Yesterday I received an email newsletter from the New York Review of Bookspromoting the review of an exhibit commemorating the 1,300th anniversary of the founding of Reichenau Abbey in Germany. At the base of the page was a link to Francine du Plessix Gray’s 1972 piece “The Politics of Salvation,” her account of the trial of the Harrisburg Seven, the group of Catholic antiwar activists charged for conspiracy against the government in 1971.
I was moved to set my notes aside and read the piece. Du Plessix Gray’s Divine Disobedience, her immersive journalistic study of the Berrigan brothers and other figures of the 1960s Catholic left, was a formative text for me, and seeing her name felt like a call over time.
Referring to the trial’s prosecutor, William Lynch, du Plessix Gray informs us “that he is a lector at his parish. That he sees Pope John XXIII as the destroyer of his Roman Catholic Church.” Disentangling the ironies of a Catholic prosecuting Catholics for acting on their beliefs, she continues:In this encounter with nuns and priests freeing themselves from traditional molds of Church authority, Lynch remains an entrenched example of the autocratic, disciplinarian Catholic ethos. [Defendant] Anthony Scoblick has an interesting view of the prosecutor: “He hates us for not behaving like priests,” Tony says. “He hates us because he can’t look up to us and be dominated by us.”
The accuracy of Scoblick’s psychologizing aside, what struck me about his observation was its connection to a theme that has reappeared throughout the Synod: the notion of “shifting peripheries”—the ways in which the center of the church is moving geographically from North to South and West to East—and the points of resistance to this movement from those who may fear a less rigidly Eurocentric, more inculturated Catholicism.
Francis’s announcement of 21 new cardinals on Sunday is a case in point: of the cardinal designates, many hail from South American countries, and African and Asian nations are also represented. The three designates chosen to speak at yesterday’s briefing were from the Ivory Coast, Japan, and Brazil.
Asked about what unique qualities from his local church would contribute to the global missionary church, Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, S.V.D., Archbishop of Tokyo, spoke of the “exchange of gifts from one church to the other.”
Kikuchi explained how this exchange was formerly understood as rich churches supporting poorer ones, but the rise in religious vocations from Africa and Asia now means that “the exchange of the gifts is shifting from the West to the East.”
“The peripheries are moving towards Europe,” he said, recalling Bishop Anthony Randazzo’s remark at Friday’s briefing: “When you come to Oceania, you here in Europe are the periphery.”
Kikuchi also referenced Pope Francis’s recent visits to Asia, saying, “the Holy Father is showing the importance of Asia” and “the center of the mission of the church is shifting from Europe to other areas.”
Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay, spoke of the “great richness” of Asian cultures and what they can offer the global church at Monday’s briefing.
“We are by nature in Asia synodal,” he said. “We are not individualistic.”
After stating that “the Synod should have an effect not only in transforming the Catholic Church” but also the world, Gracias said, “We’ve got to respect other cultures.”
“We understand the value of us accepting, respecting, understanding, and also inculturating the faith in different ways,” he said, adding that it is important “to value all cultures, to respect cultures, and to use the richness of these cultures in our own work.”
“God became flesh,” he said. “That’s the classic example of inculturation.”
Gracias also highlighted another kind of decentralization that is less geographic and more theological: that of the church’s relationship to other religions, an issue that gained prominence last month when Pope Francis told an interreligious group of young people in Singapore that “All religions are paths to God.”
Drawing on the discernment of the Asian Bishops’ Conference of 2022, Gracias said, “We no longer refer to [other religions] as ‘non-Christian religions.’ We begin to refer to them after the conference as ‘neighbor religions,’ working together, searching for God.”
Also speaking at the briefing was Sr. Mary Teresa Barron, President of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG). Sr. Barron said that she feels Synod delegates “are growing in our capacity to listen to each other” and are not so quick to try to convince others to accept their viewpoints as they were during last year’s session.
Barron shared that UISG has established a dedicated office for synodality. Priorities for the office include “review[ing] our style of leadership to be in a more synodal key” and “grounding everything in a spirituality of synodality.”
Barron added that UISG members are “helping those in religious life who are on the peripheries” by “building up that solidarity” in places such as Syria, Lebanon, Russia, Ukraine, Myanmar, and Indonesia.
Yesterday Synod delegates gathered for two General Congregations. Today they gather for a third and final General Congregation on the opening section of the Instrumentum Laboris, “Relations.” Delegates will return to their Working Groups tomorrow morning to write their reports on this opening section.
The Synod methodology describes the importance of this movement between large and small groups in crafting these reports: “Listening to the Reports of the Language Tables and the free interventions in the General Congregation allows each Participant to bring together, in an atmosphere of prayer, the perspective of their Group with all the others.” Michael Centore
Editor, Today's American Catholic | 
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