Stephen P. White: True synodality is far from a silly diversion from the evangelical mission of the Church. In fact, it is essential to it.
Every diocese is supposed to be involved in preparatory meetings for the Synod on Synodality these days. I found this article by Stephen White to be among the more intelligent, and hopeful, accounts of all this.
“I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking, writing, and speaking about synodality in recent months. Mention the Synod on Synodality to any American Catholic and you are likely to receive a wide range of responses:
Some are excited at the prospect of a more participatory, even democratic Church.
Some are skeptical about the prudence of holding a synod at such a divided, even chaotic, moment in the life of the Church.
Some are concerned about the Germany Synodal Path and worry that the Synod on Synodality will be an opportunity for the German model to metastasize.
Some, having seen various synod “promotional materials,” have decided it is likely as not to be an exercise in silliness.
“But in my experience, the most common response among American Catholics to a synod on synodality is polite indifference. Most Catholics simply don’t know what all this talk of “synodality” is supposed to mean. For the most part, they keep this indifference to themselves for fear of seeming less than enthusiastic about something Pope Francis so obviously cares about. As I’ve written before, synodality is a neologism in search of a theology.”
Pope Francis seems to have invented the concept of “synodality” wholecloth, and never seems to have defined it precisely. The impression I have is that, back when he was a bishop, he did not like the way that the curia in the Vatican during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI had taken so many decisions out of the hands of bishops (at least partly, in an attempt to reform the bishops’ dioceses for them). The synods of bishops held in Rome, one of the initiatives of Vatican II, always ended with a “post-synodal apostolic letter” by the pope, which had the effect of making the bishops attending the various synods little more than junior contributors to a papal document. Centralizing too many decisions in Rome, without enough input from the bishops, made it hard for the bishops to do what they thought best. And too many bishops were incentivized by all this to listen only to Rome, and not to their own people. So the original spirit of these synods, which was to have the benefits of Church councils without the high stakes of these councils, has been lost. ‘Synodality’, which Stephen White rightly calls “a neologism in search of a theology”, to my ear evokes something like this line of argument. Or at least, that’s the vibe it gives me.
In White’s more hopeful understanding, synodality is a way for the whole Church to turn to mission, rather than the Church being focused entirely on the hierarchy:
“The word is meant to describe a particular modus vivendi et operandi for the Church, one in which the entire People of God takes responsibility for the mission we all share by virtue of our Baptism, particularly as laid out by the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium. If clergy are expected to carry out the Church’s evangelizing mission while the laity are more or less just along for the ride, is it any wonder that the Church grows sclerotic and evangelical vigor wanes? That this has never been the Church’s understanding of herself hasn’t prevented it from becoming, to a disturbing degree, the status quo in many quarters. The laity need to rediscover the power and promise of their own baptism for the good of the Church – and the world, to whom she is sent to proclaim the Good News...”
I’m not sure that the problem in the Church is that Church officials don’t listen enough to the laity. So I’m not convinced that a bunch of listening sessions is going to be helpful. The problem with the laity tends to be a lack of formation, so that their opinions are not formed according to the mind of the Church. Listening to opinions that are worldly rather than Christian isn’t the way for the laity to “rediscover the power and promise of their own baptism.” There’s nothing worldly about baptism! To rediscover one’s baptism is to think in an extremely supernatural way. While most of the silliness and chaos to which White alludes is actually a result of (a) listening to “laity” who don’t think like lay Christians, and (b) compromising the proclamation of the supernatural vision of the Church in order to appease their worldliness.
White ties his analysis to the vision of Lumen Gentium, rather than the Code of Canon Law. What do I mean? Canon law describes the laity as a state of life within the Church, which can be thought of as the default: you are baptized, you are not something special like clergy or religious, so you are the laity. Lumen Gentium sees the laity as aspiring to sanctity of the same level as the greatest martyrs and confessors and canonized saints in history. If we were to distinguish within the lay state between those who intensely desire Christian perfection while living in the world and those who merely are not ordained or consecrated, then we can see that listening to the former group might be quite valuable, while listening to the latter group... less so.