It is notoriously risky to compare two large historical movements, especially recent or contemporary ones, and to claim to detect similarities between them: quite simply, like is not being compared with like. That said, present debates might benefit from a quite different perspective: a comparison between the current enthusiasm for “synodality” within the Catholic Church and the process of “perestroika” which occurred within the Soviet Union at a slightly earlier period. The purpose of this short article is to suggest that such a parallel, however farfetched or even outrageous it might seem, might give us some food for thought.
As many will no doubt still recall, perestroika is a term that referred in the final years of the twentieth century to an undefined, if fairly widespread, desire for change in the political, social and economic structures of the former Soviet Union among its own citizens. The term can be translated as, for instance, “reconstruction” or “rearrangement” or “realignment”, but it is perhaps more important for our purposes to recognise that it evoked or reflected a mood of discontent in Soviet society with the current state of affairs and a sense that “something had to change” if the whole system were not to implode and disintegrate. Admittedly, there were also those in the Soviet Union who saw or felt no need for change, and were quite happy with the status quo, perhaps not entirely for altruistic reasons.
In the case of the Soviet Union, the motor for change was seemingly the perceived imminent economic collapse of the State. And the face behind the movement for change was that of recently deceased President Mikhail Gorbachev. In the case of the Catholic Church, what seems to have been the driver of change has been a certain diminution in credibility in the entire ecclesial system, a problem that Pope Francis, for one, with his drive for “synodality” seems determined to address. As with the Soviet parallel, there are elements within the Catholic Church that refuse to endorse any gloomy diagnosis, however pervasive, of the Church’s present predicament. Many, in addition, might well argue that the synodal process has less to do with any current crisis of credibility than with a desire to pursue more vigorously the initiatives outlined at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) about involving the “People of God” in the Church’s mission.
Be that as it may, the denting of Catholicism’s credibility, in itself a centuries-old issue, has clearly been deepened by reactions inside and outside the Church to revelations of sexual abuse within, in particular, its clerical ranks, and the indelicate tactics frequently adopted at the highest levels of the Church hierarchy to conceal such scandals. Yet, in seeking to understand the contemporary sense of malaise, and even sometimes of disintegration, felt within parts of the Catholic world, it would be surely unwise to underestimate the significance of a more diffuse and elusive sense of unease regarding the very purpose or raison d’être of the Church.
This latter difficulty might possibly be even more of a problem for the Church than all the scandals and their concealment. So much so, indeed, that one might even be tempted to wonder whether the process of “synodality”, launched amid a seemingly never-ending series of unsavoury revelations about the behaviour of the Church’s “official” representatives, might be seen as a smokescreen, however unintentional, disguising the potentially more lethal threat to the Church’s wellbeing posed by the difficulty of providing convincing answers to unwelcome questions concerning the credibility of the Church’s fundamental beliefs in God, Jesus Christ, the sacraments, and the ultimate explanation traditionally offered for our beginning and our end.
This brings us back to “perestroika”, and thus to the word inevitably associated with it, “glasnost”. Usually translated as “openness”, this concept could arguably be seen as a precursor of Pope Francis’s notion of “parrhesia”, a term, as the editor of Studies, Dermot Roantree, has convincingly claimed, “which Pope Francis has made very much his own in the course of his pontificate”. According to the Collins Dictionary, “parrhesia” comes from the world of rhetoric and means “boldness or frankness of speech”. Semantically at least, both terms have an undoubted congruence.
The process set in motion by President Gorbachev certainly ushered in change, though maybe not of the kind he had foreseen or wished for. But the end result (so far, at least) has been the strengthening of the central power in the state in the hands of one person. It is odd, in fact, that most revolutions, since at least the heady days of the French Revolution in 1789, have begun by ostensibly wanting the “people” to have their say, but have tended to end up by concentrating the power of the state increasingly in the hands of one individual. France today is effectively an “elective monarchy” – to borrow the description of the Fifth Republic coined, or at least popularised, by the distinguished French thinker Raymond Aron (1905–83) with supreme power vested in the President for the period of his (so far there has been no “her”) mandate. In the former Soviet Union, when the dust of “perestroika” had finally settled, the figure of a newly minted modern “Czar” came more sharply into focus. And there, for the time being, matters rest, though probably still simmering below the surface.
“Perestroika” may have finally failed, of course, nor primarily for internal reasons, but because of the West’s “unhelpful” reaction to the Soviet Union’s problems at the time. It would thus doubtless be foolish to use the fate of this concept as an infallible guide to that of “synodality”. That said, if purely historical trends are any clue to the movement of Church history (and this must remain a matter for academic debate), this latest attempt to set the Barque of St Peter on a different course towards a Brave New Catholic World could well end up with the hands of the “fisherman” more firmly wrapped round the tiller than in the past, and with the centralisation of ecclesial power more firmly vested in the papacy than ever before. Whatever the advocates of “synodality” had in mind when they embarked on their journey, and despite their best intentions, this might be what the process delivers. “For man proposes, but God disposes.”
The law of unintended consequences, in other words, may finally produce an outcome to the process of “synodality” that might compound the problems of the Catholic Church rather than mitigating them.
Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, is a priest of the diocese of Down & Connor in N. Ireland
(Bishops look on as an unseen Pope Francis celebrates a closing mass at the end of the Synod of Bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica at The Vatican on October 28, 2018 | Photo by CLAUDIO PERI/AFP via Getty Images)
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