended any Catholic school, I ask why should anyone write a “precis”—if armchair critics simply walk on by and choose not to read?
I humbly recommend my above comments (precis!) of April 13 at 1:14 p.m. and April 14 at 7:53 a.m. For those interested in discursive footnotes less honed than Fr. Nichols excellent article, then feel free to at least scan my earlier comment of April 13 at 3:24 a.m.
In another but related article and thread I posted an illuminating piece about the regnant Jesuit Order.. In one of his many book reviews (this in “Faith and Reason,”1988), A Catholic Jesuit (!) Fr. Gerard Steckler, SJ, examined Malachi Martin’s “The Jesuits” (1987). In what serves as a reference point for the present, he wrote:
“In 1965 [Jesuit General Pedro] Arrupe decided to do battle with Pope Paul VI, a kind and weak and tearful man who had made his initial mistake years earlier in listening to Jacques Maritain’s exhortation to work with the world. At General Council 31 [1964-5] the Jesuits decided to transform Paul VI’s commission to fight atheism into the socio-political struggle of the masses. The spiritual and supernatural element in Jesuit Catholicism had been excised [!….] General Council 32 [1974-5] converted the Society of Jesus from an arm of the Church engaged in indispensable apostolic works to ‘faith in the service of justice,’ i.e., revolution against the socio-economic-political structure of the capitalist West [….] They succeeded in amalgamating [!] nature with revelation.” (the early Maritain confides in his later “The Peasant of the Garonne” [1968], that Christians were engaging in “a kind of kneeling before the world”.)
Synodality is an inverted pyramid by another name. “Congregationalism” on post-Vatican letterhead?
Go ahead, trash my verbosity alongside Fr. Nichols! An honor, for sure, but know that I am not a theologian. Yea verily, know that I am from the unwashed masses—and, therefore, I value highly the full range of material offered by CWR, even including the posted comments invited (!) from others of my ilk as from outside the imagined guild.
Brineyman above – Maybe I should have another go at the article. Or not.
I’ll bet you’re in the very small percentage of CWR readers who are into First Things.
Not that one set of readers or one publication is more worthy than the other but they’re different.
Carl above – I read your Seven Challenges article. I think it was clear and graspable for the ordinary reader.
I nominate you to write the precis for Fr. Nichols’ article.
In addition to explaining Synodaling, the cause of heteropraxy also explains the role in this papacy of the late Mr. McCarrick, Rupnik, Zanchetta, et al.:
Anyone useful to promote the ideological agenda should be embraced, promoted and protected, unless they get exposed by the press for a gravely secular offense and thereby threaten the public opinion of the Pope and with him, the cause.