The cardinal overseeing the worldwide synod says the process is an attempt to end the Church’s “culture of silence” about its problems including the clerical sexual abuse crisis and the “deep divisions” that exist between Catholics.
Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops office in Rome, says the synod is an opportunity to have a “frank and open” discussion on the fundamental questions about the future of Catholicism.
“There are problems, issues, within the Church about which we choose to remain silent rather than speaking,” he said during a Mass to open a three-day meeting of church leaders, “The Road to a Synodal Church”, at the Catholic Chaplaincy of the University of Oxford on 24 March.
“The clearest example which comes to everyone’s mind is the sexual abuse crisis that the Church went through and is still going through. Unfortunately, this is not the only instance of a problem in the Church about which we choose to remain silent. What about the general silence concerning the deep divisions within the Catholic Church?”
The cardinal cited disagreements over the liturgy, the role of women in the Church, political divisions, and why some “want to exclude certain categories from our pews,” a reference to LGBT Catholics. Rather than discuss these issues the Church often prefers to remain silent, which leads to the growth of like-minded “cliques” and culture of “us against them”.
The 65-year-old Maltese prelate, who took part in the synod symposium which was hosted by Campion Hall, a Jesuit permanent private hall of Oxford University, was speaking almost six months since Pope Francis launched an unprecedented listening process across global Catholicism.
Synod processes have, however, sparked fierce disagreements inside the Church with the German synodal path repeatedly in the firing line for criticism from cardinals and bishops.
The German process, attempts to tackle the root causes of the abuse scandals, has worried conservatives for deciding to focus on the use of power in the Church, the question of women’s ministry and Catholic sexual teaching. Meanwhile, the global synod, due to culminate with a meeting in Rome in October 2023, has been met with indifference and resistance in some quarters, including from priests and bishops.
While Cardinal Grech said he understood people’s worries about the synod, he argued that there was also a widespread misunderstanding of Francis’ aims.
“This is not a process of revolution: the Pope does not want to change the Church into something that it is not,” he stressed. “This is not a wiping out of tradition. This is is not a process of democratisation. Rather, the synodal process is a time for speech. A time to let the voice of the Church speak and bring forward the issues, the problems that inhabit our synodal Church.”
During his homily, the cardinal reflected on the Gospel passage where Jesus casts out a demon from a man who was mute and then regains his power of speech. Noting that the demon forces the man to remain silent, the cardinal said that “silence at a time when speech is needed is a sign of evil, a sign of the devil.”
He added that it was “time for local Churches to voice their concerns” and for “liberals and conservatives of the Church to speak, frankly and openly.” But he also pointed out that after speaking about the issues in the Church there needs to be a “time of silence, a time of discernment”.
The following day the cardinal gave a keynote speech to the Oxford gathering laying out the biblical and theological foundations of the synodal process. Speaking afterwards, he emphasised that the synod was about putting the Second Vatican Council into practice by emphasising the Church as the “People of God,” while the Pope’s new constitution on the Roman Curia, which opens the way for laypeople to lead Vatican departments, continues in this vein.
In his speech, the cardinal stressed that Vatican II laid out how divine revelation is “dialogical” – God reveals himself through humanity – which makes “listening” a foundational principle of the Church.
During the first centuries of Christianity, the cardinal said, the Church was sustained by the sensus fidei, the sense of the faith among believers. This concept was “fully recovered” by Vatican II which, in the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium, gave precedence to the notion of the Church as a People of God before that of the Church as a hierarchy.
The constitution also rediscovered the priesthood given to all the baptised and placed it in relationship with the ordained priesthood. In his talk, Grech insisted that ordained ministries must not be set against each other, and the way they interrelate is crucial to the synod listing process.
Ordination, he said, does not rest on the “principle of dignity and power but rather insists on the element of service to the holy People of God,” and if “there was no Holy People of God, there would be no need for sacred ministry: if there was no Church, there wouldn’t be any ministry!”
Although synodal practices have waned during the twentieth century, Cardinal Grech pointed out that Pius IX consulted before he defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (1854), while Pius XII did the same before proclaiming the doctrine of the Assumption (1950). He reminded the audience that John Henry Newman used the example of Pius IX’s consultation when arguing for greater involvement of the laity in the Church’s life.
“Where there is listening, there is the Church, and this can only be synodal,” the cardinal said. “St John Chrysostom [347-407] had already understood this: ‘Synod and Church are synonymous’.”
“The Road to a Synodal Church” bought together those leading diocesan and national synodal processes across the English speaking world, including a large number from dioceses in England and Wales. It was organised by Austen Ivereigh, the papal biographer and journalist who is a fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall.
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