One of the outcomes of the synod will be the formalisation of decentralisation within the Church, Professor Eamon Conway of the University of Notre Dame Australia told a conference on synodality in Dublin last weekend.
“Things have changed,” Professor Conway underlined, and he said this was evident from the gradual transformation of the process of the general assembly.
A priest of the Archdiocese of Tuam, he added. “We're not waiting for a synod – we are in the middle of a synod; we are waiting for the first of two assemblies within the synod.”
Other speakers at the conference which was hosted by the All Hallows Trust in Dublin included Professor Vimal Tirimanna of the national seminary in Sri Lanka, Dr Gemma Simmonds of the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge, Professor Maria Cimperman of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and Dr Eugene Duffy formerly of Mary Immaculate College Limerick.
The Tablet’s Rome Correspondent, Christopher Lamb, another speaker, described the synodal journey as “the most crucial event in the life of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council”.
He suggested that synodal renewal would be one of Pope Francis’ most significant and lasting legacies.
“Over the last ten years, Francis has brought about incremental changes which, cumulatively, amount to a quiet revolution in the way the Church operates.” Synods, he explained, are no longer just meetings in Rome involving bishops, but are seeking to include everyone. “No topic is off the table for discussion.”
Lamb, author of The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Church, emphasised that the synod is not simply a project of this pontificate. “It’s not a process that can be stopped. The process so far has shown that the Church needs to be synodal if it wants to speak to people today, and credibly witness to the Gospel.”
Under Pope Francis, the synod of bishops has also become a space for free and open discussion, something that was not always the case in the decades after it was established by Pope Paul VI in 1965.
But he also questioned how synodality, if it is taking place at every level in the church, might affect a papal conclave.
Canon lawyer, Professor Myriam Wijlens of Erfurt in Germany, said the Church was at a decisive moment in the synodal journey. “With this whole synodal process we have already embarked on a new chapter in the reception of Vatican II.”
She said those who gathered in Frascati to synthesise the summaries sent to the Vatican noted, “a surprising and remarkable convergence on the topics that need to be addressed” considering the “very different circumstances” of those who contributed from around the world. The Frascati group saw this convergence as a sign of the working of the Holy spirit.
“It does not mean that the reports didn’t express tensions - they did. But the tensions relate to the same topics around the world,” she said.
However, she warned that without a change of mentality, even if laws change, nothing will happen. On the issue of pastoral councils, she said there were no statutes to say that 50 per cent of the members should not be women.
In a question-and-answer session, Professor Wijlens highlighted that one of the questions in the synod document is why the remarried and divorced is such an issue around world still if the Church had held a synod on marriage and the family as recently as 2015. “What is the effectiveness of a synod if it is not followed up on?” she asked.
On the issue of abuse, she said countries like Ireland, “in which you have been bruised and wounded so deeply” were asking for change in the way the Church operates and the demand for transparency and accountability had come very strongly to the fore.
The Dutch academic acknowledged that there was great concern about how to get young people involved in the synodal journey and that the digital synod was part of this response. “This is one of the challenges the Church is meeting, and it is one of the themes. I think we have to ask the youth themselves because we cannot answer for them.”
While some people had been sceptical about the Synod on Synodality, slowly more and more people are getting interested, she said.
“The uniqueness of this journey is that everybody can join at any time, it’s not true that the train has departed and I’ve missed it – you can join at any time as it is an ongoing journey.”
Professor Massino Faggioli of Villanova University in the US commended Pope Francis for doing something “very delicate and very complex” through synodality, supplementing something that was really not there in the Second Vatican Council.
“He has been very clear on breaking a taboo on what is the function of the rules and the law in the Church.”
According to the professor of historical theology, “We are now in a different age of synods and synodality. If Vatican II gave us or was understood as having accomplished an ecclesiological reform, this was actually unfinished business.” He said the Church today needed to implement collegiality with synodality and collegiality is necessary for synodality.
According to Professor Faggioli, this pontificate is clearer on what Vatican II has not delivered, and what needs to be done for Vatican II to deliver. “The status quo is not sustainable.”
Pope Francis, he explained, had seen as a bishop, the crisis of the bishops’ synod that was created by Paul VI in 1965, and which “had very little to do with synodality”. Though it had the same name, it was “something else”.
“This is a pope who has really faced and is facing the issues of our time, in our disrupting of the international and national order, on nationalism, on race, on views on gender. He is a pope who has given us a lot to think about on the relationship between the Church and modernity, especially on democracy.”
He said there was a need for a new inculturation and a new kind of dialogue with global modernity and post modernity.
“We are going to find out what it means to be faithful to the Vatican Council today. We are in this transition rebalancing the uncertain deconstructionist project on one side, and the methods of imposing disciplines of John Paul II and the Benedict era. We are trying to make a synthesis of this.”
One of the biggest challenges would be how to manage expectations of real change. “But real change begins with a spiritual and cultural crisis, before it is translated into new laws, new solutions, new policies – that must happen,” he said.
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