LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2024: #10

Today, the Latin Rite Catholic Church celebrates the liturgical feast of Pope St. John Paul II. One of the many striking features of Synod-2024, as also of Synod-2023, is the virtual absence of the magisterium of an exceptionally consequential teaching pontificate from the materials prepared for synodal discussion by the Synod General Secretariat and its theological advisors. Here in Rome, these days, it can seem as if the pontificate that gave the Church an authoritative interpretation of the Second Vatican Council through its encyclicals, post-synodal apostolic exhortations, and apostolic letters—the pope whose message, example, and diplomacy helped bring down the Berlin Wall, thirty-five years ago next month; the pope whose Theology of the Body creatively addressed many of the issues that are roiling this triennial “synodal process”; the pope whose social doctrine remains a compelling prescription for the future of the free and virtuous society of the twenty-first century—never existed: at least in the minds of the Synod managers and their allies.

That is not true, of course, among those Catholics leaders at Synod-2024 who represent the living parts of the world Church. They continue to be animated by the teaching and pastoral practice of John Paul II, as do many of the seminarians, young priests, and lay students studying at the pontifical universities here. So if we are trying to identify fault lines in twenty-first-century Catholicism, here is one to be reckoned with: the line between those who believe that John Paul II provided the Church with an evangelical and missionary template for the future that has enduring validity because it was thoroughly contemporary while deeply rooted in the Church’s tradition, and those who somehow missed—or, more likely, rejected—that vision of the Catholic future.

St. John Paul II, ora pro nobis; módlcie się za nas; pray for us. XR II

The Master Plan?

by George Weigel

Earlier this year, two distinguished theologians with long Roman experience told me that, if there were a master plan of some sort for the doubleheader Synod of 2023–2024, it would be found in a small book originally published in 2023 and then revised in 2024 in light of Synod-2023: Un nouveau concile qui ne dit pas son nom? (A New Council That Doesn’t Speak Its Name?), by Christoph Theobald, a French Jesuit of German nationality and professor emeritus of theology at the Facultés Loyola Paris, the Jesuit theological center in the French capital. I have no idea whether Fr. Theobald’s book in fact provides the roadmap for the Synod managers and their allies. But its content does suggest certain “elective affinities,” as the sociologists say, between the author’s understanding of and vision for the Church, and theirs.

Un nouveau concile begins in 1999, when Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, S.J., told the 1999 Synod for Europe (the last of the continental synods in preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000) that the Church needed “an experience of universal confrontation between bishops for the new century.” This was not-quite-so-subtle code for a new ecumenical council, the Vatican III of progressive Catholicism’s fondest dreams: dreams based, I might add, on a deep misunderstanding of the purpose and teaching of Vatican II. This was the same Cardinal Martini who, shortly before his death in 2012, averred that “the Church is 200 years behind the times”—a striking indictment that was repeated, seemingly with approbation, by Pope Francis in his 2019 Christmas address to the Roman Curia (which is arguably five hundred years behind the times, but that’s a story for another day). What I termed the “Martini Curve” puzzled me then, and it puzzles me today.

For what, precisely, is the Catholic Church two hundred years behind? A Western culture come unmoored from the deep truths of the human condition? A culture that celebrates the imperial, autonomous Self? A culture that reduces human love to merely another contact sport because it detaches sex from love and responsibility? A culture that celebrates freedom as “I did it my way,” and thus breeds the politics of immediate gratification and intergenerational irresponsibility? Why on earth would the Church want to catch up with that?

In any event, Fr. Theobald is evidently a big fan of the Martini Curve and the cardinal’s not-so-subtle call for a new council, and suggests that the triennial synodal process launched by Pope Francis in 2021 might be that “council without a name”: that surreptitious Vatican III, which would now include “the whole of the People of God,” who would “find a way to progressively unravel the web of problems accumulated in the Catholic Church.” In support of this, Theobald cites Pope Francis’s address to Synod-2015 on the meaning of “synodality” as “to walk together,” or as the Franco-German Jesuit puts it, “to set out on the road again, and together.” Yet here we return to the Martini Curve and its reading of the contemporary Catholic situation. For if the Church is to “set out on the road again, and together,” doesn’t that imply that 1.3 billion Catholics are a) not “together” and b) stalled? That may be true of Fr. Theobald’s native and adoptive lands; the experience of the last three weeks has amply demonstrated that it is not true of many other sectors of the world Church, which are living evangelical missionary discipleship in impressive and courageous ways, often in difficult situations.  

The introduction to Un Nouveau Concile is also enthusiastic about how the present pontificate has “transformed” the Synod secretariat, through which “circulation between the different levels of ecclesial life [has been] ‘stimulated,’” such that, “in the spirit of enlightened pragmatism, the Churches are moving forward ‘by steering by sight,’ gradually learning to benefit from experiences lived and re-read together.” Putting aside the interesting question of how any philosophical conception of pragmatism can be made compatible with biblical religion, we’re back amidst the word salads achingly familiar to those who follow American presidential campaigns. And questions immediately arise:

Is Fr. Theobald unaware of the fruitful and extensive “exchange of gifts” among the living parts of the world Church that have been underway for decades? Is he unaware of the cooperation “between the different levels of ecclesial life” displayed in the synodal structures already in place throughout the world Church? (See “Letters from the Synod-2024: #8” for an exhaustive list.) Would he be surprised to learn from a senior African bishop present at Synod-2024 that, in his young, living, and growing part of global Catholicism, “we don’t know what a diocese without a pastoral council is”?

Then there is the business about “steering by sight.” How is that to be distinguished from making-it-up-as-you-go-along? That may work for jazz improvisation, but it doesn’t work well in a religious community based on an authoritative tradition, as the meltdown of liberal Protestantism over the past century ought to have demonstrated. Moreover, in the darkling world in which we live—by which I mean the world after original sin—steering by sight without appropriate illumination to show the way can lead you into a ditch, or over a cliff.  

Fr. Theobald is eager to acknowledge “everyone’s ability to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the Churches,” but like virtually every other fan of the “synodal process” who invokes this phrase from Revelation 2:7, he tells us nothing about how to distinguish between good spirits and evil ones, or between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of the age. Should we not remember that the author of the Book of Revelation also warned that “many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18–19)? And might it not be helpful to suggest some criteria by which to grasp what is truly of the Holy Spirit and what is of . . . elsewhere? 

Fr. Theobald believes that “we are discovering more forcefully that it is impossible to listen to God speaking to us without at the same time listening to others—including those confined to silence, as well as the silent cries of the earth.” Here, of course, we meet again the hoary canard that some voices in the Church—presumably the voices of Catholic progressivism—have not been heard, when in fact they’ve been caterwauling for decades. True, those voices have not been agreed with. But one would have to be stone deaf since at least 1967 and 1968, when Paul VI issued the encyclicals Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (on priestly celibacy) and Humanae Vitae (on the means of fertility regulation), to believe that these voices have been “confined to silence.” Why not be honest about this and concede that the progressive agenda has just not achieved any sort of consensus, for its ideas or its pastoral practices, in the world Church and especially in its living parts? As for the “cries of the earth,” they are being well-represented by the delightful, elderly, and slightly daft religious sister who keeps telling her synodal discussion group that they have to listen to “the trees.”

In the conclusion to his book, Christoph Theobald states that the “synodal process inaugurated by Pope Francis is indeed ecclesiologically far-reaching,” because “it involves nothing less than a deliberation, to be lived by the whole People of God, on the very form of the Catholic Church.” But where, one must ask, is the Lord Jesus in all this? 

Didn’t Christ give the Church its apostolic form in Matthew 10:1–4 (the sending out of the Twelve), its eucharistic character in Luke 2:19 (the Last Supper), its leadership structure in Matthew 16:18 and John 20:23 (the Petrine office and the priestly power to forgive sins), and its evangelical mandate in Matthew 28:19–20 (the Great Commission)? We can reflect on that “form.” We can deepen our understanding of it, as the Church did at Vatican II in its magnificent Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. We can live its implications more faithfully. But the form of the Church is not ours to form, and the minute we think we can do so we verge on apostasy.

Fr. Theobald’s book is intensely Eurocentric, even as he laments the “dangerous normality”—some might say, vertiginous collapse—of European Catholicism “in recent decades.” So it is worth noting in conclusion that the leadership of Synod-2023 and Synod-2024 is thoroughly European (Luxembourg, Malta, Italy, France): surely an oddity in that western European Catholicism as a whole, and notwithstanding some impressive signs of life and vigor, is hardly a “paradigm” (to use that favorite conciliar word) of vibrant, evangelically compelling Catholicism. 

Which suggests that it’s not the Eurocentric Martini Curve with which the Church should be concerned, but the Faith Deficit in Catholicism’s historic heartland.

George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.   

The Last Word Goes to John Paul II

This week, Synod-2024 will consider, wrestle with, and vote on its Final Report. This will require courage on the part of many Synod participants, whose ecclesiastical lives may be made more difficult, and in some instances more difficult, by their pushing back against the pressures of the Synod managers. A lot of that courage has already been displayed, especially in the forthright challenge mounted to the notion that national episcopal conferences have doctrinal teaching authority. More courage will be needed throughout the final stages of this exercise.

On this liturgical feast of John Paul II, then, it may be helpful to remember the summons to courage he laid down in 1987.

Westerplatte is a narrow peninsula framing the Bay of Gdańsk in the northwest of Poland. There, one of the first battles of World War II in Europe was fought. At 0045 on September 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the small Polish garrison at Westerplatte, expecting that the vastly outnumbered and outgunned Poles would run up a white flag. That was a misimpression. The Poles—mostly youngsters with no combat experience—not only resisted the offshore bombardment; they repelled amphibious assaults by German marines, suffering serious casualties in the process. The Polish garrison finally surrendered on September 7. But they had so impressed the aggressors that the German commander allowed the Polish officer leading the Westerplatte garrison to keep his ceremonial sword.

Addressing a vast throng of young Poles at Westerplatte in 1987, John Paul II, speaking slowly and forcefully in his beautiful, sonorous Polish, invoked the memory of the heroes of Westerplatte, while explaining how those young Polish soldiers were relevant to young people of every time and place—and, I suggest, to all those at Synod-2024. Here is what the Pope said:   

Here in this place, at Westerplatte, in September 1939, a group of young Poles, soldiers under the command of Major Henryk Sucharski, resisted with noble obstinacy, engaging in an unequal struggle against the invader. A heroic struggle.

They remained in the nation’s memory as an eloquent symbol.

It is necessary for this symbol to continue to speak, for it to be a challenge . . . to new generations . . . 

Each of you, young friends, will also find your own “Westerplatte.” . . . [T]asks you must assume and fulfill. A just cause, for which one cannot but fight. Some duty, some obligation, from which one cannot shrink, from which it is not possible to desert. Finally—a certain order of truths and values that one must “maintain” and “defend”: within oneself and beyond oneself . . .

At such a moment (and such moments are many, they are not just a few exceptions) . . . remember . . . [that] Christ is passing by and he says, “Follow me.” Do not forsake him. 

XR II

O God, who are rich in mercy
and who willed that Saint John Paul the Second
should preside as pope over your universal Church,
grant, we pray, that instructed by his teaching,
we may open our hearts to the saving grace of Christ,
the sole Redeemer of mankind.
Who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever.

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Image in the public domain.