Three years of discussions without end, crowned by a document that is not final. This is the synod desired and molded by Pope Francis with the apparent purpose of refounding the Church as a Church of the people, of all the baptized.
What the upshot will be is hard to predict. Francis expunged from this last synod all the questions on which there were strong divisions, delegating them to ten commissions that will continue to discuss them until next spring. After which he will be the one to decide what to do.
But what is certain is that in the meantime he has radically modified the form of the synods.
Born with Paul VI after Vatican Council II with the aim of implementing a more collegial leadership of the Church, with the bishops periodically called for consultation by the successor of Peter, the synods were, all the way through the pontificate of Benedict XVI, moments revealing the views of the Church hierarchy on the questions put to consideration each time.
As at a council, the discussions almost always took place in plenary assembly, where everyone could speak to everyone and listen to everyone. The synod was held behind closed doors, but every day “L’Osservatore Romano” published summaries of all the presentations with the names of the respective speakers, and briefings were held in various languages for accredited journalists, at which selected representatives provided further information on the discussion that had taken place during the preceding hours. Each bishop was free to make public the full text of his presentation in the assembly, and to report as he wished on the presentations he had heard.
Of course, the synods were purely consultative and the only one to draw normative conclusions was the pope, with the post-synodal exhortation that he published a few months after the end of the work.
But what a bishop said in the assembly could still have a notable resonance in public opinion, inside and outside the Church. Quite strong, for example, was the echo of the presentation that Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini — Jesuit, renowned biblicist, and archbishop of Milan — gave in the assembly on October 7, 1999, at a synod concerning the Church in Europe.
The cardinal said he had had a dream: “a universal forum for the bishops that would serve to untangle some of those disciplinary and doctrinal snarls that periodically reappear as hotspots on the path of the Churches of Europe, and not of Europe alone. I am thinking in general of an exploration and development of the ecclesiology of communion of Vatican II. I am thinking of the shortage, already dramatic in some places, of ordained ministers, and the growing difficulty for a bishop to provide for the care of souls in his territory with a sufficient number of ministers of the Gospel and of the Eucharist. I am thinking of some issues concerning the position of woman in society and in the Church, the participation of the laity in some ministerial responsibilities, sexuality, the discipline of marriage, penitential practice, relations with the sister Churches of Orthodoxy and more in general the need to revive ecumenical hope; I am thinking of the relationship between democracy and values and between civil laws and moral law.”
To address these issues, Cardinal Martini continued, “perhaps not even a synod would be sufficient. Some of these snarls probably require a more universal and authoritative collegial instrument, where they can be addressed with freedom, in the full exercise of episcopal collegiality, listening to the Spirit and looking to the common good of the Church and of all humanity.”
There were some who read these words as an expression of hope for a new council. In any case, that presentation by Cardinal Martini was spot on, identifying the issues on which the Church would be divided in the following decades and today more than ever, not only in Germany, where the local “synodal path” has pushed the conflict to the verge of rupture, but within the universal Church itself, in the latest as in the previous synods convened by Pope Francis.
In the first synod he convened in two sessions, in 2014 and 2015, on the theme of the family, Francis had a clear objective, the liberalization of Eucharistic communion for the divorced and remarried. To this end he set up a preliminary consistory of all the cardinals, in February 2014, but immediately encountered such strong and authoritative opposition that he was induced to curb the transparency of the discussion in the synod.
And in fact he imposed secrecy on the presentations in the assembly, of which only a generic list of the topics touched upon was made public, without giving the names of the respective speakers.
News of the liveliness of the clash for or against communion for the divorced and remarried leaked out anyway. And this induced the pope to resolve the issue, in the post-synodal exhortation “Amoris laetitia,” in an ambiguous way, with a couple of footnotes that some episcopates interpreted as authorization to give communion while others remained against it, only to then say, in a handwritten letter to the Argentine episcopate subsequently elevated to the rank of magisterium, that the correct interpretation was the former.
At the following synod on the Amazon held in 2019, the most debated issue was access to the priesthood for married men, which Francis had repeatedly signaled he wanted to experiment with, but which in the end he rejected, to the great disappointment of the bishops who supported it.
And then it was the turn of the synod on synodality, this latter a theme that Francis succeeded in putting ahead of the questions that at first had taken center stage in the wake of the “synodal path” in Germany: from homosexuality to female priesthood, from the end of clerical celibacy to the democratization of Church governance.
With the pope having removed these issues from the agenda and entrusted them to commissions he created “ad hoc” and with an uncertain future, for the synod there was nothing left but to discuss how to make the Church a synodal Church.
And how to discuss this? No longer in plenary assemblies, nor even in linguistic circles, but at dozens of tables of a dozen people each, in an audience hall set up as if for a grand gala dinner (see photo). Always with the constraint of secrecy on what everyone said or heard at his respective table.
It is hard to imagine a more fragmented and muzzled synod than this, the exact opposite of the much vaunted new synodality.
But there is more. Because between one synodal session and another, and precisely on a question removed from the discussion of those summoned, it was the pope who decided on his lonesome, with an edict issued by his “alter ego” set at the head of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, the Argentine cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández.
With the declaration “Fiducia supplicans” Francis authorized the blessing of homosexual unions. With the result of raising a massive wave of protests and rejections, especially among the bishops of the only continent on which the Catholic Church is growing, Africa.
Another solitary intrusion of the pope on a disputed issue occurred on the ordination of women to the diaconate. In an interview with an American television network, Francis made it clear that with him as pope such ordinations will not take place.
Here too raising widespread protests that also found expression in the synod of last October, to the point of bringing the pope back onto the field through the trusty Fernández, with the temporary suspension of all the rules of secrecy that gagged the synod.
Fernández spoke on October 21, on one of the rare days on which the synod met in plenary assembly. He justified for reasons of health his absence and that of the secretary of the doctrinal section of his dicastery from a previous synod meeting on the same topic, and reiterated that for the pope “the time is not ripe for the question of the female diaconate,” while much more important for him is the general question of the role of women in the Church.
The full text of Fernández’s remarks was made public, the only such instance in a month of discussions under secrecy, and an appointment was made for a further meeting at the synod on the same topic, which in fact took place on the afternoon of October 24, for an hour and a half, with about a hundred attendees present to speak with the cardinal.
Here too with a breach of the rule of secrecy, because the entire audio recording of the meeting was released, with the questions addressed to the cardinal, all more or less polemical, and his answers here and there embarrassing.
In short, in a month of synod this was the only moment that was noised abroad to any effect, and all because of a solitary, anti-synodal position taken by the pope, accompanied by the temporary breaking — concerning only this presentation — of every bond of secrecy imposed by him on the assembly.
An anomaly that was also reflected in the final document, where the only paragraph that registered a significant number of votes against (97 nos against 258 yeses) was the one in which it was written that on the question of women deacons “discernment must continue.”
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
————
Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
