As the three-year synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church limps into its final three weeks of meetings in Rome, even poking fun at it has become a bit tedious.
Originally ridiculed by many as a “meeting about meetings,” it never managed to demonstrate that it wasn’t. Way back in November 2021, still flush with excitement over the synodal process—with meetings at the parish, diocesan, national, continental, and planetary level still beckoning enticingly—Cardinal Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio in the United States, said that if synodality was a “meeting about meetings,” it would be a “purgatory.” Indeed, the very “idea of having a meeting about meetings” would mean that “we would certainly be in one of the lower rings of hell in Dante’s Inferno!”
The Inferno is back in session this week. The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus liked to joke that the first words heard upon entering hell would be, “Break down into small groups, discuss, and then report back to the plenary.”
At the end of last year’s “assembly”—some four hundred participants gathered into small groups for several weeks—the final report called for further study on what “synodality” actually meant, two years of thrashing about inside it not having made that clear. Pope Francis took note and sent the conceptual and definitional work off to a “study group,” which will chew it over until June 2025. So this October’s Inferno will proceed without knowing what synodality means.
Which poses a certain problem for the initial “penitential service” planned for Tuesday evening, October 1. The service will hear testimonies from those who have suffered “the sin of abuse; the sin of war; the sin of indifference to the drama present in the growing phenomenon of migrations all over the world.”
After that, a more fulsome confession will follow, specifically including sins “against peace,” “against creation,” “against indigenous populations,” “against migrants,” “against women, family, youth,” and “against poverty.”
Two novel sins appear in the list as well: the “sin of using doctrine as stones to be hurled,” and sins “against synodality/lack of listening, communion, and participation of all.”
Details of the ceremony were not revealed ahead of time, but one expects a dramatic moment when Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, rends his garments for having sinned against synodality. No figure in the Church has more grievously sinned against synodality, with malice abundantly aforethought. Last year, while the actual synodal assembly declined in its final report to address homosexuality and related issues, Fernández himself was secretly working to introduce the blessings of same-sex couples. That betrayal of synodality, released in the depth of winter from the frozen pit at bottom of the Inferno, shocked the Catholic world.
The fiasco—subsequently retracted on a geographic basis—dealt a lethal blow to synodality. If the highest authorities in the Church felt free to ignore synodal consultations—even while formally participating in them—then it was much worse than originally feared. There would be endless meetings about meetings to no effect, while elsewhere major decisions were taken without any meetings at all.
A key question on Tuesday will be whether Cardinal Fernández is able to confess his sins against synodality; he may lack sufficient contrition and the necessary purpose of amendment.
Aside from contrition and amendment, it may be hard to know what to confess at all. “Sins of abuse” are clear enough, but what about sins “against creation”? Are all those who flew to Rome guilty of carbon concupiscence or climate cupidity? Or does the “sin against creation” mean advocates of the “LGBT” agenda, the “T” of which Pope Francis denounces in the most vehement terms?
The penitential service “is intended to direct the work of the Synod towards the beginning of a new way of being Church.”
It seems to have forgotten about an older way of being Church, even from just twenty-five years ago.
“Pope Francis has taught us that it is also necessary that the Church ask for forgiveness by calling out sins by name, feeling pain and even shame, because we are all sinners in need of mercy,” the synod managers write of the penitential service.
St. John Paul the Great made the request for forgiveness and the purification of memory a central part of the Great Jubilee 2000. That Lenten liturgy, one of the most moving of the entire year, had been prayerfully and painstakingly prepared—not dashed off by an announcement at a press conference. John Paul articulated his desire for such an initiative in 1994; five years later the International Theological Commission, under the leadership of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, produced a lengthy study, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past.
It was a profound examination of what it means to say that the Church is holy and sinful—Ecclesia sancta simul et semper purificanda—or, to use the disturbing patristic expression, casta meretrix—the chaste harlot.
Cardinal Fernández occupies Ratzinger’s chair as prefect of doctrine, but he is not his equal. Ratzinger developed the theological framework for the Church to look upon her own shadows in the light of Christ, who transformed the scandal of the cross into the instrument of salvation. Christ Crucified—the anointed and cursed—is the mystery around which the Church revolves.
The synod on synodality invites the Church to look inward, self-referential rather than understood in reference to Christ. She thus finds herself going around in circles.
Dante’s circling eventually left the Inferno behind. May the synod delegates in Rome be so blessed.
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza is a Senior Fellow at Cardus.
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Image by Andreas Tille, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
