Vatican City, Oct 18, 2024 / 15:15 pm (CNA).
Is there more than meets the eye in the framing of discussions about ecclesiastical governance and the relationship between the local Churches and the universal Church — the main topic of conversation at the Synod on Synodality for the past week?
One gets the impression that many synod participants view the subject as a kind of Trojan horse, a theme that may seem innocuous on the surface but one that can be deployed to sneak sidelined issues such as married priests and women deacons back on the main agenda.
The mere possibility that this is what’s really going on has put those who want to hold the line on the Church’s governance structure and moral teaching on high alert.
The theme in question relates to Part 3 of the synod assembly’s Instrumentum laboris, or working document, which “invites” the people of God “to overcome a static vision of places that orders them by successive levels or degrees according to a pyramidal model (i.e. parish, deanery, diocese, or eparchy; ecclesiastical province; episcopal conference or Eastern hierarchical structure; and universal Church).”
“This has never been our vision,” the document goes on to say. “The network of relationships and the exchange of gifts between the Churches have always been interwoven as a web of relations rather than conceived as linear in form. They are gathered in the bond of unity of which the Roman Pontiff is the perpetual and visible principle and foundation.”
As Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, archbishop of Luxembourg and the synod assembly’s relator general, emphasized during the week: “The Church from the beginning has referred to the city, to the places in which it lived, guided by the bishop in a close relationship with the territory.”
It was in this context that Cardinal Leonardo Steiner of Manaus, Brazil, said during a daily press briefing that “many of our women are true ‘deaconesses’” while arguing that Pope Francis “has not closed the question” of the ordination of married men in places like the Amazon. He advocated for the Church to be be open “to listening to cultures and religions” so that the Gospel can be “inculturated.”
What does this mean, exactly? In Steiner’s view, it allows for the possibility that some episcopal conferences might say yes to women deacons and married priests, based on cultural considerations, while others may say no. By that reasoning, even the synodal path of the Church of Germany could make sense, even though Pope Francis has not missed an opportunity to criticize and even to mock it, having made the quip to a German bishop in Belgium: “Is there a Catholic Church in Germany?”
At a pastoral-theological forum on Oct. 16 titled “The Mutual Relationship of the Local Church and the Universal Church,” Cardinal Robert F. Prevost, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, emphasized that local Churches are not merely parts of a larger structure but embody the true presence of the Church of Christ, achieving unity through diverse local expressions.
Echoing that theme, another forum participant, Miguel de Salis Amaral, a Portuguese priest and theology professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, said the local Churches are formed “in the image” of the universal one. Citing Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, he emphasized that “the power, the richness of all the sacramental and spiritual gifts” resides “in every local Church.”
Another speaker, Antonio Autiero, a priest of the Diocese of Naples, Italy, and a professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Münster, highlighted how the experience of the Church is “purely local.” He expressed support for a “ministry of listening” at the local community level, which through their “elements of discernment” could make suggestions to the local Church.
An example of local bodies shaping Church policy highlighted during the form was Australia’s Plenary Council, convened to respond to the country’s sexual abuse crisis. Comprised of 44 bishops and 275 other members, the council is authorized by an indult from the Holy See to dialogue and make decisions.
Meanwhile, within the assembly hall, there was agreement of the need to highlight “the importance of preserving the unity of the Church,” according to Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the Dicastery of Communications.
How the delegates choose to articulate that consensus in the assembly’s final document at the end of the month, however, remains to be seen.
Cardinal-elect Roberto Repole, archbishop of Turin in Italy, for one, signaled that the document won’t express the views of the majority and the opposition but rather a consensus.
“We are not a parliament; we are searching for the voice of the Spirit also through listening to the voice of our brothers. Here, I see the catholicity of the Church,” he said.
“Synodality is an experience,” he added, “but requires an in-depth analysis of theological questions that cannot remain on the sidelines.”
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Andrea Gagliarducci perceives what others have, the local Synodal church multifarious geographically and doctrinally, as I noted in ‘Vatican statistics: Catholic population shrinks in Europe, rises everywhere else’ where I questioned the sparsity of new African appointments to the cardinalate. Orthodoxy in the faith will garner faithful parishes in Africa, at the Vatican it won’t buy you a cup of coffee.
Parish councils the extant formula will expectedly become more deliberative than consultative. After all, we’ve had these councils for decades. Now they’re given teeth to rip and tear.
What Synodal theory compromises is the relation of the canonical pastor to his associates, and the lay members of a committee which by nature is selective. All members according to practice during the Synod have virtual equal input and presumptive proficiency. A pastor will assume the role of a moderator [as did Synod bishops] rather than decision maker.
In effect it reduces the pastor’s function to a dispenser of the sacraments subject to the authority of other members of the parish community. This is what occurred post Vat II until corrected when the role of parish council members became deliberative. And deliberations will likely favor many of the popular heterodox issues.
About the Trojan Horse, in Rome we find that everyone speaks in English but thinks in German…
In truth, the relation between the local (meaning particular) Churches and the Universal Church is that, sacramentally, at each and every Mass assembly (not a local congregation) and in the Eucharist, the whole universal Church is fully present, including all of the Communion of Saints from the first years until now. As St. John Paul II articulates in his Prayer before Mass: “We all join in offering this Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, this unbloody RENEWAL AND EXTENSION of Christ’s [singular!] Sacrifice on the Cross…”
Even on core matters of real identity and doctrinal and gifted unity, why such a scripted and predictable process to construct something else from “local” geographies and contexts?
In physics, such “entropy” is the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. Now, entropic local (c)hurches? And, likewise, regarding the geographically larger synodal Continental Assemblies, we find that geological “continental drift” was scientifically confirmed in the 1960s, about the same time as following the Second Vatican Council when the Church was theologically set adrift. And, now–conflating “governance” with bottooms-up itches against faith and morals–the synodal relator general Hollerich signals that the “sociological and scientific foundation” of the universal moral law is no longer true. Truth? A post-Church, randomized, and drifting with the zeitgeist? The process is the message. This is “what the meaning of is, is!”
The Englishman William Shakespeare said it well: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” or Rome, or Luxembourg, or now wherever.
It is interesting to see victims of post-conciliar liberalism describing – accurately – the latest stage in the war on tradition as a trojan horse.
The War on Catholicism 1962-1965 and all the toxic fall out was already described as a Trojan Horse in the title of an excellent book by Dietrich von Hildebrand “Trojan Horse in the City of God.”
The freemasonic War on Catholic Tradition includes ALL Catholic Tradition…including the parts hitherto left intact.
We’re all Traditionalists now?
What a farce. How can they say this stuff with a straight face when PF removes bishops he doesn’t care for without explanation, sends his goons to do “visitations” on religious communities, appoints co-adjutor in France to take over a diocese where he doesn’t care for the local bishop’s approach. Oh, and where he shut down the American bishop’s attempt to deal with the McCarrick crisis so that he could control (stage-manage) the process to insure there was no hint of a finding that homosexuality in the priesthood had anything to do with it.
Dear BXVI: How very true. Francis should have to answer for what he’s done to harm the Church.
Yes, this synod is a trojan horse. In a post to a article a couple of weeks ago, I made this very simple observation, that this author expounds on in the above article, and my comment was denied. I’m glad to see that articles are now coming out about this very reality of this Synod, which really is just an evil trojan horse. And we all know what the trojan horse did back in the day, too.
I do not trust this Pope one iota.
In the United States, most Catholics’ “local experience” is not the diocese but the parish and, as my long-ago theology professor Sabbas Kilian was wont to note, parishes have the least defined ecclesiology. In fact, THAT local experience — the parish — has been diminished since the 1980s, when Fr Kilian wrote that, by (a) dioceses coopting greater degrees of functions (e.g., most prominently schools); (b) growing diocesan chanceries (when Uncle Teddy McCarrick arrived in Metuchen in 1981, the new Curia looked like a miniature Rome, not the chancery of a mid-size mid-Jersey diocese; (c) bishops left and right have treated parishes as disposal fiefdoms subject to their fiat – “the bishop said; and so it was, and it was good…..” The ordinary Catholic, (except German bureaucrats getting their check from the diocese) hardly pays attention to what the “diocese” thinks.