Is the Synod on Synodality any more than an empty talking shop, asks John L Allen Jr.
If one were seeking a title with which Pope Francis’s October 4-29 Synod of Bishops on Synodality will pass into history – assuming it leaves a significant enough legacy to be remembered, which is not yet a foregone conclusion – a strong candidate might well be the “Table Synod”.
Not only is the round table the preeminent symbolic expression of the event’s spirit, but much of the early drama had to do with what Pope Francis took off the table before it even began, while as the assembly nears its close, the biggest question is what will remain on the table once it’s over.
To push the metaphor even further, there’s also the question of who’s been denied a seat at the table. The most obvious example is the media, who’ve been struggling all month with the exceptional requirements of confidentiality – the less polite, but arguably more accurate, term for which is “secrecy” – imposed by the Pope and his team.
The “Table Synod,” therefore, seems fairly apt.
From the beginning, Pope Francis and his allies have presented this synod, and the three-year process which led up to it, almost as an ecclesiastical Camelot, and thus it’s only right and just that its centrepiece would be a round table.
In past synods, participants sat in a large hall in rows of seats facing a dais for the plenary events, while they would occupy different rooms with various seating arrangements for the small group sessions. This time, however, participants are gathered in the larger Paul VI Audience Hall, sitting at a series of round tables.
While mostly a concession to the practicalities of bringing together almost 500 people, a much larger group than in past editions, the round table has been extolled repeatedly by participants as a metaphor for the concept of synodality itself.
“When you sit around the table, cardinals, bishops, laypeople and mainly lay women, rubbing their shoulders with the hierarchy, in a concentric Church not a pyramidal Church – not that the pyramidal Church is bad, we need that – but the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium lived, we need that,” said Sri Lankan Fr Vimal Tirimanna, a moral theologian taking part in the event.
It was a theme developed by Belgian Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich in his opening address on October 4.
“We are not sitting in hierarchical order but at round tables, which is a way to foster genuine sharing and authentic discernment,” said Hollerich, who is serving as the relator, or secretary, for the synod.
“Round tables also remind us that none of us is a star in this synod,” he said. “The protagonist is the Holy Spirit, and only with a heart fully open to the Spirit’s guidance will we be able to respond to the call we have received as synod members.”
Yet as the synod opened, the burning question seemed less the shape of the tables at which participants would be talking, but rather what was left on those tables to discuss after Pope Francis ruled preemptively on several of the topics expected to loom large during the month-long gathering.
Just before the synod opened, a group of five conservative cardinals, none of whom is actually participating in the event, submitted a set of five dubia, or “doubts”, to Francis, two of which touched on the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of women clergy. The surprise wasn’t so much the challenge, as all five cardinals are well known as frequent Francis critics, but rather that the Vatican swiftly provided written responses from the pontiff, despite his previous policy of leaving such loaded questions officially unanswered.
In effect, Francis offered a cautious “yes” on the blessings issue, with the caveats that such gestures must not be confused with the sacrament of marriage, and that the practice should not be codified into any general norm or policy but rather left to individual, case-by-case pastoral discernment.
On women clergy, the Pope delivered a basic “no”, citing the teaching of Pope John Paul II. Yet Francis also distinguished between a teaching which is “definitive” and one which is “dogmatic”, adding that the former can be the object of further study, offering the example of the validity of ordinations in the Anglican Communion.
Whatever one made of those replies, they had the effect of rendering discussion on those issues inside the synod a bit superfluous, since a synod’s role is to advise the Pope, and in these two cases the Pope clearly didn’t feel the need for advice.
While critics might grouse that Francis’s choice to speak before listening to his own synod was perhaps just the slightest bit, well, “un-synodal”, others insist that he freed the assembly from getting bogged down over a couple of contentious matters and thereby allowed the discussion to be more far-reaching and comprehensive.
Bishop Anthony Randazzo of Broken Bay, Australia, compared Francis’s replies to what happened in October 1965 when Pope Paul VI informed members of the Second Vatican Council that he was reserving the issue of priestly celibacy to himself, thereby avoiding a public fight on the council floor and allowing the assembly to end peacefully a month later.
That analysis, however, invites an obvious follow-up question: if the purpose of the Pope’s intervention was to clear space for other matters to surface, what are they, and what might we expect in terms of concrete outcomes?
Over and over again, participants selected by organisers to brief the media have insisted that the synod is about the journey, not the destination. Their mandate is not to reach conclusions on specific issues, they say, in part because this synod is merely prolegomena to another assembly next Oct-ober. Rather, these participants say, their goal is to pioneer a new way of being Church, a participatory and dialogical style in which all voices are heard in the effort to forge communion and to discern difficult matters together.
Such, anyway, is the public narrative being propounded by the synod’s communications team.
Sotto voce and on background, however, other participants tell a different story. They describe frustration with what are perceived to be sometimes theologically and intellectually vacuous discussions, an over-emphasis on emotion, a strong internal climate of political correctness and a generally airy tone that renders it unclear what, exactly, they will have achieved by month’s end.
When one synod member was asked in casual conversation what he’d learned so far, the answer was sarcastic: “That white men are bad, white men in Roman collars are really bad, and white men with pectoral crosses are the worst.” As with any such quip it was clearly an exaggeration, but one intended to make a point.
Granted, few would dispute the desirability of listening to different voices. The question is what this ethos means operationally for a complex global Church in which there are real divisions which cannot simply be dissolved no matter how many ways one finds to work in references to “synodality” while discussing them.
At the moment, there actually seems to be a cycle of linguistic inflation surrounding the concept of “synodality”, which has become so vast and all-encompassing as to defy clear definition. Recently, for example, Cardinal Christoph Pierre told an October 16 Mass marking the erection of the new Archdiocese of Las Vegas that Catholic growth in the city is the result of “synodality”, raising the obvious question of how to explain the emergence of the more than 650 other archdioceses in the world before “synodality” was the order of the day.
The risk is that if “synodality” simply becomes a synonym for “good”, then it may not be clear why the Church needs it, and not certain that it will stand the test of time.
This, then, may be the final test for the “Table Synod”. At the end of the exercise, will there be enough sustenance left on the table to keep feeding Catholicism, even after the current roster of cooks has passed from the scene?
For that answer, alas, we may need to await the second round of table service in October 2024.
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