ROME – As the Synod of Bishops on Synodality continues to unfold in Rome this month, it’s increasingly reminiscent of another synod just over a decade ago: The Synod of Bishops on New Evangelisation, which took place under Pope Benedict XVI Oct. 7-28, 2012.
Consider the following parallels:
Those similarities are already matters of record. What remains to be seen is whether there will be a couple further points of resemblance, which we already know about the 2012 edition but where the jury is still out on this one.
First, the 2012 synod was the last great hurrah of the John Paul II-Benedict XVI era in Catholicism. Just a little over three months after it closed, Benedict, who was 85 at the time, announced his resignation on Feb. 11, 2013, setting the stage for the election of Pope Francis.
Today, Francis is presiding over the synod at the age of 86. While there’s no indication of any health crisis around the pontiff at the moment, it’s at least possible that bringing this synodal project to conclusion, including the second assembly next October, may be among the last major acts of his papacy too.
More basically, the question is whether the same fate awaits “synodality” after this papacy as befell the “new evangelisation” after John Paul II and Benedict.
It was astonishing how quickly references to the “new evangelisation” seemed to disappear from official argot and practice after the popes who’d sponsored the term were gone.
That 2012 synod ended with recommendations to create departments of new evangelisation at Catholic universities, to open formation centers for new evangelisation in dioceses, and to launch commissions for new evangelisation within bishops’ conferences and other ecclesiastical structures. Very little of that ever happened, because once the ground shifted in Rome with the election of Francis, it seemed clear that “new evangelisation” no longer was the apple of the reigning pope’s eye.
The Pontifical Council for New Evangelisation, created to great fanfare in 2010, lasted only twelve years until it was suppressed in 2022, merged into the new Dicastery for Evangelisation. Given that bureaucracies generally signal their priorities by creating departments dedicated to them, suppressing such a department usually is an equal-and-opposite sign of waning interest.
Elsewhere, the story is more or less the same. Consulting the website of the U.S. bishops, for instance, one finds that a page dedicated to the New Evangelisation basically hasn’t been updated with any new Vatican texts since the late Benedict XVI years.
Of course, this isn’t to say that the energies released under the banner of the “new evangelization” have simply disappeared. Multiple efforts to reach out to lapsed Catholics sprouted up when the push was at its peak, and many of them have gone on to great success. Moreover, Pope Francis probably would argue that synodality is his own version of new evangelisation, so that the idea didn’t vanish with the vocabularly but rather took on a new guise.
Nonetheless, it’s still fair to say that efforts branded as “new evangelisation” no longer enjoy the same direct and explicit papal encouragement as they did a decade ago, a reminder that perceived priorities in Catholicism often shift as popes come and go.
Only time will tell if a similar disuse will surround “synodality” in the future.
But the good news for devotees of both new evangelisation and synodality is that in the Catholic Church, nothing ever really disappears. Catholicism is like your grandad’s attic; everything he ever owned is still up there, waiting to be dusted off and brought back into use, when the wheels turn and it suddenly seems valuable again.
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