17 October 2024, The Tablet

View from the Synod

by Austen Ivereigh

THE GLORY OF the Synod is being part of the multipolar Church “exchanging gifts” between cultures and contexts. You’ll go from talking to an Asian bishop to a Colombian woman religious while walking from the hall to attend Mass in Aramaic at a Maronite liturgy. So it can feel odd to be suddenly among your own. Tuesday night last week, for example, the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences (CCEE) had arranged a private tour of the Vatican museums, including the Sistine Chapel, for European delegates and experts. The following evening, I was down with the tribe. Our man in Rome, Chris Trott – huge fun – hosted dinner for Team UK. Anna Rowlands, Avril Baigent and I, assisting as experts in different ways, were joined by Belfast’s Jesuit bishop, Alan McGuckian, the Anglican Communion’s delegate, Bishop Martin Warner of Chichester, the two England and Wales bishops (Marcus Stock of Leeds, John Wilson of Southwark), the Pope’s pick (Nicholas Hudson, auxiliary of Westminster) and a certain white-robed cardinal-elect friar. Poignantly, a place had been set for Fr Jan Novotnik, who was to be part of the non-bishop delegation. However, Cardinal Nichols retained him at the last minute, it seems, to carry out some re-organisation at the bishops’ conference HQ in London.

AMBASSADOR TROTT wasn’t sure if he should call Fr Timothy Radcliffe “Your Eminence”. In one of his pre-assembly retreat reflections Timothy described the Vatican – which he knew well in the years he was based here as master-general of the Dominicans – as an intimidating place of “grandiose titles and strange clothes”. Francis has told him that he and his fellow cardinal-elect, the Dominican archbishop of Algiers, can forgo the abito corale and red-piped abito piano, and wear only pectoral cross and scarlet zucchetto in addition to their friar habits.

We could have two cardinals from Yorkshire at the next conclave. Like Timothy, Arthur Roche, the divine worship prefect, hails from God’s Own County. Hours after the announcement, waiting for a bus to take us to St Mary Major to pray for peace with the Pope, I suggested to Cardinal Roche that this was rather a lot of Yorkshiremen in one conclave. “I’m surprised there aren’t more!” he shot back.

The prospect of three English cardinals voting in the next papal election is amazing. And very unlikely. Francis would have to die or resign before August, when Radcliffe turns 80, and three months later Cardinal Nichols joins him at that milestone. Over-80s – who currently include a fourth British red hat, Walsall-born Michael Fitzgerald – don’t take part in the conclave, but can attend and speak in the so-called general congregations that precede it, working up a profile of the pope that the Church needs. And in that discernment the wisdom of the emeriti is much appreciated.

I WAS IN THE Sistine Chapel just before the conclave of March 2013, when accredited journalists were given a tour of the set-up. So at the CCEE event I found myself explaining to a couple of Francis-appointed European cardinals where the tables and chairs will be set, where the smoke machine goes, and so on. They were riveted. “And here is where you cast your vote,” I said, gesturing up at the Last Judgement. “You vow that you are voting purely for the good of the Church and not for any interest or preference of your own. And to concentrate your minds,” I added, “you’ll see that Michelangelo’s depiction of hell is at your eye-level.” They looked solemn for a moment, until the best laugh of the evening moments later. Just after we were asked to leave the Sistine, a wag shouted: “Extra Omnes!”

THIS ASSEMBLY is – whisper it – a very Ignatian process of apostolic group discernment. And such processes often hit troughs mid-way. We’re in one now. As we enter the third of the five modules, it has often felt – to re-use my train analogy of last week – as if we’ve stopped in our tracks, even slipping back. It’s not just that too many interventions move off-topic to grind axes and bang drums. Mainly it’s because the assembly has surrendered to the temptations warned of by assembly chair Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich when he asked us to identify the concrete steps we need to put into operation the People-of-God ecclesiology of Vatican II. What would deviate us from this, he warned, would be an excess of abstraction on the one hand or of pragmatism on the other; we need to give space, he said, both to inspiration and to concrete practices and proposals.

Abstraction is by far the greater temptation. So many interventions are little more than commonplaces, restating principles we were familiar with in last year’s assembly. This concluding assembly is tasked with showing how we implement synodality. “Facts are stronger than words,” Hollerich reminded us, before asking the assembly to articulate what decision-making processes can better reflect the dignity of all the baptised. Yet we remain moored in we-shouldism: high-altitude rhetorical calls for this or that without taking any responsibility for the who or what or how. When most of the reports unanimously agree on abstract platitudes, something is adrift.

Last year’s danger was polarisation; this year’s is the false peace of irenicism. As one of the Synod’s key people here tells me, the “Conversations in the Spirit” method can create a sense of oneness or communion which people are reluctant to disturb. In steering clear of tensions and differences, the small groups are avoiding the truth of experience, and closing themselves up to the “overflow” of the Spirit and the new horizons on offer. Almost everyone I talk to is pessimistic that we’ll have a document in a fortnight that gives a clear road-map to synodal conversion, written in accessible language, but that will also make the heart sing. Meantime they can’t decide who or what is principally to blame.

And yet, say people experienced in these processes, such troughs are typical: the result of exhaustion – not just physical or mental, but of our own resources. Only when we realise it cannot depend on us do we let the Spirit pull up a chair. And sure enough, as I write, it feels as if we’re inching out of the sidings. There are gems of insight and even concrete proposals – not many, but maybe enough to get us chuntering.

FROM MY vantage-point at the margins of the Synod hall, my mind occasionally drifts to how I might construct an intervention if I were allowed to address the assembly. It would have three stages. First, after referencing the relevant section of the working document, speak from experience about either an existing practice of synodality or suggest a new way of operating that reverses an unsynodal way of proceeding. Second, show how, done well, this example or innovation has changed or would change the Church’s way of doing things, and produce great fruits. Third, make a concrete suggestion or proposal that would allow this existing practice or proposed method to be embedded in the wider Church or at least further studied.

I found myself next to Cardinal Hollerich in the coffee queue and put my imaginary address to him. He thought for a moment. “Actually that is really rather good,” he smiled. “You should put it in an article.”