The Tablet

31 October 2018 | by Christopher Lamb

The Church goes back to its roots

Francis blesses the unborn child of Gina and Jonathan Lewis after a session of the synod
Photo: CNS/Vatican Media

Archbishop Bruno Forte, one of the ablest theologians serving in the Church’s hierarchy, boiled down the task of the youth synod to a simple question.
“What sort of Church do you want in the future?” the Italian prelate who leads the Archdiocese of Chieti-Vasto asked. This question, he told journalists, cuts to the heart of what the Synod Fathers and participants had focused on during the month-long assembly in Rome that finished last weekend.
Unlike the stormy 2014 and 2015 synod gatherings on the family, the youth synod did not become preoccupied with contentious doctrinal questions, in particular over whether there might sometimes be circumstances when a divorced and remarried Catholic could receive Communion. Although the issues on the table were young people, the faith and vocational discernment, more fundamentally the 2018 synod was about ecclesiology, the nature of the Church, and its pastoral strategy.
In the past two centuries the Church has been increasingly characterised by a devotion to unchanging tradition, directed from the top, with the house rules set forward by popes and bishops, and the people expected to fall into line. Pope Francis and the latest synod of bishops gathering are recovering a radical ecclesiology, becoming a Church that listens and “walks with” people, rather than one in which edicts are issued from on high and blindly obeyed.

It’s “radical” in the classical sense of the word, which derives from the Latin “radix”, meaning “root”. Synods are rooted in Scripture, and reflect Jesus’ mission of accompaniment. They were a feature of Christianity for several centuries, and are used across the Orthodox Churches. “Missionary synodality”, as the 60-page synod document puts it, is both radical and rooted in tradition. “Synodality” is far from being a new-fangled buzzword dreamed up by a curial official.
The final document is imbued with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. The dust is at last being blown off the idea of “collegiality”, one of the central themes of Vatican II, which had boldly proposed a worldwide synod of bishops to address the challenges facing contemporary Catholicism. That Council thought it had consigned the “fortress Church” idea to history; perhaps it is only now that this radical idea is being realised.
The Franciscan ecclesiology is built on a living notion of “synodality”, a Church where bishops, priests and people each have their distinct part to play but are “co-responsible” for its mission; one which opens the sacristy doors and goes out to bring the Gospel to the world’s outsiders and to those with no formal connection to Christianity. “Synodality” is more than abstract theology, and more than signing off agreed statements. As he closed the synod last Sunday, Pope Francis said that the gathering had shown the “synodal style” for the Church in action: “a way of being and working together, young and old, in listening and discernment”.
Significantly, synodality is a modus operandi that lays the groundwork for more radical pastoral shifts in the future, and the final synod document puts a strong emphasis on conscience and discernment. Any genuinely synodal Church has to include women, and it’s no surprise that on this the synod document called for the most dramatic shift from the current state of affairs. It is a “duty of justice”, the text says, that women become involved in decision-making in the Church; there is an “urgency of an unavoidable change” in its approach.
“An area of particular importance is … the presence of women in the ecclesial bodies at all levels, also in positions of responsibility, and of female participation in ecclesial decision-making processes while respecting the role of the ordained ministry,” the document states.
Each paragraph in the synod document was voted on separately by 249 synod fathers and needed a two-thirds majority of the assembly – 166 votes – to be passed. In the end all 167 paragraphs of the document were adopted. Getting agreement from bishops hailing from vastly different parts of the globe is no easy task, and proved most problematic over the paragraph on gay Catholics.
The final text avoids using the term LGBT, although it had been present in the synod’s working document – the first time that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people had been referred to by the term they prefer to use themselves in official Vatican material. African bishops, according to those inside the synod, raised the strongest objections to “LGBT”, some of them on the grounds it would undercut the pressure they are putting on governments in their own country to resist “ideological colonisation” from the West. This was the section of the document which passed by the tightest margin, with 178 bishops voting in favour and 65 against.

“The Synod reaffirms that God loves every person and so does the Church, renewing its commitment against every discrimination and sexually-based violence,” it states. “Equally reaffirmed is the determinative anthropological importance of the difference and reciprocity between man and woman and it is held to be reductive to define a person’s identity only by their ‘sexual orientation’,” it asserts, citing a 1986 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that has been heavily criticised by gay Catholics for its harsh tone.
But the synod also calls for a deeper theological and anthropological study of these issues and recommends that parishes “accompany” gay Catholics, and “recognise their desire to belong and contribute to the life of the community”.
While this part of the document will disappoint many gay Catholics, the recognition of the need for further study is a significant development, perhaps creating an opening for the Church to recognise that being gay is not a “disordered choice”. Regardless of the detail of the final text, a “synodal” approach to LGBT Catholics implies listening, accompaniment and integration into parish life and an end to stigmatisation. That in itself is a shift.
The synod included bishops and young people from across the globe with vastly different concerns and agendas. “Synodality” is a method that can be applied universally, without coming up with local uniformity. In the final text, bishops’ conferences across the world are urged to take up the synodal “path”, by listening, welcoming and engaging in a “common discernment” in order to transform the lives of everyone involved in it.
This “missionary synodality”, the document adds, should be focused on the most vulnerable, the poor, and those who have no contact with parish communities. “It’s up to us, the bishops and the bishops’ conferences to take the message of the synod and then to apply to it to our concrete situations,” the Cardinal Archbishop of Karachi, Joseph Coutts, told me last week. “That is the challenge … not just to take it as a document to be read and then put on the shelf.”
Some worry that “synodality” is a questionable way of doing business, and threatens the universality of the Church, opening up the possibility of local churches following different disciplines and interpretations of church teaching. But synodality should not be misunderstood, Cardinal Coutts told me. “It’s not the same as a liberal democracy, where everybody can vote; it’s a walking together, it’s listening.” As Pope Francis stressed in his address after the voting had been completed last Saturday: “The synod is not a parliament. It’s a protected space where the Holy Spirit can act. Let us never forget this; it was the Holy Spirit that was at work here.”
The synod took place cum Petro et sub Petro (“with Peter and under Peter”), with the Pope taking part in the vast majority of the sessions, mingling with participants in the coffee break, sharing the lift and posing for selfies. As the bishops put it in the final document: “We felt that the collegiality which unites [us] cum Petro et sub Petro in care for the People of God is called to be articulated and enriched through the practice of synodality at all levels.”
In other words, the synodal journey is insured by the papacy. The Pope is the one who gets to press fast forward, pause or rewind on how fast, or slow, things proceed. It’s also up to the Pope to decide what to do with the final synod document. He can reject it, rewrite it or elevate it to magisterial teaching; the latter option is one that was instituted earlier this year under new synod rules signed off by Francis himself.
Not everything has run smoothly during the past few weeks. One problem has been translations. The synod document was initially only issued in Italian, hardly the best way of getting its message out to a global Church and beyond. The synod of bishops seems like a classic car that the Church is starting to drive for the first time after years of being left in a garage. It sometimes takes a while for it to start; the gearstick is hard to manoeuvre; and it burns up a lot of petrol. But under this Pope, it is becoming roadworthy.