When the Catholic Church asked the entire world to contribute its thoughts and experiences for the Synod on Synodality, it was inevitably going to be messy. If you ask 100 people what they love about being Catholic or what they struggle with, you’re likely to get 100 different answers. If you ask one billion people from every corner of the globe, well…
The attempts to synthesize all of the contributions of the people of God up to this point have actually been quite impressive. The reports from all the different continents as well as the synthesis document from the last synod session gave careful attention to a wide variety of topics. (This video explained how this process worked for writing the Oceania continental document well.)
This year, to help focus the conversations in the synod hall, Pope Francis created 10 study groups that would take up topics like, “women in the church, the procedure for choosing bishops, designing seminary programs to help priests learn to collaborate, ministry to LGBTQ Catholics and relations between bishops and members of religious orders.” The idea was not so much to ban these topics from coming up again in the synod hall but to continue moving forward on them while narrowing the focus of this year’s synod discussions to one question: “How to be a synodal church in mission?”
Apart from the “conversations in the spirit” that occur at the round tables among language groups, synod participants are also able to make “free interventions” that address the entire assembly of the synod. These take up a significant amount of time: The Vatican said that there were over 70 interventions just on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.
The Vatican gave an overview of some of the topics that came up in the free interventions: the role of laity, women in the church, listening to parents and families, young people, digital ministry, the poor, the Vatican-China agreement on the appointment of bishops, the burdens facing priests, parish councils and more.
During the Q&A part of the press conference, I raised my hand and asked: It sounds like there is an incredible diversity of topics under discussion. Will the synod’s way of operating allow the delegates to hone in on a few topics enough to say something new and meaningful?
Archbishop Luis Fernando Ramos Pérez of Puerto Montt, Chile, answered my question, saying, “Although efforts have been made to prioritize which topics the assembly considers most relevant and which are somewhat less relevant, and participants have been encouraged to focus their contributions on those topics, this isn’t always achieved.”
He pointed to the “free interventions” as one of the ways synod discussions stray off-topic. Outside of the conversations happening “I think there’s a methodological challenge because many have already prepared something, a text perhaps, and naturally want to share it,” the bishop said. “However, what they have prepared doesn’t always align with the current topic, so there is some dispersion in that regard.”
Nature abhors a vacuum, and without a clear focus for conversation, people will naturally try to fill it with any number of issues. I believe we have run up against the limit of talking about synodality in an abstract way. Tom Reese, S.J., voiced a similar concern ahead of this year’s session, writing: “Talking only about synodality can lead to a level of theological abstraction that goes nowhere. The most effective way to learn synodality is to do it on concrete issues facing the church. Rather than discussing musicology, we need to be an orchestra playing a symphony with actual instruments.”
A synod delegate used a sports analogy to describe the issue in a different way: “It may seem as though instead of playing a game, we are only focusing on training camp. Instead of writing a diary of the mission, it seems that we are writing down a training manual. But we should rediscover the beauty of playing a football match, and not being at training camp perpetually.”
There’s a chance that the Synod on Synodality will end without much in terms of wide-sweeping changes that the “rest” of the church can look to. For concrete change to occur, future synods will need to return to focusing on a particular topic. (Previous synods under Pope Francis focused on the family, the Amazon and young people). But, even if this synod is practice for a future one, as any sports fan knows, no practice can totally prepare you for the speed and intensity of an actual game.
