Is “Shared Responsibility” the Answer? It Depends.
by George Weigel
Parish priests were in very short supply at Synod-2023; if memory serves, there was one present. Questions were raised about this, some of them acerbic; the Synod General Secretariat was evidently irked; and so an “International Meeting of Parish Priests for the Synod” was hastily summoned and met in Rome last spring.
One of those attending later described the meeting in these pungent terms: “excessively wordy, procedurally disorganized, inordinately focused on the interventions of experts and not those of pastors, rife with inappropriate agendas, and unclear about how its conversations would be synthesized.” In short, the International Meeting of Priests was a microcosm of the entire synodal “process” as led, managed, massaged, and manipulated by the Synod General Secretariat. But the meeting was not without value, according to that priest-reporter: “in the context of a warm spirit of priestly fraternity, many pastors who were inexperienced in synodality and co-responsibility for the Church’s mission embraced the concepts and practices.”
This observation underscored the diversity of pastoral situations in a Church of almost 1.4 billion members that includes—if I may cite four situations with which I’m personally familiar—parishes in war zones (Ukraine), massive parishes with thousands of members (the urban and suburban parts of the United States), rural parish centers with numerous missions in agricultural hinterlands (Togo), and dying parishes with 2 percent Sunday Mass attendance (Germany). In such a Church, the notion that there is a one-size-fits-all model for the embodiment of “synodality” is fatuous. The vast disparities in financial resources, technology, and trained personnel throughout the world Church also caution against cookie-cutter approaches to implementing shared responsibility in local churches.
That shared responsibility is imperative within the Church is not a deduction from management theory but an implication of the sacrament of Baptism, which does not call the faithful into discussion groups but into mission. As John Paul II taught in his epic 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), every Christian is baptized into a missionary vocation. At his or her baptism, every one of those 1.4 billion Catholics was given the Great Commission (“Go . . . and make disciples of all nations” [Matt. 28:19]). Every Catholic is thus called to measure his or her discipleship by an evangelical criterion: “How, in the particular circumstances of my life, am I bringing others to, or back to, the Lord Jesus?” That is a universal aspect of the Christian life. Still, shared responsibility will be lived in quite different ways in different parts of the world Church.
According to an unstated premise running through the entire “synodal process,” from 2021 through this October, there is insufficient shared responsibility in the Catholic Church today—which is doubtless true in some parts of the world Church, and for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. Nonetheless, ample structures for the exercise of shared responsibility exist in some local Churches: among them, the Church in the United States. A priest attending the International Meeting of Priests for the Synod prepared a memorandum on the “best practices” of “synodality” in his diocese, most of which, he noted, had been in place for some time and were not a response to the “Synod on Synodality.” That memo, which was distributed to interested brother-priests, cited the following:
SYNODAL PRACTICES AT THE DIOCESAN LEVEL
Strategic Planning - From 2021–2023 the bishop and his staff consulted widely with the clergy and with lay faithful of different demographics to develop a Strategic Plan based on a consensus regarding pastoral priorities.
Diocesan Finance Council - As required by Canon Law (Can. 492), the bishop and his staff regularly consult this council, and have established three subsidiary bodies (Audit & Budget Committee, Savings & Loan Corporation Committee, and Investment Committee) of expert lay faithful with whom to consult further.
Diocesan Pastoral Council - Although not strictly mandated by Canon Law (Can. 511), the bishop has established this council, which advises him on the pastoral works of the diocese.
College of Consultors - Required by Canon Law (Can. 502), the bishop meets regularly with this college.
Presbyteral Council - Mandated by Canon Law (Can. 495), the bishop meets regularly to seek the counsel of this body.
Building Commission - The bishop has established this group of clergy and lay experts to advise him on major construction projects.
Catholic Charities Board - The bishop leads this board which advises him on the charitable works of the diocese.
Annual Meetings with Priests - The bishop gathers with his priests in Advent and in Lent for Days of Prayer, during an annual week-long Convocation in the spring, at a Fall Meeting of Priests, and on other occasions, both formal and informal, at which he receives the counsel of his clergy (see Can. 384).
Bishop’s Advisory Council on Racism - The bishop meets yearly with this group comprised of black clergy and lay men and women from across the Diocese who advise him on issues related to race.
Bishop’s Annual Listening Session with Victims of Sexual Abuse - The bishop meets yearly with victims of sexual abuse to hear their testimony and to offer his and diocesan support.
Bishop’s Listening Sessions in the Wake of the Clergy Abuse Scandals - In 2019, the bishop met several times with the lay faithful to understand the pain caused by the scandals and to assure them of the diocese’s conscientious response.
SYNODAL PRACTICES AT THE VICARIATE LEVEL
Regular Meetings of Vicars Forane with Priests of the Deanery - The vicars forane, according to law (Can. 555), meet with the priests of their vicariate to seek their counsel and to ensure their well-being.
Annual Visits by Vicars Forane to Parishes- As established by universal (Can. 555) and particular law, the vicars forane make annual visitations to the parishes in their vicariates during which they consult with the clergy and lay staff of those parishes.
SYNODAL PRACTICES AT THE PARISH LEVEL
Finance Councils - As required by Canon Law (Can. 537), pastors regularly consult these parochial councils composed of expert lay faithful.
Pastoral Councils - Although not required by universal law (Can. 511), parish pastoral councils are required by particular law and meet regularly in each parish, with the lay faithful members advising pastors on the pastoral works of the parish.
Staff Meetings - Most parishes have regular staff meetings at which pastors consult their lay staff regarding the pastoral and administrative works of the parish.
To which might be added, in most American dioceses, diocesan school boards and school boards in parishes that sponsor a Catholic school. Then there is the shared responsibility for various dimensions of the Church’s life displayed in sodality chapters, Knights of Columbus councils, sports leagues, marriage preparation programs, campus ministries, and the programs by which adult converts are led through the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults.
In sum: There is a great deal of shared responsibility and “listening”—that Synod buzzword—already underway in the Church, which might have been acknowledged in Synod-2024’s Instrumentum Laboris. Alas, the Working Document drafters seemed not to notice, wallowing as they were in caricatures about a “static” and “pyramidal” Church that once suffered—and in some cases still suffers—from an “abstract,” “homogenizing,” “hegemonic,” and “reductionist” universalism leading to “fatal immobilism,” “pastoral redundancy,” and irrelevance to the young.
According to the priest-author of that memo on synodal best practices, more than a few of his fellow-priests were surprised at the extent to which these structures of co-responsibility existed in an American diocese—which is, I might add, one of the most flourishing in the United States. How such mechanisms of co-responsibility might be modified or adapted to meet the pastoral needs of different social and cultural circumstances throughout the diverse world Church might have been a useful exercise for a Synod. It isn’t happening here in Rome this October, however, and it didn’t happen in Rome last October, either. An opportunity for a genuine “exchange of gifts” within the one body of the Church was thus missed and continues to be missed.
Another point should be stressed in reflecting on this one diocesan template for synodal co-responsibility in the Church: It isn’t self-implementing in advancing the Church’s evangelical mission to spread the gospel and heal a broken world. Structures can help facilitate that mission, but structures by themselves cannot energize or animate that mission. The Catholic Church in Germany has structures upon structures on top of structures. According to one estimate, more people work in the structures of German Catholicism that attend Mass in Germany on some Sundays (which, if true, tells you something about the sacramental fidelity of many of those Church employees). So what is the difference between this American diocese and the Church in Germany? Let me count the ways.
The American diocese in question has been self-consciously faithful to the teaching of the Church since the Second Vatican Council, including the period of disciplinary meltdown that followed the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae; Germany has been one of the centers—perhaps the epicenter—of Catholic dissent.
The American diocese has been led by a series of able, orthodox bishops committed to growing the Church during a period in which the German hierarchy, with notable and noble exceptions, has seemed resigned to leading a process of managed decline.
The American diocese and its parishes actively encourage priestly vocations and vocations to the consecrated life, which is rarely the case in the German Church.
The American diocese includes several fine institutions of high learning that are academically rigorous while being self-consciously and proudly Catholic, which is hardly the case in the German academy.
The American diocese has encouraged and supported innovative and independent lay initiatives to implement the New Evangelization; in Germany the vast, clotted Church bureaucracy tends to fill up an enormous amount of the available Catholic “space” in the country.
The American diocese has experienced its share of the sins and crimes of clerical sexual abuse, but it has not weaponized those scandals in the pursuit of a progressive Catholic agenda; rather, it has dealt with this scandal through outreach to victims, appropriate structures (including a review board of lay leaders to assess claims of abuse), and episcopal support of seminary reform. Weaponization of clerical sexual abuse to advance various progressive agendas has long been a rationale for the German “Synodal Path.”
And at the bottom of the bottom line: The American diocese, while facing stiff cultural headwinds, has nonetheless held firm to the faith and to the idea of the Church as a culture-reforming counterculture, while the German Church has, in many cases, abjectly surrendered to the Zeitgeist, taking its cues from wokery and political correctness.
Structures of shared responsibility in the Church can facilitate Catholicism being a Church of “communion, participation, and mission,” as Synod-2024 bids us be. Those structures cannot do that, and will not do that, in the Church of Maybe: the Church of Catholic Lite.
George Weigel, the biographer of Pope St. John Paul II, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary
October 16, 2024
As I was standing in line on Tuesday to get into St. Peter’s Basilica, I looked at one of the fountains in the square and noticed a seagull land on the top level of the fountain. He stayed there without moving for as long as I was in line, leisurely standing in the spray coming off the fountain. It was a strangely comforting sight since it was hot outside, and I was envious of the opportunity to just bask in the fountain’s cooling mist.
It struck me that seagulls have probably been doing this for centuries and will be doing so for centuries to come, long after all of us are gone. And I thought of how happily oblivious the seagulls must be to all the court intrigue and acrimonious in-fighting that had gone over time in the surrounding buildings.
And I was envious of that as well, since I’ve spent the past two weeks in Rome focusing on synodal controversies: which, in many ways, is an exercise in anxiety-inducing cogitation on penultimate realities. I was going into St. Peter’s to pray at the tomb of Pope St. John Paul II for a very dear friend back home, who is seriously ill and had just been admitted to the hospital. At that moment I was overwhelmed with a sense of what is truly important and a deep feeling of gratitude for the joy of being a Catholic.
If the result of the Synod in the years to come is something that increases the possibilities for an ever-larger number of people to feel that same joy at being a Catholic, then I will tip my hat to the “synodal process” and thank the Lord for his providential guidance of his Church. Nevertheless, I cannot help but be sad that all the media focus is on the penultimate issues of the moment, rather than the perennial ultimacy of God’s outpouring of love in Christ. To be sure, the issues of concern are not unimportant, but they will remain in the end unresolvable, and in an interminable way, if the sought-after answers to these questions are not grounded in the ultimacy of Christ as the singular and absolute inbreaking of God into time and space.
Some might say that I am being simplistic and unfair to the ongoing synodal deliberations since the issues in debate are being contested precisely on the grounds that fidelity to Christ requires “reform”—“reform” in the direction of changed teaching in some areas. It is precisely a deeper reflection on the meaning of God’s revelation in Christ, it is claimed, that is compelling us to move in a new direction, no matter how painful it might be to admit that the Church has been wrong for millennia on matters of central concern.
However, when one is speaking of a fundamental alteration to the Church’s Christocentric anthropology on matters relating to gender and sexuality, caution is in order. St. Paul admonished us to “test everything” (1 Thess. 5:21), which immediately follows his warning not to despise those who make prophetic utterances. Here we see that St. Paul is open to the movement of the Holy Spirit among the baptized, even as he cautions us that we need to analyze such promptings in the full light of “what is good.” Likewise, the apostle John warns that we should not trust every so-called movement of the spirit, because many “false prophets” have gone out into the world (1 John 4:1).
In other words, it is the ultimacy of God’s revelation in Christ, as this has been delivered over to the Church for safekeeping, that must be the ultimate barometer for adjudicating between true and false movements of the Holy Spirit. And it is precisely the loss of this central focus on ultimacy that short-circuits the process of discerning the spirits. The penultimate concerns of “the world” have a tendency to crowd out this focus, and to create a thick bramble of sophistries in order to press their case.
In the light of this, one of the most troublesome aspects of this entire synodal process has been the tendency to treat every opinion on contested issues as in some way expressive of the mind of the Holy Spirit. In none of the synodal documents are we given criteria for “testing everything,” beyond boilerplate acknowledgements of the need to stay true to divine revelation. But this is an empty gesture, since it is precisely the meaning of that revelation that is now being contested, as it is filtered through the lens of these various opinions.
The Australian theologian Tracey Rowland, winner of the Ratzinger Prize and no theological lightweight, in a wonderful essay in the substack What We Need Now, has noted that the Church has always judged whether or not one has “the sense of the faith” by how faithful he or she is to the settled teachings of the Church. She goes on to ask just how many voting members of the Synod meet this standard. Was faithfulness to Church teaching a consideration in deciding who to invite in as a Synod participant?
She is not questioning here the sincerity of those concerned. Nor is she questioning whether they are devout Catholics in some sense. But at what point do we acknowledge that not all opinions are equal? Granted, the last word will be with the pope, and the Synod does not bind whatever he might decide in the end. And certainly there is a value in letting disparate voices to be heard. But as Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has recently noted, traditionally a synod of bishops has only bishops as voting members, and that what we have now instead is more like a theological “symposium” than a true synod.
Perhaps that is a debatable point. But one thing is certain, and that is that the impression has been given that matters assumed to be long settled are being relitigated in the light of a dubious understanding of both the teaching of Vatican II on “the People of God” (which was not a nod in the direction of a democratic egalitarianism of all of the baptized), as well as how it is we are to “test everything.”
What is being occluded is that what is most important and ultimate is the only true foundation for how to test the spirits. The penultimate is malleable and changeable. And it too shall pass.
I really envy that seagull.
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology at De Sales University and the co-founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania.
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