The Sat Report: The Synodal Synod on Synodality
Our Preview of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality
On Wednesday, October 2nd, the second and concluding Synodal Session of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on theme of Synodality: For a synodal Church: communion, participation and mission, will open in Rome and will run until October 27. This has been described by some as the most important event in Church since Vatican II, by the same people who view Vatican II as the most important event in the history of the Church since the Resurrection. I detest hyperbole, so reject both characterizations, but what I do believe this is the most important event of the Pontificate of Francis, and the success or failure of it, both in terms of it achieving its own goals, as well as having an effect on the Church’s ability to carry out the mission it was entrusted by its founder and God, to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”, will ultimately determine the legacy of Pope Francis.
“We must continue along this path. The world in which we live, and which we are called to love and serve, even with its contradictions, demands that the Church strengthen cooperation in all areas of her mission. It is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the third millennium.” - Pope Francis in his address at the ceremony commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the institution of the Synod of Bishops by Paul VI.
The Itinerary of the Synod
Before the Synod proper kicks off, it will be preceded by two days of spiritual retreat on September 30 and October 1 in the Vatican, guided by meditations from Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe and Benedictine Mother Ignazia Angelini. They will also lead prayers during the general congregations of the Synod, when participants are sat in small groups at round tables in the Paul VI Audience Hall.
At the conclusion of this retreat, a Penitential vigil led by Pope Francis, will be held on the evening of Tuesday, October 1, in St. Peter’s Basilica. This will be the first broadcast event of the Synod. The liturgy will feature testimonies from three people who have been directly affected by the sins of abuse, war, and illegal migration. I think we should all admire the bravery of the abuse survivor and keep him or her in our prayers in the days leading up to event.
More controversially is the collective confession of a specific list sins in the “name of all the baptised”, which are as follows; sins against peace, creation, indigenous peoples, migrants, sins of abuse, sins against women, family, youth, the sin of using doctrine as a stone against others, sins against poverty and sins against synodality. The Holy Father will then conclude by asking forgiveness from God and all humanity on behalf of all the faithful. It is good the Church publicly asks for forgiveness for sexual abuse and coverup. It would have been better if this were done in a standalone liturgy.
It is not clear what some of these sins “all the baptized” are supposed to be confessing. For instance, what are sins against synodality, especially since the Vatican has thus far refused to give a specific definition of what Synodality is. Which doctrines have been used as stones against others; transubstantiation against protestants? The Resurrection against Muslims? I don’t understand why the Synod organizers felt the need to passive aggressively list sins that they see in the critics of the Synodal process. It is completely unnecessary and does not help in building trust amongst those who are already skeptical.
The Synod proper opens on October 2, the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels, with Pope Francis assisting in cope at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in St. Peter’s Square. The first general congregation with speeches by His Holiness Pope Francis, and their Eminences Cardinals Grech and Hollerich S.J., will be broadcast live at 4pm Rome time. After these speeches, the broadcast cameras in the Synod Hall will be turned off for the other interventions. This will be the case for the entire Synod. The daily morning prayer will be broadcast live, in addition to daily, except for Sundays, Holy See Press Conferences with panels consisting of Synod participants will take place from Thursday October 3, onwards, which will also be broadcast live.
Unlike the Synods during the Pontificates or every other Pope of post-Conciliar era, Pope Francis has decided to have all interventions behind closed doors and in secret, with delegates themselves prohibited from publishing their own interventions, let alone the interventions of others. This secrecy, the Pope contends, allows the Holy Spirit to work with delegates being freer to speak openly. Cynics say it clouds the entire process in darkness, with zero accountability.
Synod business will be briefly interrupted by an ecumenical service on October 11 in Protomartyrs Square, on the southside of St. Peter’s Basilica, in site in Nero’s circus where St. Peter was martyred, to mark the 62nd anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The Ecumenical Prayer Vigil was probably moved to the much smaller square within the walls of St. Peter to avoid the embarrassment that happened at the Ecumenical Prayer Vigil at the last Synod, with very few faithful in attendance in St. Peter’s Square.
On Sunday, October 20, in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis will canonize the Blessed Martyrs of Damascus; Manuel Ruiz Lopez and companions of the Order of Friars Minor, and the lay Maronite faithful Francis, Abdel Mohti and Raphael Massabki, three brothers, who were all killed by Muslim rioters during the 1860 Christian-Druze War, for refusing to convert to Islam. Also canonized is Blessed Giuseppe Allamano, IMC, an Italian priest who founded the established the Consolata Missionaries and the Consolata Missionary Sisters. Blessed Marie-Léonie Paradis, PSSF, a Canadian nun who founded the Little Sisters of the Holy Family, and finally Blessed Elena Guerra, OSS, an Italian nun who founded the Oblates of the Holy Spirit, will also be raised to Altars and their names inscribed among the saints.
Finally, on the last Monday of the Synod, October 21, there will be a day of spiritual retreat and discernment ahead of the drafting of the final document, which will then be voted on Saturday, October 26, and published the same day, and if the previous Synods are anything to go by, probably very late in the evening. Pope Francis will officially close the Synod on Sunday, October 27, assisting in cope the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
What is Synodality, and why now?
As the Holy Father so clearly laid out in his address to the bishops, priests and religious of Belgium this morning; “The changes of our time and the crisis of faith that we are experiencing in the West have pushed us to return to the essential, that is, to the Gospel, so that everyone may be once again proclaimed the good news that Jesus brought into the world, making all its beauty shine. The crisis – every crisis – is a time that is offered to us to shake ourselves, to question ourselves and to change. It is a precious opportunity – in biblical language it is called kairòs, special opportunity – as happened to Abraham, Moses and the prophets. When we experience desolation, in fact, we must always ask ourselves what message the Lord wants to communicate to us. And what does the crisis make us see? We have gone from a Christianity placed in a hospitable social framework to a “minority” Christianity, or rather, a Christianity of testimony. And this requires the courage of an ecclesial conversion, to initiate those pastoral transformations that also concern the customs, models, and languages of faith, so that they are truly at the service of evangelization.”
The Synod is a response to the crisis of faith experienced in the West. This crisis is only getting a deeper and this needs a change of mentality. This is what I think the Holy Father means by an “ecclesial conversion”, this is no longer the Church of the early 1960’s confident, sure of itself, an unchanging bulwark in an ever-changing world. This constancy, centered on Christ - the same yesterday, today and tomorrow - was the great strength of the Church, and what kept it relevant through each passing age. The Church has tried the spirit of Vatican II, which has done almost nothing to stem the ever-deepening crisis of faith. Many say that the Council has yet to be implemented, or that it takes 100 years for a Council to really be understood, both phrases that where stables of Pope Francis rhetoric in the first half of his Pontificate, but which have subsequently disappeared. Socialism has failed everywhere because it has not been done correctly yet.
It is not just in the West where there is a crisis in faith. The Church in Latin America, due in part to the influence of Marxist Liberation Theology, has been losing faithful to protestant sects, namely those exposing a heretical prosperity gospel. In Africa too, where the Church is still growing, and is healthier than on other continents, the growth rate is slower than the overall birth rate. This I think is part of the reasoning for the urgency and haste of this current Synodal Process.
Half-way through this Pontificate, synodality suddenly became a buzzword with the Pope linking it to the model that the Eastern Orthodox church employs that the Church in the West has lost with time. There was a good reason, over time, Synods went out of favor in the West. I’m reminded of a press conference during the Synod of the Youth in 2018, when Antonio Spadaro, S.J., said that Pope Francis wants a return to the Synodal Church of the first centuries, to a journalist quipped back "may I remind you that the Diocesan Synods of Rome of the Patristic age were chaos, they would literally kill each other.”
Without explicitly saying so, the implication of Pope Francis logic is that synodality may be the way to heal the 970-year-old East-West Schism. There have been other subtle signs of this being the aim of the Pope, including reintroducing the title of ‘Patriarch of the West’, into the Annuario Pontificio, after Pope Benedict XVI dropped the title in 2006. The rationale given by Benedict at the time was that the Roman Pontiff does not only represent the West, but also the Eastern Church in communion with the Holy See. When Pope Francis quietly reintroduced the title, it was seen by some to re-establish the traditional pentarchy of antiquity, the Patriarchal See of the Roman Empire: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, with Rome being Primus inter pares, the first among equals.
This leads to the why now. My overriding criticism of the synodal process have been two-fold, i) it being a top-down measure imposed by the hierarchy on a laity, who did not ask for it, quintessentially clericalism in action, and ii) that it was rushed.
This process is ambitious, akin to the census of Quirinius, where Rome wanted to hear, and more importantly, listen to all the faithful. This listening process was initiated in 2020 in the middle of global pandemic, where Churches had been closed, with listening sessions being held on Zoom. Yes, this was idiotic. Turnout was poor, and turnout has been poor, and it never really took off, with numbers well below the 5% that Pope Francis said would be disastrous. Those who have been most engaged have well been organized progressive lobby groups, the same that have always tried to push their agenda in every Synod in this Pontificate, only for every time for the Pope crush their dreams. Women deacons, married priests, changing of the words ‘intrinsically disordered’, etc.
On the rush. The Church’s primary objective is the salvation of souls, and this task is always urgent, yet it has become ever more urgent due to the steep decline in religious practice in the West, and the worrying trends alluded to earlier elsewhere. So, time is of the essence. I also think that the Vatican itself was a little hamstrung by what the Germans were doing with their own Synodale Weg, and despite numerous interventions from Vatican officials and from the Pope directly, the Germans displayed an unwillingness thus far of altering the direction of travel. This coupled by a rigid unwillingness of the Germans to slow the speed at which they were approaching the abyss has forced the Vatican’s hand.
The Vatican and this Pontificate has bent over backwards to accommodate the Germans. The whole point of the Synod of the Family was to try to establish a mechanism in which divorced and ‘remarried’ Catholics could have access to the sacraments despite, from an objective point of view, appearing to be engaging in mortal sin. Nobody was asking for this, one at all, except the progressive German prelates and their neighbors in Belgium. Amoris laetitia was a concession. However, this was never going to be enough as subsequent events have proved.
I want Synodality to succeed in the bringing more souls to Christ through His Church. This is the stated aim of the Pope who this morning in Belgium in the same address that I referenced earlier said; “the synodal process must involve returning to the Gospel. It is not about prioritizing “fashionable” reforms, but asking, how can we bring the Gospel to a society that is no longer listening or has distanced itself from the faith?”
The General Sense of Apathy
Every single Synod during this Pontificate has been exaggerated out of all proportion, mostly by the liberal progressive wing of the Church, with their organized lobbies proposing all manner of nonsense, which in turn elicited a strong reactions and distrust of the Synodal process from more traditionally minded faithful. This happens every time, but unlike the last Synod the enthusiasm from progressives has died down, because of the Pope’s steadfast and pointed rejection of women deacons, and controversial topics being relegated to commissions, that are expected to give an update on their work to the general assembly of the Synod, aren’t expect to submit their conclusions to the Pope until, with these expected to remain private. The issue of homosexuality, which dominated the last Synod, had been headed off by the Vatican and Pope Francis by the publication last December of Fiducia supplicans, and will form no part in the deliberations of this Synod.
The organizers of this Synod, and the Pope himself have been at pains to reiterate that “the main protagonist of the Synod is the Holy Spirit.” This has not really cut through to the ordinary faithful in pew, who struggle to see the Holy Spirit in inward looking focus group style roundtables. The failure to convince the faithful that it is really the Holy Spirit who is driving the Synod and the Synodal process, is a big reason for the generalized apathy that has grown around the Synod, especially amongst the faithful who are not terminally online.
The other thing to note is that Synod has no authority, it is merely a consultative body to aid the Pope. The Pope has all the authority in Church. The Pope knows the outcome that he wants from the Synod, as has been the case of every single synod of his Pontificate. It is just that very few people know what this is. I don’t know either, my guess, my hunch is the envisioning a radical reinterpretation of Papal Primacy that doesn’t break with tradition, but would be acceptable to Orthodox, that is acceptable to the Miaphysites, and that is acceptable to the Lutherans, and to do so in time for the great 1700th anniversary of the council of Nicaea in 2025.
What to expect
The major themes from the Instrumentum Laboris, the Synod’s working document can be broadly outlined as relationships with God, among brothers and sisters, and among the Churches; formative paths and community discernment, and places of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, with an emphasis on women and accountability. As Bishop Barron pointed out in an opinion piece on the eve of the Synod; “I frequently pointed out at the last synodal gathering that, at least in the American setting, women already play a very prominent role in ecclesial life.” It is not just in America; women dominate Parish life the world over. The Church has been hemorrhaging men in the pews since the council, and there seems extraordinarily little attempt in this document to make any attempt to try reach out to them.
If Synodality is to be the major reform of this Pontificate, the creation of a Church as a constant permanent Synod, it can thus far be best described as chaotic, with abysmal participation rates among the people of God, highjacked by wealthy well-organized lobbies. Pope Francis to his credit has tried his hardest to push back against these progressive lobbies, for the good of Church unity, as was displayed in the Vatican’s response to the African criticisms of Fiducia supplicans.
At the moment the very nature of what a Synodal Church will look like is in flux, and the next month will help define it more concretely. Pray for the Holy Father, that this Synod bears fruit, and achieves the aims he has set out, namely “how can we bring the Gospel to a society that is no longer listening or has distanced itself from the faith?” For our part, on Twitter we will have daily updates and videos from the Vatican Press Conferences for the duration of the Synod. On Substack and Patreon, paid subscribers will get a daily brief with my opinions on the way things are going at the Synod. The weekly Sat Reports for October will be free, with news and updates from the Synod. Thank you for ploughing through this rather long read. Have a blessed week.