Those alarmed by Pope Francis’s views on synodality should know that his views are not at all new or revolutionary but in fact deeply traditional
October 23, 2015 12:20 EST
Pope Francis participates in prayer at the start of a session of the Synod of Bishops on the family at the Vatican Oct. 23. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
In my 2011 book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy I discussed a topic that usually gets little attention, and then mostly among academics and theologians: the practices of synodality and how a permanent ecumenical synod might look and function.
Pope Francis' recent address, last Saturday, at the Commemorative Ceremony for 50th Anniversary of Synod of Bishops changed that. “It is precisely this path of synodality,” Francis stated, “which God expects of the Church of the third millennium. …
A synodal Church is a Church which listens, which realizes that listening “is more than simply hearing”. It is a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of truth” (Jn 14:17), in order to know what he “says to the Churches” (Rev 2:7). … Synodality, as a constitutive element of the Church, offers us the most appropriate interpretive framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself.
The address has, understandably, raised some eyebrows. What, exactly, is Francis up to? First and foremost, we must root out quickly the mistaken impression that Francis is making stuff up as he goes along, as part of his supposed scheme to revolutionize Catholicism. To those who have—again, understandably—raised the alarm about Francis’s views on synodality, let me assure you that his views are not at all new or revolutionary but in fact deeply traditional. They are grounded in widespread practices of the Church in the West through the first millennium and well into the second. This tradition and its history is well-documented, not least in my book, where I show a great diversity of practices under the umbrella of “synodality.”
Merely because something has a long history, however, is not a good reason to assume that it must be done today—or that doing it today would be a good thing. Both claims fail to acknowledge that today’s context is remarkably different from earlier periods in Church history. What worked for the good in one cultural context may not do so today in a quite different one; what was helpful in the past may be harmful in the present.
As my long-suffering students from this semester’s course “The Papacy and the Vatican” will tell you, I am forever boring them by going on and on about the “law of unintended consequences” when it comes to papal and ecclesial reforms. In treating ecclesial reforms, one must proceed with great caution, a slave neither to the ideas and practices of the past nor to idealistic or utopian fantasies of the future. What is required of us here, now, today?
As Francis' fellow Jesuit, the historian Robert Taft, would surely remind the pope, “history is instructive but not normative.” To put it a little more fulsomely, borrowing the eloquent formula of a third erstwhile Jesuit, Hans Urs von Balthasar, from a 1939 essay “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”:
No time is completely like another, and the Church is always standing before a new situation, and, therefore before a new decision in which she can let herself receive advice and admonition from her past experiences but in which, however, the decision itself must be faced directly: The past can never lighten, let alone dispense from, the decision itself.
If the Church in the West today is on the verge of a “decision” about synodality, what of her past experiences should be kept in mind? What of the “new situation” today that must equally be kept in mind? And, finally, what of the experiences of synodality in the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches today should also be kept in mind? I treat the first of these questions—Western past experience—in my book and will not repeat that here. Instead, let us review some of the Eastern experiences before I consider, in the next installment of this post, the situation in which the Western Church finds herself today. In typical Eastern fashion, I begin apophatically.
The first and most important lesson from Eastern Churches with synodal governance—and that would be all of them, both Catholic and Orthodox—is to be clear on what a synod is not:
• A synod is not a talking shop for ginning up support for schemes to widen “pastoral practice”.
• A synod is not a synonym for “episcopal conference”, perhaps one of the most common but most fatuous of all misunderstandings about synods.
• Synods are not Parisian salons called to bandy about new ideas or breathe fresh air into a supposedly stale faith.
• Synods are not called except when new ideas in fact threaten to undermine the faith. Then and only then, with great reluctance and extraordinary pains not to overreach, does a synod proceed to a definition. As the old rule of thumb (attributed, perhaps, to Cardinal Newman) has it, “nothing is defined until it is denied.”
• A synod is not an exercise in unlimited “democracy” like a political convention with competing factions trying to jerry-rig their beliefs onto a ramshackle party platform to hold everyone together.
• A synod is not an exercise in group therapy in which we can all “listen” to complaints about the flawed annulment process, or about how difficult it is for your wife to practice NFP, or how awful the Crusades were, or how impossible it is to be a theist in a supposedly scientific age.
• A synod is not the ecclesial equivalent of a college seminar where anybody and everybody can throw any and every idea on the table to mull over before committing oneself to accepting or rejecting it.
• Synods are not regular bodies meeting constantly.
• A synod will not lead to the total abolition of a curia or chancery bureaucracy—though it will change the latter’s responsibilities.
• A synod in one diocese or region cannot proceed with such dramatic changes that its neighbors would be unable to recognize the “faith once delivered to the saints.”
• A synod (like a papal conclave) is not normally conducted in the full scrutiny of the tendentious media clamoring for change and breathlessly relaying every tweet, rumor, and off the cuff utterance.
• A synod for the universal church is not possible without synods in the region and diocese.
• A synod is not a substitute for, nor is it even possible to convene, in the absence of strong episcopal, patriarchal, or papal governance.
• A synod is not a synonym for “episcopal conference”, perhaps one of the most common but most fatuous of all misunderstandings about synods.
• Synods are not Parisian salons called to bandy about new ideas or breathe fresh air into a supposedly stale faith.
• Synods are not called except when new ideas in fact threaten to undermine the faith. Then and only then, with great reluctance and extraordinary pains not to overreach, does a synod proceed to a definition. As the old rule of thumb (attributed, perhaps, to Cardinal Newman) has it, “nothing is defined until it is denied.”
• A synod is not an exercise in unlimited “democracy” like a political convention with competing factions trying to jerry-rig their beliefs onto a ramshackle party platform to hold everyone together.
• A synod is not an exercise in group therapy in which we can all “listen” to complaints about the flawed annulment process, or about how difficult it is for your wife to practice NFP, or how awful the Crusades were, or how impossible it is to be a theist in a supposedly scientific age.
• A synod is not the ecclesial equivalent of a college seminar where anybody and everybody can throw any and every idea on the table to mull over before committing oneself to accepting or rejecting it.
• Synods are not regular bodies meeting constantly.
• A synod will not lead to the total abolition of a curia or chancery bureaucracy—though it will change the latter’s responsibilities.
• A synod in one diocese or region cannot proceed with such dramatic changes that its neighbors would be unable to recognize the “faith once delivered to the saints.”
• A synod (like a papal conclave) is not normally conducted in the full scrutiny of the tendentious media clamoring for change and breathlessly relaying every tweet, rumor, and off the cuff utterance.
• A synod for the universal church is not possible without synods in the region and diocese.
• A synod is not a substitute for, nor is it even possible to convene, in the absence of strong episcopal, patriarchal, or papal governance.
This last point is the most important, and I will return to it presently.
What, then, is a synod for? It has two tasks: legislation and election. In a properly functioning church, the synod passes legislation (e.g., the rules surrounding ordination, say, or the creation of a new diocese), and it also elects new bishops and patriarchs. Its brief, in other words, it is limited to these two tasks.
Synods are further limited in their schedules. Historically synods have been episodic or ad hoc—they are not permanent bodies forever in session. Historically, they often met in the spring during Lent, and again in the fall during harvest time.
In between gatherings of a synod, there is almost always another body, much smaller and nimbler, that can be called quickly into session to deal with emergencies. This smaller body, often called a “permanent synod” or “standing synod”, also exists to keep the daily machinery of governance in good order outside emergencies. The Roman Church retains vestiges of this today in the college of cardinals, though that body has long since lost legislative function and its electoral responsibility is limited to one: choosing a new pope.
A synod, in a properly functioning church, is, by design, utterly impossible without a countervailing primate, whether a diocesan bishop or a patriarch. The genius of synodality in its most developed form is that both the synod and the primate need each other, and neither can function in the absence of the other. A synod can pass thousands of pieces of legislation, but the primate alone determines when and how to enforce legislation—or not to enforce if, if he has a veto. A primate can propose, but not pass legislation on his own. A synod can propose and pass legislation, but not enforce it on its own. The synod, then, is legislative and electoral in nature, but the primate holds executive function. Both must be present and working together or the whole business of the church grinds to a halt.
In most of the Eastern Churches, synods are gatherings of bishops alone. But there is no requirement that they exclude parish clergy and lay people, and some Eastern Churches—e.g., the Romanian Orthodox, or the Armenian—include parish clergy and laity at all levels of their synods, from selection of local priests and diocesan bishops all the way to the election of the patriarch or catholicos. Francis himself seems to incline towards the view that synods should not just be limited to bishops:
The first level of the exercise of synodality is had in the particular Churches. After mentioning the noble institution of the Diocesan Synod, in which priests and laity are called to cooperate with the bishop for the good of the whole ecclesial community, the Code of Canon Law devotes ample space to what are usually called “organs of communion” in the local Church: the presbyteral council, the college of consultors, chapters of canons and the pastoral council. Only to the extent that these organizations keep connected to the “base” and start from people and their daily problems, can a synodal Church begin to take shape: these means, even when they prove wearisome, must be valued as an opportunity for listening and sharing.
Beyond the local or diocesan level, the pope continues, we find “the second level is that of Ecclesiastical Provinces and Regions.” Only if both local and regional synods are functioning can a universal synod itself function properly.
How ought all synods at whatever level work? Whom should they include? What is the secret to a successful synod—rather than a failed one, of which history furnishes several examples (perhaps the most notable being Ferrara-Florence of 1438-45)?
For any synodal institution to work well, there is only one very simple rule: everybody must be a saint. Sanctity is far more important for synods than for everybody to rush out to read Roberts Rules of Order or learn Latin to understand canon law. Everybody must be deeply grounded in the orthodox and catholic faith that comes to us from the apostles, and be committed to a serious life of asceticism and self-sacrifice, seeking not one’s own will or good but the will and glory of Christ and the good of His body, the Church.
Do we have such people in the Church today? And if not, what does their absence portend for any possible future practice of synodality? How do Eastern synods work reasonably well in the absence of saints? I will take up these questions in the next part.
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