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FEATURES / Transformation and renewal The Church at a turning point After three years of listening and discernment, the Synod on Synodality has ended with a Final Document and the promise of processes and structures that will transform how the Church listens, discerns and decides / By AUSTEN IVEREIGH PHOTO: ALAMY, MARIA GRAZIA PICCIARELLA Pope Francis presides over a Mass on Sunday to mark the end of the Synod on Synodality AS WE NEARED the halfway mark of the assembly, at the start of Module Three, the sheer intensity of the first 10 days began to take its toll. Exhilaration was turning to exhaustion, and the exchange of gifts in this most global of gatherings also included viruses: people had begun getting colds, even Covid. There were some gaps at the 36 round tables – at which groups of 10, split by language, spread across the Paul VI audience hall – when Cardinal-elect Timothy Radcliffe OP stood to frame the discussion. We had been through the conversion of relationships; now we were on to processes, of discernment and decisionmaking. Radcliffe dwelt on Jesus’ interaction in Matthew 15 with the Canaanite woman, who had challenged Jesus by saying that “even the dogs eat the crumbs from the master’s table”. The incident comes between two great feedings of thousands, he pointed out, yet Jesus tells the woman there is only enough bread for the children of the household. It is “a moment of profound transition”, in which Jesus’ silence creates space for a poor woman to be heard, and for the Father to open the minds and hearts of the disciples to fresh possibilities. “Our task in the Synod,” Radcliffe went on, “is to live with difficult questions,” just as past synods had, back in the days of Jerusalem, Nicea and Chalcedon. How can Gentiles be admitted to the Church? How can God be truly human, three yet one? Today we face other deep questions: how can men and women be equal yet different – be equal, yet with different roles and hierarchy? These were the questions behind the overarching question that we were gathered to answer in this concluding assembly in Rome: how can we become a synodal Church in mission? Speaking next, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the synod’s relator or chair, said this was a moment for the synod to get concrete, to “act on what we speak of ”. Just when things were getting crucial you could feel the fatigue, the sense of disorientation. Many of those on the tables, members and facilitators, had grown deeply in communion; they were at one with each other; there was trust among them. But there was a lack of focus, a taking refuge in abstraction. IN SPARE MOMENTS that week – there weren’t many – I found myself thinking of an even deeper question, one that has never been explicit in this process: why, precisely, do we need to become synodal, to change in this way? That Friday, 11 October, I wandered over to a talk at the “synodality tent” organised by the Latin Americans, where Cardinal Michael Czerny (who heads the integral human development dicastery in Rome) and Sr Gloria Liliana Echeverri (who leads Latin America’s umbrella body of Religious) explained how the Amazon had flowed into the Tiber. The precursor of this Synod on Synodality was the Amazonia synod of October 2019, the first to operate according to Francis’ new synod regulations the year before. It had begun with what was then an unprecedented consultation of around 90,000 people in the region, and involved a large number of non-bishops, including women, whose testimony was invaluable. The synodal renewal of the Church was key to the salvation of the region: to the defence of integral ecology and the flourishing of its people, indigenous and otherwise. Its main fruits? Five years on, the Church in the region has a unique new structure – the world’s first “ecclesial conference”, covering a vast territory which includes nine nations and bishops’ conferences – with a fully synodal modus operandi, geared to mission. Its governing body has a mix of bishops, clergy, Religious and lay people, and discernment and listening are built into decision-making. There is a regional university in the offing, and an Amazon-specific liturgical rite. New forms of ministry, especially of women – who play a key role in running church communities there – are being tried and discerned along the new ministerial paths opened up by Pope Francis in his exhortation Querida Amazonia. There is a new commitment to the area: resources are being mobilised, and there is fresh hope and missionary energy, despite the appalling droughts and worsening eco- 4 | THE TABLET | 2 NOVEMBER 2024 For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk
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logical crisis. Five years on, you can see the renewal in Sr Liliana’s eyes and voice when she describes this new way of relating, of acting together. What, you ask, has Amazonia got to do with the vast, poor dioceses of Africa, the teeming urbes of Asia – in the Philippines, Cardinalelect Pablo Virgilio David told reporters, one diocese has gone from 1.4 to 4 million people in four years — or the ageing, empty churches of Europe? Everything, it turns out. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, told me that in Austria there are now more priests per person than in the 1950s, because of the demographic collapse (people aren’t having children, yet are hostile to migrants). For him, synodality is about facing the fact that Europe is in huge demographic decline and the Church is growing fast in the south – to the point where, by 2050, 75 per cent of the world’s Christians will be there. And there are already large parts of Europe, especially in rural areas, where church communities might see a priest only rarely, even if he doesn’t arrive on a canoe. each other, and to the Spirit that speaks in the sensus fidelium. Then we need to grasp that, as the synod secretary general Cardinal Mario Grech put it, the Church is not the product of our actions and reforms – it is not a corporation – but “a living organism that lives by grace”. In the pre-assembly retreat Radcliffe told us there were “urgent questions which will not let us go on living in the same way”, but these had to be more than just questions about whether something should be allowed or refused for that, he said, would be to stay the same sort of Church. Some have framed this gathering as a synod to address the question of whether to accept women as deacons. The Final Document’s paragraph 60, which deals with the question of woman deacons, was the only one that attracted a high “No” vote – 97, just under a third – probably because it declared that the question remained open. It is ironic how some of those who in the John Paul II years lamented his remote authoritarianism now want Francis to act as a Bourbon monarch, imposing enlightened reforms on a backward society. It’s a variegated picture, but one truth emerges: as Madre Maria Ignazia, the synod’s spiritual mother, put it, this assembly is “embedded in an epochal turning point in history and in the Church, the contours of which we confusingly sense but do not see clearly”. There’s new wine here: a call to a deeper way of relating to each other, and to Christ, in ways that release the baptismal gifts and agency of ordinary people. And there’s a search for new – or at least, dustedoff – wineskins to contain all this complex multipolarity: processes and structures that allow us to assemble in order “to dialogue, discern and decide”, as the Final Document puts it. And while this can seem self-referential, because the horizon of our discernment is the Church itself, its purpose is mission. But nor was it true that the assembly was a passive body, meekly directed from high. There was a huge variety of views and perspectives in the hall but it was beautiful to There’s a call to a deeper way of relating to each other, and to Christ, releasing the gifts of ordinary people see, this year especially, how they were fruitfully contained by bonds of trust and communion. James Martin SJ, the New York-based writer known for his outreach to LBGTQ people, was struck by how those who had been aggressive towards him last year told him this year how he had made them think. Conversations about LGBTQ Catholics were IN A SECULARISED SOCIETY, the Church really only has three possibilities: to close off in resignation and resentment, seeking refuge in citadels of the pure (the traditionalist temptation); to accept the role that liberal secularity casts for the Church, as a provider of charitable services and harmless community activities; or it can move into a new missionary mode, evolving to share responsibilities and ministries, and discerning, allowing ourselves to be summoned by the Lord “out of the small places in which we have taken refuge and in which we have imprisoned others”, as Radcliffe put it so well. The Final Document captures this conversion beautifully when it describes synodality as “a path of spiritual renewal and structural reform that enables the Church to be more participatory and missionary, so that it can walk with every man and woman, radiating the light of Christ” (28). “much friendlier, much more relaxed and much more open this year”, he says. He himself dropped the use of the term, which was not used in the final report last year, but was happy that the Final Document spoke of reaching out to people who felt “the pain of feeling excluded and judged because of their marital situation, identity or sexuality”. My own favourite line in the Final Document is a rather complex one in paragraph 17, on how synodal processes offer us a taste of what it means to be the People of God. The People of God, it says, “is never the simple sum of the baptised but the communitarian and historical subject of synodality and mission, still on pilgrimage through time, and already in communion with the Church in heaven”. Synodality forms the People into what Ignatian spirituality calls the subiecto, or subject, that is, a body sufficiently mature and spiritually developed to be capable of discernment. It’s a journey: last year, the assembly showed many signs of not being a subiecto: many people came wanting to get things, to persuade, to complain – or to fight their corner. How do we convert? By entering into “patient, imaginative, intelligent, openhearted listening” – Radcliffe’s words – to But this year, it felt they had become a body made up of many parts yet capable of acting as a subiecto. You saw it around the table, in the relaxed laughter. And you saw it on the afternoon the assembly felt disrespected. This was the only real crisis of the month, and it centred on the handling of women’s ministries. Right at the start of the assembly, there were presentations from the 10 study groups that had been set up to noodle over topics arising from the synod that were too big or divisive for the assembly to tackle this month. The issues were: Eastern-Latin Catholic relations; the cry of the poor; mission in the digital environment; seminary reform; questions relating to ministries, especially of women; relations between bishops and religious orders and movements; criteria for selecting bishops; the role of nuncios; methods for discerning controversial doctrinal and ethical issues; certain ecumenical questions. The study groups were asked to work in a synodal (collaborative, transparent, multidisciplinary) way, and to report to the Pope next summer with proposals that could help shape the implementation phase of the synod. THE PRESENTATIONS on 2 October were brief, and rushed, and the Assembly members wanted time to hear from them in more detail and to dialogue with them. There was a particular strength of feeling around Group Five, looking at women’s ministries, which did not disclose its membership or plans and was perceived to be operating in secrecy. The synod secretariat arranged meetings for 18 October, which mostly went down very well. But when Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández failed to show for the Group Five meeting, sending two junior staffers instead, there was real indignation, freely expressed, which ended up in the media. But Fernández responded, offering to meet us on 24 October, for what turned out to be a freewheeling 90-minute dialogue. There he gave a detailed account of why the DDF was handling this – because the Pope had asked him to, before the study groups were created – and the remit he had been given: to look at the question of ministries and what in governance is proper to the sacra potestas of ordination. He gave a detailed account of who was involved (a large number of members and consultors), how they operated, and the way they collected evidence and testimony. As a priest and bishop he has long been aware of the feelings of women: that they are sidelined and not listened to, or not taken seriously because they are not part of the clergy. In his experience, most such women were not asking to be ordained; indeed, the clerical status would be an encumbrance. Instead what they sought was the ability to carry out their work and mission, and to have the authority and resources to do so. He saw it as vital to investigate the lived experience and praxis of women already exercising authority and ministries, “because there are many things we find not in European books but in experience”. The locus theologicus, in other words, was the reality of women already exercising jurisdictions and ministries; this showed what the Spirit was already doing in the Church that CONTINUED ON PAG E 6 For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk 2 NOVEMBER 2024 | THE TABLET | 5

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FEATURES / Transformation and renewal

The Church at a turning point

After three years of listening and discernment, the Synod on Synodality has ended with a Final Document and the promise of processes and structures that will transform how the Church listens, discerns and decides / By AUSTEN IVEREIGH

PHOTO: ALAMY, MARIA GRAZIA PICCIARELLA

Pope Francis presides over a Mass on Sunday to mark the end of the Synod on Synodality

AS WE NEARED the halfway mark of the assembly, at the start of Module Three, the sheer intensity of the first 10 days began to take its toll. Exhilaration was turning to exhaustion, and the exchange of gifts in this most global of gatherings also included viruses: people had begun getting colds, even Covid. There were some gaps at the 36 round tables – at which groups of 10, split by language, spread across the Paul VI audience hall – when Cardinal-elect Timothy Radcliffe OP stood to frame the discussion. We had been through the conversion of relationships; now we were on to processes, of discernment and decisionmaking.

Radcliffe dwelt on Jesus’ interaction in Matthew 15 with the Canaanite woman, who had challenged Jesus by saying that “even the dogs eat the crumbs from the master’s table”. The incident comes between two great feedings of thousands, he pointed out, yet Jesus tells the woman there is only enough bread for the children of the household. It is “a moment of profound transition”, in which Jesus’ silence creates space for a poor woman to be heard, and for the Father to open the minds and hearts of the disciples to fresh possibilities. “Our task in the Synod,” Radcliffe went on, “is to live with difficult questions,” just as past synods had, back in the days of Jerusalem, Nicea and Chalcedon. How can Gentiles be admitted to the Church? How can God be truly human, three yet one? Today we face other deep questions: how can men and women be equal yet different – be equal, yet with different roles and hierarchy?

These were the questions behind the overarching question that we were gathered to answer in this concluding assembly in Rome: how can we become a synodal Church in mission? Speaking next, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the synod’s relator or chair, said this was a moment for the synod to get concrete, to “act on what we speak of ”. Just when things were getting crucial you could feel the fatigue, the sense of disorientation. Many of those on the tables, members and facilitators, had grown deeply in communion; they were at one with each other; there was trust among them. But there was a lack of focus, a taking refuge in abstraction.

IN SPARE MOMENTS that week – there weren’t many – I found myself thinking of an even deeper question, one that has never been explicit in this process: why, precisely, do we need to become synodal, to change in this way? That Friday, 11 October, I wandered over to a talk at the “synodality tent” organised by the Latin Americans, where Cardinal Michael Czerny (who heads the integral human development dicastery in Rome) and Sr Gloria Liliana Echeverri (who leads Latin America’s umbrella body of Religious) explained how the Amazon had flowed into the Tiber. The precursor of this Synod on Synodality was the Amazonia synod of October 2019, the first to operate according to Francis’ new synod regulations the year before. It had begun with what was then an unprecedented consultation of around 90,000 people in the region, and involved a large number of non-bishops, including women, whose testimony was invaluable. The synodal renewal of the Church was key to the salvation of the region: to the defence of integral ecology and the flourishing of its people, indigenous and otherwise.

Its main fruits? Five years on, the Church in the region has a unique new structure – the world’s first “ecclesial conference”, covering a vast territory which includes nine nations and bishops’ conferences – with a fully synodal modus operandi, geared to mission. Its governing body has a mix of bishops, clergy, Religious and lay people, and discernment and listening are built into decision-making.

There is a regional university in the offing, and an Amazon-specific liturgical rite. New forms of ministry, especially of women – who play a key role in running church communities there – are being tried and discerned along the new ministerial paths opened up by Pope Francis in his exhortation Querida Amazonia. There is a new commitment to the area: resources are being mobilised, and there is fresh hope and missionary energy, despite the appalling droughts and worsening eco-

4 | THE TABLET | 2 NOVEMBER 2024

For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk

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