Why did the Synod on Synodality hold extra theological meetings in 2024?

Vatican City, Oct 18, 2024 / 10:55 am (CNA).

Four different theology conferences, held publicly Oct. 9 and 16 in Rome, explain the “theological undertone of the synodal process,” according to a conference moderator and expert at this month’s Synod on Synodality.

The evening forums gave a platform to 17 handpicked theologians and canonists who spoke for about 10 minutes each on the topics of papal primacy, the people of God, the bishop’s authority, and the relationship between the local Churches and the universal Church — all in the context of how to make the Church more synodal.

One of the few novelties of the second session of the Synod on Synodality, the forums revealed some of the theological underpinnings of synodality — according to the experts who were writing about the concept years before Pope Francis launched the three-year synodal process — and the concrete proposals for the future of the Catholic Church.

Klara A. Csiszar, a moderator of two of these forums, an expert at the Synod on Synodality, and a Romanian-Hungarian-Austrian theologian, said at an Oct. 16 briefing for journalists that the conferences “help to better understand the theological undertone of the entire synodality process, especially the theology of the people of God, which is seen as the subject of the mission.”

“This is a fundamental theme that, in my opinion, should be translated into practical application with all its implications,” she continued, adding that “theology helps with this by learning not only to teach, so to speak, but also by listening a lot, sitting in the hall, and trying to understand what is really at stake” during the Oct. 2–27 Vatican assembly.

Other participants agreed that the goal of the forms was to examine some of the issues and concrete proposals being debated inside the Vatican synod hall in a deeper theological way.

Archbishop Roberto Repole of Turin and Susa, Italy, told CNA at a briefing earlier this week that while the forums were a way to make some of the synod debates more open to the public, they were also a good opportunity “to grasp the stakes of some possible changes” to the Catholic Church and to see the journey the Church has made to arrive at synodality since the Second Vatican Council.

“Synodality,” Repole said, “has to do with a way of living together, being Church, of deciding as Christians on the basic issues. But it also asks for some deepening on theological issues that cannot remain on the sidelines of the journey that is being made.”

At the forums, Repole and many of the meetings’ speakers drew heavily on the Church’s dogmatic constitution from Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, in their defenses of synodality, insisting that the theological concept has its roots in the council.

Cardinal Leonardo Ulrich Steiner, speaking at the same Oct. 15 briefing as Repole, explained the impetus for organizing the theological-pastoral forums.

The Brazilian cardinal said that at the end of the first session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2023, theologians expressed a desire to have a more integral and prominent part in the synodal discussions.

It was important for theologians to “participate more in the synod,” Steiner said. “And in this sense, the synod has identified a new path, a new way to consider what has been proposed.”

“Last year it was said that theology was not granted sufficient attention,” Csiszar said. “The theological and pastoral forums provide an answer and open a space in which theology, on the one hand, is learning to articulate its role in a synodal Church, and on the other, is making a substantial contribution to the development of a new synodal style, a new synodal culture.”

The four topics of the forums, she continued, “help provide orientation where there are blockages, motivate where possibilities are perhaps no longer seen, and address exhaustion when it sets in as well as offer criticism where many responses indicate that a certain path might be the wrong one.”

A group of 15 theological experts is participating in the Synod on Synodality as advisers, but they are not delegates and do not take part in voting during the Oct. 2–27 assembly.

Some of the forums’ panelists were chosen from among these over two dozen theologians and canonists. Others were chosen by synod organizers “mainly from among those who participated in the various phases of the synodal process,” Father Riccardo Battocchio, the synod’s special secretary, told the National Catholic Register in an email interview.

“Some [of the speakers] are members of the theological commission established in 2021, others were added during the preparation of the first and second Instrumentum Laboris, others were involved for their specific expertise and experience,” Battocchio explained.

He said the presenters “were asked not to privilege, in their presentation, a particular theological school but to convey, even in the short time available, the scope of the individual questions, the possible different answers offered by Catholic theology, helping the participants in the forums to grasp the different aspects of each theme and to ask questions.”