The shape of the Church to come
Synod on synodality
As the second and final assembly of the Synod on Synodality begins, one of the advisers helping to facilitate discussions summarises it as a stage in the dramatic transformation of Christianity into a Church that will grow through encounter and witness, just as in its first centuries.
There is a template for the statement of a bishop newly appointed to a diocese in England and Wales that has been in use for as long as I can remember. First: express surprise, shock and above all humility at the appointment. Then say something nice about the diocese (“beautiful part of the country”) and how you are looking forward to getting to know it. Then say you’ll miss your existing diocese and the wonderful people in it, even as you are honoured by the Pope’s trust in you for this new mission. Finally, thank the retiring bishop or interim stand-in for their support, and ask for prayers. Follow with a potted summary of your blameless ascent up the ecclesiastical ladder.
So accustomed are Catholics to this vacuity – indistinguishable from the communiqués of remote corporations (“Mr Brown will be taking over from Mr Smith as head of accounts. Mr Brown says how delighted he is …”) – that most of us struggle to imagine how it could be different. A new bishop has been appointed; we know little of him, nor he of us. But the news is all about him.
The Instrumentum Laboris (IL), or working document, for the second and final assembly of the Synod on Synodality that begins this week in Rome allows us to envision another way, in a Church that is “closer to the lives of her people, less bureaucratic and more relational” (5). It is a Church that takes seriously the “we” of the People of God: not simply the sum of the baptised, but “the communitarian and historical subject of synodality and mission” (3), through which the Spirit is acting. It is a Church in which the normal way of operating is interdependence and reciprocity and mutual listening; where ministries and charisms in all the baptised are valued and encouraged; where there is participatory decision-making, formation in listening and discernment. It is a Church in which the bishop is not a remote monarch, ruling in isolation from the Church he serves, but who listens and accompanies synodal decision-making processes at every level in the diocese, fostering accountability and transparency.
Put like this – and let’s face it: the Synod on Synodality has often struggled with finding language that captures this shift – it might seem abstract. But the IL begins and ends with the image of God’s promised banquet in Isaiah, in which social ladders and political pyramids are upturned, and the Spirit is heard in the young and the poor and the spurned; and in which, amazingly, even ordinary people are agents of God’s purpose, by virtue of their baptism. Synodal conversion is a journey of rediscovering that joyful amazement in the daily life and culture of a Church whose heart is open to the Kingdom.
The IL does not deal specifically with how bishops are appointed, for, like many topics that have arisen in the course of these three years – including women deacons, LGBT issues and the mission to the digital world – it has been entrusted to one of the 10 study groups adjacent to the assembly poring over the canonical and theological questions relating to these topics. This is not to “exclude” them from the Synod, but to ensure they are dealt with, while allowing the assembly to focus on its main task. The groups will present brief “work-in-progress” reports to the assembly, and their conclusions to the Pope next year.
But look at IL 91, which calls for creating and strengthening “different types of councils – parish, deanery, diocesan, or eparchial – as essential instruments for the planning, organisation, execution and evaluation of pastoral activities”. Now imagine a future bishop being named to a diocese that has a vigorous pastoral council, one which has for years been organising listening and discernment processes in parishes and deaneries, and collating their fruits. It would be a diocese in which problems and challenges – pastoral, social, institutional – would constantly have been surfaced and prayed over by large numbers of people, who draw up proposals that have buy-in from the ordinary faithful across the diocese, because they were involved in the listening processes from the get-go. Now further imagine that the bishop has been appointed, perhaps, because he can identify with the priorities it has discerned. Would his statement be all about him, or at least as much about the diocese, and how he proposes to lead it in its mission and priorities? The People of God of that particular Church would not be passive and invisible, as now, but a subject.
The clericalist mindset is so embedded that people object: surely this emasculates the bishop’s authority? They know little of the Church’s deepest traditions. “The aim of synodal ecclesial discernment,” says the IL, “is not to make the bishops obey the voice of the people, subordinating the former to the latter, nor to offer the bishops an expedient to make decisions that have already been taken seem more acceptable, but rather to lead to a shared decision in obedience to the Holy Spirit.” It is the same ancient notion of authority and decision-making that runs from chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles through the Early Church synods and councils, chapter 3 of St Benedict’s Rule, and so on, well into the Middle Ages, where it was assumed that deliberation “takes place with the help of all, never without the pastoral authority that takes decisions by virtue of its office”, as IL 70 puts it. Earlier, the IL quotes Pope Francis’ October 2015 speech that synodality offers “the most appropriate interpretative framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself” (8).
Accountability, transparency, discernment – all these belong “to the oldest of the Church’s traditions”, and “found in the very nature of the Church as a mystery of communion” (73-74). The bishop’s authority to take decisions is not reduced by this, but enhanced, legitimised and copper-bottomed. He is free, indeed obliged, to make the final discernment, and is not bound by any general agreement that has emerged from church listening processes. But he needs a convincing reason to do so, as canon law even now says, lest he injure the bond between himself and the people. For in the Church the exercise of authority constitutes a “moderating force in the common search for what the Spirit requires, as a ministry at the service of the unity of the People of God” (69).
The concluding gathering in Rome, formally known as the “second session” of the XVI General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, will bring to a close a remarkable three-year ecclesial event aimed at bringing the yeast of synodality into the Church’s daily bread. The Synod has been turned from “an occasional event to an ecclesial process that extends in space and time” (106). It has become a mechanism of ecclesial discernment that begins with consultations and gatherings of the People of God and concludes with bishops’ assemblies that include plenty of non-bishops, which finally makes proposals to the Pope. And thus, presumably, it will now continue to be.
The Synod journey has recovered ancient habits of listening, participation and discernment, and found new structures and methods to encourage these in the ordinary life of the Church. The IL is stuffed with examples of such reforms, but here’s one: councils in parishes and deaneries etc. should no longer be primarily administrative bodies made up solely of people that run things, but “subjects of ecclesial discernment and synodal decision-making” which enable “the practice of accountability and the evaluation of those in positions of authority”. Its members should represent the community they serve, and include people who witness to their faith in different ways, such as the young, migrants, the elderly or any other group who might be under-represented. Their remit would be not just management, but developing the mission of the parish (IL 91-93).
The assembly was due to begin on Wednesday this week following a two-day retreat and penitential service. By the time it ends on 27 October, it is expected to show clearly how the synodal conversion articulated and endorsed at last October’s assembly can now take flesh in the Church across the world. Working through the five modules of the 48-page working document stitched from submissions by local Churches in answer to the question “How to be a synodal Church in mission?”, Synod fathers and mothers will mull proposals under the four broad headings of “foundations”, “relationships”, “pathways” and “places”, with the final module given to amending and voting on the concluding document.
The assembly’s make-up mirrors last year’s: 368 voting participants from seven continents, made up of 272 bishops (mostly delegates from bishops’ conferences, plus 20 curial heads and 41 papal picks), and 96 (a quarter of the total) non-bishops, of whom 54 are women (lay and religious). The “non-bishops” are delegates from the continents plus 15 of the Pope’s own selections. Aside from 26 substitutes replacing those who had asked to withdraw for health and other reasons, members will be the same people as last year – the idea, after all, is to “journey together”. Even the retreat masters, Timothy Radcliffe OP and Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini OSB, are the same. The number of “fraternal delegates” – who can speak, but not vote – has been upped to 16 from 12 in response to the growing interest in the other Churches in this transformation. The ecumenical guests will play an important role at the prayer vigil on 11 October led by Pope Francis on the anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.
The method and format, too, will broadly be the same: 36 round tables of roughly 10 members in which all have equal right and time to speak, guided by facilitators using the “Conversation in the Spirit”. In a new step, group reports will be synthesised by six “language tables” (two in English, one each in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese) which will be presented to the assembly. The various reports will then be used as the basis for the final document. All of this requires support from the other main grouping at the Synod: 70 “experts” (23 of them women), who have neither voice nor vote but act as table facilitators, theologians or communicators to keep the machinery moving. Among them are three Brits (Anna Rowlands and I are this year joined by Avril Baigent) and one from Ireland: Fr Eamonn Conway.
If the assembly succeeds in the final report in providing consensus for a clear road map, the Pope may well simply declare that the Church has spoken, and mandate the Catholic world to go do it. Or he may add booster rockets of his own. Asked about this, Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the Synod, would only say that “until now” the tradition was for a Pope to do a post-synodal exhortation, meaning, of course, he is free to do so or not. If he does, my guess it will not be long in coming – by Christmas, or January at the outside.
What strikes me now, rereading the IL, is how clearly synodality is a direct response to the signs of the times, to what long ago, at the Latin American bishops’ meeting in Aparecida, Brazil, the then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio called “the change of era”. The term was coined to describe the time of dramatic transformation over many decades which, the bishops observed, was burying cultural Christianity – Christianity as religio: as a marker of identity, imbibed through family and institutions – and giving birth to a Church emerging that was smaller but more spiritually potent: one that grows through encounter and witness, just as in its first centuries. Back in the early 1970s, the shift was foreseen by Karl Rahner SJ, whose talks, gathered in The Shape of the Church to Come (1974), are striking to reread in the light of the Synod on Synodality. Even the titles of some of his talks – “A declericalised Church”, “A Church concerned with serving”, “Morality without moralising”, “A Church of open doors” – could serve happily as the IL’s subheadings.
Nowhere in the IL is it precisely stated that so many of the Church’s current structures and habits are the product of an era that is dying; nor that synodality is the vehicle to take us into a new era. Yet it is implied on virtually every page. The Church is called to change in order to carry out the mission entrusted to it by Jesus Christ. The era of powerful institutions protected by alliances with power is fast ending, along with the time of a strong cadre of clergy and Religious and a silent laity. What has been true for a long time of poorer parts of the world where the Church has been growing fast is also now also true of the wealthy West: there is no longer the personnel or the resources to sustain the business-as-usual of clericalism.
Now is the time to recover a deeper tradition, one that is in many ways pre-modern yet renewed and reformulated for our times, that allows the Church to shine more brightly, yet shorn of all triumphalism. The Church is not a corporation, but a body of people transformed by the encounter with Christ, who listen to God’s Spirit and receive guidance from that Spirit both individually and as a body. Synodality allows us, at this time of crisis and change, to listen deeply and discern faithfully, to receive the new horizons of the Spirit while distinguishing them from the spirit of the age. This is who we are, how we act. Synodality is deeply, essentially Catholic.
The IL names a number of the signs of the times that have surfaced on the Synod journey. One is the way our ecclesial belonging has shifted. A community of faith today is not just a geographical place: we are mobile, urban creatures, who might belong at the same time to different countries as well as church movements or societies; and we increasingly spend much of our lives in a parallel digital, virtual world. This reality “challenges the Church’s organisational forms”, notes the IL (82), for so many of our structures assume a notion of place that has been in practice superseded. Without forgetting the importance of physical context and concrete culture, we need to start seeing the Church not just as spaces but “environments and networks in which relationships can develop, offering people rootedness and a basis for mission, which they will carry out wherever their lives unfold” (86). This suggests more investment in “centres” of spirituality and formation, from where – as in the Early Church – we radiate out. The call for formation has been widespread and insistent from the start of this Synod journey: in understanding how the Spirit guides the Church; in listening and group discernment; in how to include the poor and those on the periphery; in formation of faith witnesses and for preaching; in listening to the Word of God, and the voice of God in Creation, and so on (51-66). All this will require a major mobilisation of church resources: away from maintaining buildings, and towards such centres and networks.
Then there is the desire for deeper unity in the Church, to transcend its internal divisions, which has grown hand in hand with an appreciation of its global diversity (11): the Conversation in the Spirit method is an essential tool for this. There is a growing awareness, too, of the variety of charisms and vocations that the Spirit “constantly awakens in the People of God”, and hence the need to broaden the participation of all the baptised not just in decision-making but in shared responsibility for the Church’s mission, through “baptismal ministries” to be given “stable form” as “instituted ministries”, conferred by a bishop via a special rite after a time of discernment and formation (29). The IL sees the Spirit pouring out charisms and gifts on lay people generally – and on women in particular – in response to the pastoral needs of our time. A change of mentality is needed, to see women and men as interdependent and reciprocal, “sisters and brothers in Christ, oriented to a common mission” (14). Specifically, the assembly is being asked to consider how to widen women’s participation in ecclesial discernment processes, and to have better access to positions of responsibility, including seminaries and theology faculties and church courts (16).
Yet while women’s exclusion is highlighted in the IL, the main emphasis is on ministries that can be exercised equally by men and women by virtue of their baptism. It is not said in the IL, but many in the synodal process spoke of a future which for many is their present, in which their community is served by priests but not run by them, instead organised by ministers of various kinds, both men and women. This, of course, will vary greatly across and between local Churches; the IL asks all to “undertake with humility and confidence a creative discernment on which ministries they must recognise, entrust or institute to respond to pastoral and societal needs” (32). One in particular the IL highlights as “appropriate” to our times: “a properly instituted ministry of listening and accompaniment”, such that this becomes “an ordinary dimension of the life of a synodal Church” (34).
At a meeting the Synod organised earlier this year, parish priests also called for organising pastoral action in ways that take into account “the participation of all baptised men and women in the mission of the Church”, assigning to them tasks that do not require ordination (36). But the main reason for moving from a clericalist way of exercising authority to a synodal way is the witness the Church needs now to give. “Walking together as baptised persons in the diversity of charisms, vocations and ministries … is an important sacramental sign for today’s world,” the IL notes (42), for it is a world of “increasingly intense forms of interconnectedness” yet dominated by “a mercantile culture that marginalises gratuitousness”.
So questions this assembly must answer – how to enable deep dialogue and listening, co-responsibility of all the baptised, authority as service, and so on – turn out to be for the sake of an age-old mission: to enable the Church to show the world God’s better way of being, and to help heal its wounds through love. By the end of October, God willing, we’ll know better how to do this.
Austen Ivereigh is fellow in contemporary church history at Campion Hall, Oxford, and a biographer of Pope Francis.
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