Overhyped, Overmanaged, Underwhelming—and Providentially Heartening
by George Weigel
In a 1989 article, future cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., agreed with Protestant historian Otto Dibelius that the twentieth century was the century of ecclesiology—the century of the theology of the Church. For Catholics, the pivot of that theological era was Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (The Mystical Body of Christ) and its magisterial apogee was the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, which presented the Church in richly biblical and theological terms, rather than in the static, juridical-political language of the “perfect society” that had dominated post-Reformation Catholic ecclesiological thinking. Lumen Gentium also re-centered the Church on Christ; thus the dogmatic constitution did not begin “The Catholic Church is . . .” but rather “Lumen gentium cum sit Christus . . .” (Since Christ is the light of the nations . . .). Any truly Catholic ecclesiology is thus Christocentric, not ecclesiocentric.
If not wholly absent from Synod-2024, this fundamental teaching of Vatican II was at least muted. As more than one Synod participant mused, if the proverbial Man from Mars had scrutinized the Synod’s Instrumentum Laboris (Working Document) and then followed its discussions this past month, he might think that the only two “actors” in the Catholic Church were bishops and women, locked in a constant struggle for power (with “power” understood as who-gets-to-tell-others-what-to-do). Lumen Gentium’s Christocentricity and Vatican II’s theology of the Church as communion would have been hard for our interplanetary visitor to find.
So before dissecting Synod-2024 in both its miscues and accomplishments, it will help cleanse our spiritual and intellectual palates to return to Lumen Gentium—sixty years after its promulgation of Pope Paul VI on November 21, 1964—and drink deeply from its Christ-centered, biblical wisdom about just what the Church is and who we are as its members:
1. Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature (cf. Mark 16:15), to bring the light of Christ to all men, a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church. Since the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race, it desires now to unfold more fully to the faithful of the Church and to the whole world its own inner nature and universal mission . . . .
6. In the Old Testament the revelation of the Kingdom is often conveyed by means of metaphors. In the same way, the inner nature of the Church is now made known to us in different images taken either from tending sheep or cultivating the land, from building, or even from family life and betrothals, [as] the images receive preparatory shaping in the books of the Prophets.
The Church is a sheepfold whose one and indispensable door is Christ (John 10:1–10). It is a flock of which God himself foretold he would be the shepherd (cf. Is. 40:11; Exod. 34:11ff.), and whose sheep, although ruled by human shepherds, are nevertheless continuously led and nourished by Christ himself, the Good Shepherd and the prince of the shepherds (cf. John 10:11; 1 Peter 5:4), who gave his life for the sheep (cf. John 10:11–15).
The Church is a piece of land to be cultivated, the tillage of God (1 Cor. 3:9). On that land, the ancient olive tree grows whose holy roots were the Prophets and in which the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles has been brought about and will be brought about (Rom. 11:13–26). That land, like a choice vineyard, has been planted by the heavenly husbandman (Matt. 21:33–43; cf. Is. 5:1ff.). The true vine is Christ, who gives life and the power to bear abundant fruit to the branches, that is, to us, who through the Church remain in Christ, without whom we can do nothing (John 15:1–5).
Often the Church has also been called the building of God (1 Cor. 3:9). The Lord himself compared himself to the stone which the builders rejected, but which was made into the cornerstone (Matt. 21:42; Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:7; Ps. 117:22). On this foundation the Church is built by the apostles (cf. 1 Cor. 3:11), and from it the Church receives durability and consolidation. This edifice has many names to describe it: the house of God (1 Tim. 3:15) in which dwells his family; the household of God in the Spirit (Eph. 2: 19–22); the dwelling place of God among men (Rev. 21:3); and, especially, the holy temple. This temple, symbolized in places of worship built out of stone, is praised by the holy Fathers and, not without reason, is compared in the liturgy to the holy city, the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2). As living stones, we here on earth are built into it (1 Peter 2:5). John contemplates this holy city coming down from heaven at the renewal of the world as a bride made ready and adorned for her husband (Rev. 21:16).
The Church, further, “that Jerusalem which is above,” is also called “our mother”(Gal. 4:26; cf. Rev. 12:17). It is described as the spotless spouse of the spotless Lamb (Rev. 19:7; 21:2 and 9; 22:17), whom Christ “loved and for whom he delivered himself up that he might sanctify her” (Eph. 5:26), whom he unites to himself by an unbreakable covenant, and whom he unceasingly “nourishes and cherishes” (Eph. 5:29), and whom, once purified, he willed to be cleansed and joined to himself, subject to him in love and fidelity (cf. Eph. 5:24), and whom, finally, he filled with heavenly gifts for all eternity, in order that we may know the love of God and of Christ for us, a love which surpasses all knowledge (cf. Eph. 3:19). While on earth, the Church, which journeys in a foreign land away from the Lord (cf. 2 Cor. 5:6), is like in exile. It seeks and experiences those things which are above, where Christ is seated at the right-hand of God, where the life of the Church is hidden with Christ in God until it appears in glory with its Spouse (cf. Col. 3:1–4).
Would that we had heard more of that during this past month of synoding, and the past three years of the “synodal process” that preceded it.
Overhyped
The hype surrounding the three-year “synodal process” of 2021–2024 began with the Synod leadership itself. In numerous interviews, Synod general secretary Cardinal Mario Grech and the Synod relator general, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J., insisted that, thanks to the “synodal experience,” the “People of God are on the move”—as if the People of God had not been “on the move” since the first Christian Pentecost; as if the Church had been stalled and spinning its wheels in the decades after the Second Vatican Council. That self-congratulatory and self-satisfied usage fit snugly within the cast of mind of such as Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., who recently wrote, evidently without blushing, a daffy history of the Church since 1962: “The Church has gone through the revolutionary reforms of the Second Vatican Council, followed by the repressive regimes of John Paul and Benedict. Francis has once again opened the Church to free discussion . . .” And if this was how the Synod managers and the progressisti of Catholic journalism were thinking, it was unsurprising that the Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola should describe Synod-2024 as “the most significant Catholic gathering since the 1960s.”
What nonsense.
Any number of World Youth Days have had a far more enduring impact on the life of the Church than Synod-2024 will likely have. World Youth Day-1993 in Denver was a critical turning point in the life of American Catholicism, and its effects are still being felt through evangelical, catechetical, and pastoral outgrowths of that experience like the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) and the Augustine Institute, and through the innumerable priestly and religious vocations, and vocations to holy matrimony, inspired by WYD-1993.
The Extraordinary Synod of 1985, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, found the master key that unlocked the treasure chest of the “council without keys” and integrated the riches of Vatican II in its description of the Church as a communion of disciples in mission. The living parts of the world Church embraced that way of thinking and embodied it in mission and evangelization.
The two Special Assemblies for Africa of the Synod of Bishops, held in 1994 and 2009, and the apostolic exhortations that completed their work, were crucial in turbocharging the Church south of the Sahara, which is now the dynamic center of Catholicism’s growth, and which will be the demographic center of the world Church before the end of this century—and perhaps decades before. Nothing remotely resembling these impacts is going to issue from this “Synod on Synodality.”
The hype about the possibilities of this synodal process was most painfully evident in the expectations it raised about Synod-2024 formally endorsing the ordination of women to the diaconate.
There was a certain cruelty implicit in ratcheting up this particular bit of synodal hype for it had been explained, over and over again, that the proposal was a non-starter theologically. For if, as John Paul II definitively taught in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (Priestly Ordination), the Church had no authority to ordain women to the priesthood, and if Holy Orders is a unified sacrament of three grades (episcopacy, priesthood, diaconate), then the inability of the Church to ordain women to the priesthood extends to the episcopate and the diaconate as well. Pope Francis himself said on several occasions that a “female diaconate” understood in terms of the sacrament of Holy Orders is simply not on. The overwhelming majority of Catholic women throughout the world seem to have no interest in the question. Yet a dogged band of activists, urged on by America Media, La Croix International, and other progressive Catholic media outlets, insisted that this was a live issue and one that had to be addressed at Synod-2024—even after Pope Francis explicitly removed the topic from the Synod’s agenda and handed it to a study group. That study group’s preliminary report said that “there is still no room for a positive decision by the Magisterium regarding the access of women to the diaconate, understood as a degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders,” although there was room for discussion and further study and broader consultation. This was later re-explained by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández as a reflection of the pope’s conviction that the issue “is not yet mature,” which struck some as backing-and-filling in an effort to appease the unappeasable. All of this enraged those who somehow, against the available evidence, expected a different answer from Synod-2024. Thus Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, said that the failure to affirm an ordained female diaconate “feels like a betrayal of the process”—which sums up, in one phrase, the overhyping of the Synod on Synodality as an exercise that would, by reason of its process alone, deliver on the agenda of Catholic progressives.
At the very end, and after what one can only assume to have been fierce lobbying of the Synod managers, the really final draft of the Synod’s Final Document averred in paragraph 60 that the question of a female diaconate remains “open”—which, taken at face value, was less a serious theological judgment than a recognition that some people simply can’t or won’t take “No” for an answer. That paragraph got the highest number of negative votes in the balloting on the Final Document but nonetheless passed, guaranteeing more years of contention. Thus all this Sturm und Drang deepened divisions rather than fostering Catholic unity, even as the urgent question of how the Church might better deploy the Spirit-given gifts of women was shelved or diverted into discussions of bureaucratizing women at chancery and curial desks.
Even the term “synodality” still remains murky in the extreme. In an informal exchange with a few Synod participants, the pope was asked, point blank, to give them a succinct definition of the term they could work with; he could not, or would not, do so. Yet the living parts of the world Church are already living “synodality” as “communion, participation, and mission,” the three goals of this “synodal process.” How? Through diocesan pastoral councils, parish pastoral councils, and parish school boards; through lay-led review boards to adjudicate charges of clerical sexual abuse; through sodalities, Holy Name societies, the Knights of Columbus, the Order of Malta, and the Order of the Holy Sepulcher; through FOCUS and vibrant campus ministries; through intentionally Catholic faculties in Catholic institutions of higher learning; and through millions of other expressions of the Christian vocation to sanctify the world that is conferred in baptism and the other sacraments of initiation.
But from the git-go, and for over three years now, the Catholic left has mistaken this doubleheader Synod of 2023–2024 and its various consultations—“this process,” as McElwee puts it—as something akin to the “Vatican III” of its dreams. Progressive Catholicism believed its own propaganda, and until that final vote on Paragraph 60 of the really final draft of the Final Document, disappointment, bordering on bitterness, was the result—for which the Synod managers who encouraged expectations of a revolutionary event with their rhetoric about a Church finally “on the move” bear no small responsibility.
“Unheard” Voices, Imaginary and Real
The hyping of Synods 2023 and 2024 also involved the endlessly repeated trope about a “process” in which unheard Catholic voices would finally be heard. The notion that the voices of the Catholic left have not been heard is, of course, risible. Those voices dominated the discussion in the two decades following Vatican II. It was only with the Extraordinary Synod of 1985 that alternative voices, firmly committed to the Council’s teaching but understanding it as a council of reform and renewal in continuity with tradition, began to reshape the global Catholic conversation.
It would have made for a more fruitful (and, frankly, more honest) conversation if all parties to the debate over the Catholic future had admitted that the voices of Catholic progressivism had indeed been heard but had not won broad acceptance of their views and their program. It was easier, though, to blame “repressive regimes” for the failure of the global Church to get onboard the Catholic Progress Train, so the debate was short-circuited, and polemics too often took over.
Here, too, the Synod’s leadership bear a large responsibility, because their determination to bring into Synods 2023 and 2024 more than a few representatives of the perpetually aggrieved was paralleled by the Synod’s closed door to representatives of more traditional “voices”—the voices of dynamic orthodoxy—which were the voices truly under-represented in the Synod’s official meetings.
Where, this October and last, were the voices of the seminarians and young priests who look to John Paul II and Benedict XVI as their models?
Where were the voices of the growing communities of religious men and women, who are living the renewal of consecrated life as envisioned by Vita Consecrata, the fruit of Synod-1994?
Where were the voices of happily married couples who are living the Church’s ethic of human love and transmitting it to their children?
Where were the voices of those developing innovative K–12 curricula to bring the Theology of the Body alive in age-appropriate ways that affirms students’ God-given identity and dignity?
Where were the voices of those who minister in an authentically Catholic way to those experiencing same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria, offering both compassionate accompaniment and a call to conversion of life?
Where was the voice of the persecuted Church in China (as distinguished from the voice of regime-subservient Catholics in thrall to the Chinese Communist Party, represented at Synod-2024 by two bishops personally appointed by the pope)?
Where were the voices of Catholic educators at all levels, who are challenging the wokery that is corrupting education throughout the Western world?
Where were the voices of the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals who are living the culture of life while resisting the culture of death’s encroachments on the medical profession?
These voices would have added immeasurably to a truly catholic conversation about the Catholic future. It is a tragedy that they were excluded, and one has to wonder if that was by design.
Overmanaged
Before the Synod on Synodality fades further in the rear-view mirror, it’s important to confront another myth about the “synodal process”: namely, that it was uniquely open, transparent, dialogical, and unprecedented in scope.
More nonsense.
The consultations leading up to the Synods at the parish, diocesan, national, and continental levels never engaged more than, at most, 1 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, many of whom were more interested in getting on with their lives as missionary disciples than in sitting through small-group discussions dominated by the agenda-driven.
The actual Synods of 2023 and 2024 were highly structured: “painfully” so, as one bishop put it. The overhyped “Conversation in the Spirit” model of small-group discussion—an artifact of 1970s Canadian Jesuit spirituality and ecclesiology that allegedly promotes communal “discernment”—was deeply unpopular at Synod-2023. In the wake of what was, for many, an experience of frustration and occasional manipulation, a considerable number of the members of the Synod General Council—elected at the end of Synod-2023—strongly recommended a different method of small-group discussion at Synod-2024. That recommendation was ignored by the Synod leadership. So was the recommendation of a shorter synodal work week. It was as if the Synod managers were determined to wear down the participants, to bend them more easily to the managers’ will.
As for the participants, those elected by national bishops’ conferences did in fact constitute a broad, fair representation of the world Church. Appointed Synod members, by contrast, were, with a few exceptions, drawn from the Catholic left, thus skewing the Synod’s demographics in a particular ideological direction. This was especially the case with the lay members appointed to the Synod, but it was also true of appointed bishops, some of whom are never elected to anything by their episcopal conferences but who nonetheless could be counted on to support the Synod managers’ plans. (This prejudice in favor of progressivist views was even more blatant in the composition of many of the study groups on controverted issue, especially the group analyzing issues in moral theology.)
“Transparency” was a buzzword often used by the Synod managers and those they brought into Synod-2024. Would that the managers had taken to heart their own preaching on this score. Synod participants were forbidden to comment publicly on the discussions in their small groups; nor were the Synod participants allowed to share publicly their interventions in the Synod’s general assemblies. “News” was filtered through carefully controlled press conferences that fostered narcolepsy rather than insight. When a draft Final Document was completed, electronic copies of it were forbidden, and the Synod participants were sternly warned not to make copies of any printed versions of the draft.
The result was that Synod-2024, like its predecessor in 2023, was woefully lacking in a true exchange of views. Different views were, of course, expressed. But those differences were never really engaged, because neither the small-group process nor the general assembly process permitted challenge, rebuttal, questioning, or any other form of serious exchange. If true tolerance is the engagement of differences within a bond of civility and respect, then Synod-2024 was gravely lacking in tolerance, the hype and spin from the Synod’s leaders and managers notwithstanding.
Underwhelming
America’s Gerard O’Connell, a reliable barometer of the thinking within the present papal administration and its allies, wrote last Wednesday that the “strong message” he was hearing from Synod participants was that “There is no going back!” O’Connell must have been talking with a rather narrow band of participants. Other participants, more attuned to the classic Catholic method of theological and doctrinal development, know that the Church is always “going back”: back to the life and teaching of her Lord; back to the Eucharist; back to Holy Scripture and the great Fathers; back to the medieval theological and spiritual masters; back to the saints of every time and place; and yes, back to the Second Vatican Council. Historian Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous definition—“Tradition is the living faith of the dead”—remains perennially true. Those who forget it and who imagine that they can reinvent the Church anew according to the spirit of the age have been causing trouble for two millennia. The Church is called by her Lord to convert the spirit of the age, not surrender to it, especially when the spirit of the age is death-dealing rather than life-affirming and life-giving.
At the very beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis warned the Church against the evangelically numbing dangers of ecclesiastical self-referentiality: A Church bogged down in navel-gazing could not be the Church of which the pope said he dreamed, a Church “permanently in mission.” The tragedy of this “Synod on Synodality” is that it devolved into precisely what Francis had cautioned against: an exercise in self-referentiality in which the Synod managers, whether by design, ineptitude, or some combination of the two, created a “process” in which the Church spent three years, hundreds of thousands of man-hours, and tens of millions of dollars talking about itself, even as the world the Church is called to convert and serve was experiencing crisis after crisis.
Will this Synod on Synodality have legs—will it have an enduring impact on the world Church? The Final Document, while rather bland and replete with synodal jargon, is an improvement on last year’s final report and this year’s Instrumentum Laboris, being more scriptural and Christocentric (although the use of Scripture in at least one case verges on the bizarre—did the apostles really fail to catch any “fruit” in John 21?). Its fifty-two pages—Does no one in the Synod office know how to edit?—also suggest that there are urgent questions going forward that the Final Document itself does not address, even though it raises them tacitly: Is divine revelation real and binding over time, or can its tenets be modified, even reversed, because of historical and cultural circumstances? Is the Catholic Church moving toward a de facto unisex view of the human condition, in which the fact that “male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27) has no bearing on spiritual insights, pastoral gifts, perspectives on the gospel, or roles in the Church? Is Holy Orders to be reduced to the conferral of sacramental powers, period: “priestcraft,” to use an odious term popular in the 1970s?
It is unclear whether the study groups to which the pope assigned the hot-button issues he excised from the Synod agenda will address these deeper questions; in any event, they won’t report until June 2025. The pope “received and approved” the Final Document, but as that text is not an act of the magisterium—the Church’s teaching authority—his signature on it has no normative value and could just as reasonably be considered as his agreement that, yes, this is what was discussed and voted on. There will be, Francis said, no concluding Apostolic Exhortation—a document with true magisterial heft—so the status of the Synod on Synodality’s Final Document will (and should) remain contested.
As for “no going back,” it would be safe to bet that at least a healthy minority, and perhaps even a majority, of Synod-2024 participants fervently hope that they will never again go back to a process like that which they have endured for last month and last October.
But that, happily, is not the last word on the Synod on Synodality.
Providentially Heartening
For this synodal process between 2021 and 2024 has some real accomplishments to its credit.
It has allowed firm new friendships to form on a global basis among leaders of the living parts of the world Church, both clergy and lay.
It has decisively clarified the fact that, despite the thirty-five years of brilliant magisterium created by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, there remain significant voices within the Church promoting the theological, moral, and pastoral agenda of Catholic Lite. In the debate over the Catholic future, all the cards are now out on the table—and it is clear which hands are playing which cards. That the dying parts of the world Church are those who remain committed to the Catholic Lite agenda and its absorption of the spirit of the age has been made unmistakably clear. And while some may find it strange, even bizarre, that this process has been led by men and women from rather moribund parts of the world Church, others, arguably more prescient, have found this usefully clarifying, too.
That the Catholic Lite agenda at Synod-2024—the affirmation of the teaching authority of national bishops’ conferences, the endorsement of a female diaconate understood as part of Holy Orders, the LGBTQ+ program, proportionalist moral theology that dumbs down the moral life—did not gain anything resembling consensus, even in a Synod as carefully arranged and managed as this one, can only be, as one bishop said, the work of the Holy Spirit.
Synod-2024 may also be regarded by Church historians of the future as the moment when African Catholicism came into its own on the global Catholic stage. Those paying the slightest attention to the world Catholic scene knew about the exponential growth of the Church in sub-Saharan Africa in recent decades. Despite that, there seemed a certain reticence among African Catholic leaders, at Synod-2023, to assert themselves with the authority that was rightly theirs by reasons of their representing living local churches that are “permanently in mission.” No more. Africa’s voice was heard at Synod-2024, clearly and with conviction, and that will continue into the future, including at the next papal conclave.
For that we can thank the Holy Spirit. But due credit should also be given to Fiducia Supplicans, the December 2023 declaration from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which permitted some kinds of “blessings” for those in same-sex relationships.
Its authors almost certainly didn’t intend it as such, but Fiducia Supplicans was a major inflection point in the “synodal process” that began in 2021. The possibility of such “blessings” was discussed at Synod-2023; no consensus on either the theological possibility or pastoral efficacy of such “blessings” was achieved; much opposition was expressed; and Synod-2023’s final report did not endorse the practice. Yet less than two months after the Synod concluded (and a week before Christmas!), a declaration endorsing such “blessings” was approved by the curial office charged with the defense and promotion of Catholic orthodoxy—and endorsed by the pope. Church leaders throughout the world were stunned—especially, but not only, in Africa. Where was “synodality” in this? Where was the collegiality of bishops? Where were “transparency,” “openness,” “accountability,” and the rest of the synodal vocabulary?
A bond of trust, which had begun to fray when Pope Francis’s 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia went beyond the consensus at Synod-2015 on the reception of Holy Communion by Catholics in canonically irregular marriages, was broken. The wound of that break was deepened when the defenders of Fiducia Supplicans went full Hillary Clinton and painted the declaration’s critics as so many retrograde deplorables. More than one churchman said to himself, “Enough of this autocracy is enough.” And in part because of that, there was far more pushback to the progressive agenda at Synod-2024.
The robust affirmation of dynamic orthodoxy, in the face of intense cultural and intra-ecclesiastical pressures, is heartening. And it is a true sign of hope for the future, as, once again, the Holy Spirit seems to be writing straight with crooked lines.
The Baldacchino and the Future
Synod-2024 concluded with Mass in the Papal Basilica of St. Peter’s, where the restoration of the great Bernini baldacchino over the high altar has been completed, thanks to the generosity of the Knights of Columbus and the genius of Italian art restorationists. The stunning canopy over the papal high altar and the bones of the Prince of the Apostles gleams now as it has not for two centuries. There is a metaphor here, I suggest, for this Catholic moment.
The Church, like the baldacchino, gets tarnished over time. It was tarnished by the heresy of Arius in the fourth century. It was tarnished when the Ottonian emperors controlled the papacy in the late first millennium. It was tarnished when late medieval corruptions, the Great Schism, and failed reform efforts by lazy or timid churchmen eventually led to Western Christendom splintering in the sixteenth century. In each of those cases, however, those with conviction and courage undertook to cleanse the Church and restore its luster: St. Athanasius and those who defeated Arius at the First Council of Nicaea; Pope St. Gregory VII and those who defended the libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the Church, in the eleventh century; the great Catholic reformers inspired by the Council of Trent. Throughout history, cleansing has come, however painful and at whatever cost.
The Church is now being tarnished by those who, however well-intentioned, have succumbed to the temptation to deconstruct Catholic doctrine and pastoral practice as an accommodation to the spirit of this age: a temptation that is, at bottom, the temptation to deny the truth and binding authority of divine revelation and what it teaches us about the human person. That temptation was resisted these past three years by men and women of courage and conviction who understood, more clearly than the Synod leadership and managers, that what was being contested in this “synodal process” was what divine revelation had taught the Church about human origins, human nature, human community, and humanity’s destiny of beatitude.
The temptation to deny those abiding truths remains. But those who had succumbed to that temptation did not carry the day at Synod-2024. And they are not carrying the day in the living parts of the world Church.
And for that, as for the restoration of Bernini’s baldacchino, exultemus et laetemur in ea: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary
October 27, 2024
I’m back home from Rome and am trying to offer some final words on the Synod. I have to say from the outset that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find things to say about the Synod that have not already been said by many others from all sides of the theological spectrum. And the risk is very real that one begins to sound like a broken record that is stuck in a single groove on the vinyl, endlessly repeating the same deprecatory remarks, much to everyone’s annoyance.
But that is itself grist for the mill since it raises the question of just what in the heck this Synod actually was. Was it something novel and unparalleled in the recent history of the Church, breaking new ground and boldly going where no Synod has ever gone before? Or was it just more of the same post-Vatican II wrangling we’ve seen for the past sixty years over who controls the ecclesiastical narrative? Or perhaps in the end it was neither of these things, but just the babbling incoherence of a “dialogue” without any teleological orientations: the ecclesial equivalent of a rage room with padded walls.
Personally, I think that, for the most part, the answer is behind Door Number Two. As I followed the synodal deliberations, I could not help but be struck by the Groundhog Day quality of what I was observing. Or, to date myself even further, it was a David Byrne, “Same as it ever was” moment, with a spinning of ecclesiastical wheels in the mud of interminable debates that have been ongoing since the end of Vatican II.
There it all was, just as it has been for six decades: debates over sexual morality, women’s ordination, democratization of the Church, and the role of the laity in Church governance. Underneath it all is a set of largely unexamined issues, far deeper in theological content, that never seem to get addressed, even though the debates on topical points cannot be resolved until these deeper issues are brought into the light of day. And therefore, from where I sit, my chief complaint about the Synod is that it represents a missed opportunity to bring into the open the often-incommensurate theological starting points that animate the various factions.
For example, left unresolved is the single most ambiguous, and therefore contentious, issue of the modern Church: What, exactly, is a “development of doctrine” and what are the criteria for determining a true development from a false one? As far back as John Henry Newman (and probably before), on through the “Modernist” crisis, the Syllabus of Errors, Pascendi, the Nouvelle Théologie and Humani Generis, and then on through Vatican II, Humanae Vitae and its aftermath, this same question of the development of doctrine is left dangling like a hanging chad, without resolution. The proper relation between the immanent and the transcendent, the relation between nature and grace, the relation between objective truth and subjective appropriation, the grand debates between de Lubac and Garrigou-Lagrange, are all matters left unresolved.
And lurking underneath the question of development is the even more foundational issue of the proper relationship between the Church and the world and how to adjudicate between a true prompting of the Holy Spirit via a prophetic response to the “signs of the times,” and a false spirit of cultural accommodationism masquerading as true prophesy. Traditionally, it is the role of the magisterium to make those judgments. However, that well is poisoned from the start, since one of the putative “developments” on the table is precisely whether the magisterium is itself as definitive and authoritative and binding as the conservative wing of the Church claims. In other words, does the development of doctrine always involve controlling the ecclesial narrative from above, hierarchically, or is it to be more determined “from below” in an almost Hegelian fashion, as the Holy Spirit bubbling up from within the immanent processes of history, with all the subjectivist implications that implies?
Just as Nicaea I and the Christological controversies of that time required centuries to resolve, so too here. We are in a centuries-long process of debate over the issue of development, and the Synod skirted all of that in favor of the trite, sound-bite theology of the internet age.
But these are no idle questions. And as anyone involved in the theological guild can tell you, they’re questions that still burn with the same fires that have been smoldering for centuries now. Notre Dame theologian John Betz, in a magnificent article (“The Analogy of Tradition: Toward a More Radical Ressourcement”) in Word on Fire’s journal The New Ressourcement, is deeply critical—and rightly so—of both traditionalists and progressives in their attempts to answer the question of the proper concept of the development of doctrine. But he views the progressive approach as the deeper danger. Leaning on the analysis of Cyril O’Regan, Betz states:
But it is precisely at this point, having identified the danger of traditionalism, that we need to be especially wary of the opposing danger of progressivism, lest a genuine progress of the living tradition become a progressivist hijacking of the tradition or what Cyril O’Regan has termed a metaleptic transformation of the tradition. The dangers here are indeed great, to the point of potentially subverting the whole tradition in the name of “perfecting” it (whether as regards its doctrines or morals).
“Metalepsis” is a fancy term used by academics to describe the process of taking older terms and narratives and placing them in a new context. We see this all the time in Scripture, where the re-narration of events, taken up into a new moment and a deeper narrative within the economy of salvation, is a commonplace. Indeed, the New Testament makes no sense outside of this typological relecture of the Old Testament in the light of Christ.
But there is also a form of metalepsis that is the deformation of the older narrative, hollowing out its inner meaning and replacing it with a novel meaning that has no bearing on the original narrative. In this form of metalepsis, there is nothing latent in the older narrative that is now being “teased out” and organically developed in the light of new insights, but rather a bit of linguistic legerdemain intended to subvert the old from within.
This is the ecclesial issue of our time. Whose relecture of the tradition is correct, has been the debate in the Church since the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. And just as we saw during the lead-up to the Council and during its deliberations, there was a powerful “raising of expectations” for this Synod: The progressive re-narration was finally going to win the day. And, just as after the Council, the failure of the Synod to explicitly adopt the progressive relecture has caused “disappointment,” but with yet another call to keep the revolution going—“No turning back!”—in “the spirit of synodality.”
Therefore, in the end, the Synod was a failure and a yawn-fest. It provoked and then retreated. And, depending on your own theological leanings, it was either a monumental disappointment, or a gigantic distraction and a waste of time. I think it was the latter.
Larry Chapp is a retired professor theology at De Sales University and co-founder of the Dorthy Day Catholic Worker Far in Pennsylvania.
As we close the 2024 edition of LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD, some words of gratitude are in order.
Best thanks to Veronica Clarke and Rusty Reno of First Things, and Christina Guzman, Adam Wesselinoff, and Stephen Lacey of Sydney’s Catholic Weekly, for getting what was written here to those for whom it was written—and to those who spread the word from there.
Larry Chapp has been an exemplary colleague and a great addition to LETTERS’ stable of writers; many thanks to him and to Fr. Robert Imbelli, Archbishop Alexander Sample, Carrie Gress, and Stephen White for their contributions—and, of course, St. John Paul II and St. John Henry Newman.
Helen Schlueter of the Ethics and Public Policy Center provided logistical support for the project.
As in every Synod since 2015, the members of the Junior Ganymede Club (Roman Chapter) were a steady source of fraternity, good cheer, and insight.
Many thanks, too, to the elected and appointed participants in Synod-2024 for the information and counsel they readily provided.
We close with the episcopal motto of Blessed Stefan Wyszyński, Poland’s “Primate of the Millennium”: Soli Deo Gloria. XR II
