Synod and Synodality at Risk

 The Synod on Synodality, called by Pope Francis in 2021 to explore how the Church will move forward in the 3rd millennium, seeks to explore just what "synodality" should look like, and how it should work when it solicits the thoughts of all the people of God, including the laity, which is unprecedented in the history of the Synod of Bishops since its beginning in the Second Vatican Council. "Synodality" itself is the subject of this "walking/journeying together," as the word "synod" is translated from the Greek (syn, "with" and [h]odos, journey; we can hear this term in the name of the Book of Exodus [ex, out, odos, "journey, going forth"]). The Synod has had a spotty record; perhaps one need look no further that its dismal failure to detect and effectively address the sexual abuse scandal. As things stand now, the Synod has been extended one year (originally envisioned to wrap things up in October 2023), to the end of 2024. The German experience has underscored that even under rigorous preparation, people will be people.

The pope has expressed disappointment and dismay over how synodality has unfolded in Germany. The German "synod," not really a synod at all, began in 2019 to test the limits of the process, perhaps not its stated intent, but certainly its effect. The "Synodal Way" in Germany has already embraced solutions to the most divisive issues facing today's Church, and it is prepared to announce paths to same-sex marriage, special accommodations to LGBTQ, priestly celibacy, among other hot-button issues in its final meeting scheduled for March 2023.

According to the vademecum designed for the global Synod on Synodality, the synodal process is far from a wandering in the desert. The synod is led by none other than the Holy Spirit itself, an infallible guide that cannot lead astray. Each official step on the path is inaugurated by the invocation of the 3rd person of the Trinity: Adsumus Sancte Spiritus, which orders the participants to the lead of the Spirit. The German experience tells us that the human spirit can trump the Holy Spirit. It's difficult to speak of a dark side of the human spirit, as the term always has both positive denotations and connotations. Nonetheless self-interest, not the interests of the universal church, seems to have driven much of what the German bishops have heard and what they are prepared to suggest to Rome. Guided by the human spirit, the bishops have heard the call of those whom the Church seems to have marginalized; they can feel the hunger for belonging, the hunger for communion, the hunger for the Eucharist. It seems the German bishops have conflated the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. The poignancy of such a moment can be quite powerful; yet the authentic synodal way calls first and foremost for discernment, especially discernment of the Spirit. And there's the rub.

The Synod on Synodality is at risk for devolving into precisely what the vademecum warns against: a parliament of aggrieved voices and a cacophony of needs and wants, a coffee-table book on coffee tables. Perhaps it's difficult to take the Holy Spirit seriously, especially at a time when discernment is something seriously catechized people used to do in the past, but is now a step easily missed or otherwise abused.

Perhaps a Synod on Discernment would have been a better place to begin, even better that the more obviously logical focus on synodality itself. What one says, what one hears, how one says, and how one hears presuppose a process of meaningful and effective discernment. Renew the face of the earth? We need to renew our hearts, empty a tad of our human spirit to accommodate the one revealed Spirit. Perhaps then the path on earth will find a clearing where renewal can flourish.

Liturgical Reform?

Is division in the Church over its liturgy a tempest in a teapot, or a real threat to the mystical body of Christ? On the one hand, the whole church is already divided by heresy, schism and myriad denominations, all of which might be, by the way, providential, confounding as they do the tongues of those pointing arrows in all sorts of directions in the name of truth. The church is now used to division, so why all this hubbub about the liturgy? On the other hand, the Catholic Church is known by its unity. Unity is the sine qua non of Catholicism. Is it a matter of kooky kat'liks spreading their wings in their 15 minutes, or is the matter far graver?

Sancrosanctum Concilium (SC), the first constitution (on sacred liturgy) to emerge from Vatican II, sought to put into practice for the whole Catholic Church the reforms initiated here and there over 100 years prior to the start of the Council in 1962. The sole purpose of the renewal of the liturgy was to authenticate the role of the laity in the rites of the sacred liturgies ("Mass" in the western church). "Authentication" of this role refers to the ratification of the priesthood of the baptized, meaningful participation in the celebration of the mass, and the effecting of catechesis that would accomplish these goals. 

The Council fathers desired to promulgate a palpable change in the experience of attending Mass. The shape and sense of the change was called aggiornamento, renewal, updating (not modernization), a sprucing up, a cleaning up of stained-glass windows to let new light shine through. Where is aggiornamento today? I suppose it's a bit old, if not wizened, and if it's anywhere, it's more in the camp of those who champion the old rite of the mass--the Tridentine Mass--where a fraction of the practicing faithful have experienced a new sense of belonging, communion and faith in action, than in the novus ordo camp--the authorized version of the old rite made new--(new order of the Mass). 

So, what's going on here? The Council fathers had no intention of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: they had no concept of the total replacement of the old rite with a new one. Aggiornamento doesn't start from scratch; it works with what's already there to let light shine more brightly on what lay beneath crusted candle soot and rote, tired movements and speech.

I recall that my family attended Mass on every Sunday and holy days of obligation. I received my first Holy Communion under the 1962 missal and Confirmation under the novus ordo. I had a sense of the transition from one to the other. It was an exciting time to be Catholic. We were singing more (even my father would sing, a man whose voice was not known for anything close to a velvet fog) and most amazingly, we were speaking Latin. "Et cum spiritu tuo!" All the kids in the neighborhood (mostly the Catholic kids) were chanting Latin in the streets: et cum spirit, 2-2-0--ohh. Well, we certainly knew what we were saying in church--the large, folding missal cards were printed in red and black, and the English translation was clear. In retrospect, the council fathers had achieved something special and good. Alas, how long could a good thing last?

While the Tridentine liturgy had truly passed into a new reality--true renewal and updating--they are not long the days of wine and bread. Time happened. The music began to change: lyrics and melody/harmony became so pedestrian as to give "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" a new luster. The words of the liturgy itself became vague and prosaic, for example, "Lord I am not worthy that you enter under my roof..." became "Lord I am not worthy to receive you...," erasing any direct reference to the Gospel's healing of the centurion's servant (interestingly, after 30 years, this debacle was corrected in the current missal). Much of this has gotten better and real desecrations have now been expunged from the newer missal, but the effects have been devasting: poor mass attendance (the pandemic notwithstanding), horrible catechesis buttressed by ambiguous liturgical theology (a recent, and now famous Pew study demonstrated that 66% of American Catholics have no sense of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and 33% of regular Sunday worshippers think the consecrated bread and wine--the body of Jesus Christ and his precious blood--are merely symbols of Jesus); old-fashioned traditional Catholics now have the moral, theological, devotional high ground with a Tridentine liturgy they fully understand and find wholesome, devout, transforming, holy, sacred. As such, a sliver of the church seems poised for schism. Pope Francis is at a loss for a pastoral solution (Saint Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict had little luck with their own pastoral approaches).

The best Pope Francis can come up with is placing restrictions on the Celebration of the Tridentine rite. He wants to phase it out--not wipe it off the face of the earth, but put it in its historical context, juxtaposed with the novus ordo, and he wants to clarify the continuity of the one rite with the other, much as we had sensed so many years ago. That seems right to me. The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, reserves the right to celebrate the Mass according to its increasing understanding of its ecclesiology, Christology and various theologies. That the Tridentine Mass is still celebrated is at best peculiar, for there has never been a timeless, unchanging rite of Christian worship. In fact, change and dynamism are more to the point than some idolatry of the etched-in-stone. Sadly, the bishops continue to underestimate the intelligence of the laity (are American Catholics so ineducable that they cannot learn enough Latin to continue a Latin rite, at least in part...in Latin?!?!), and their pathetically paternalistic attitudes combined with theologies of the what's-happening-now, had until recently given the Faithful pablum instead of the very real presence of Christ's body and his most precious blood. We'll just have to wait and see how their attempt at Eucharistic renewal turns out.

As Sebastian Maniscalco has duly noted, "I blame the parents," or in this case, the fathers.