Pope Francis announced on Sunday that the Synod of Bishops’ meetings in the Vatican, originally scheduled for October 2023, will now be extended to October 2024 as part of a two-part process. The Pope said that much has already been gained from the Synod, but that more time is needed “for extended discernment” to “favour the comprehension of synodality as a constitutive element of the Church, and help everyone to live it as a journey of brothers and sisters who bear witness to the joy of the Gospel”.
The move could perhaps point to the fact that Pope Francis, who is increasingly wheelchair-bound and repeatedly hinting at an early departure along the lines of Benedict XVI, is in fact going nowhere. The Synod on Synodality is a key part of the Pope’s legacy-building endeavours and it is likely the Pontiff will want to see it through to the end. Therefore, critics who had been eyeing a 2023 exit, may now be looking at a 2024 departure at the earliest.
After the Pope’s announcement, the General Secretariat of the Synod said the Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis Communio allows for the possibility of multiple sessions, and the “decision stems from the desire that the theme of a Synodal Church, because of its breadth and importance, might be the subject of prolonged discernment not only by the members of the Synodal Assembly, but by the whole Church”. The Secretariat said the extension fits in with the ongoing synodal journey, since the Synod is “not an event but a process”.
This could also hint at a deepening of reforms. Amid an increasingly leftwards turn by the Synodal Path in Germany, and calls for upending Catholic tradition in Ireland, there have been criticisms that the process has been unrepresentative of what mainstream Catholics think, while being over-representative of the views of liberal groups within the Church. In England and Wales, for instance, the 30,000 estimated participants represented under 10 per cent of all Mass-going Catholics and under 1 per cent of all Catholics. The Pope opened this consultation process last year, allowing for a less centralised Church, and asking dioceses, religious orders, and other groups to embark on listening sessions. But there are fears liberal voices have drowned out many others.
Of course, the extension could also suggest a need to placate the Synodal Path in Germany as well as liberal clergy in Belgium, where bishops in Flanders recently issued a document permitting the blessing of same-sex unions, allowing the Church to be “pastorally close to homosexual persons”. But critics of the Synodal Path may see in the Pope’s extension a desire to deepen reforms, as much as to iron out any wrinkles and smooth over ongoing divisions. German Cardinal, Gerhard Ludwig Müller – who recently said Francis had no authority to challenge the teaching of the Church – recently warned that the synodality process represented a “hostile takeover”.
Speaking with EWTN, the German prelate warned “the approach is wrong” and, if successful, “will be the end of the Catholic Church”. As to the instrumentum laborious, a working document which will guide the synod in Rome, and which is being drafted by various figures, Müller said: “They are dreaming of another church that has nothing to do with the Catholic faith … and they want to abuse this process, for shifting the Catholic Church – and not only in other direction, but in the destruction of the Catholic Church.”
Of course, there is a risk of reading too much into the Pope’s decision to extend the synodal process. He has, of course, split such a meeting into two sessions before, with his Synod on the family in 2014 and 2015, which opened the door to divorced and civilly-remarried Catholics receiving Communion. Still, given how big a role this process is playing in the Pope’s legacy-building, traditionalists will likely infer that he is trying to deepen reforms, and that he is going nowhere, certainly not for a few years anyway. Whether this leads to a doubling-down of resistance is up for debate, but ongoing divisions within the Catholic Church look set to rumble on for the time being anyway.
Ignatius Dean is staff reporter at the Catholic Herald
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