The hungry world: Barbara Ward Swiss Catholicism : J iohn Emanuel B ishop Clarl v’s address to the Anglican Synod Augustus John’s 1 Hg] ht and shade: Neville Braybrooke Coleridge’s bondage: , John Coulson
The significance o f the Synod There have now been four synods of the universal Church. The synod is no longer “on trial” or “experimental.” It has become a permanent part of the Church’s life, representing a collegial element which counter-balances, in theory at least, the weight of the Roman Curia. It is a forum in which the bishops of the world can share experiences and express their “solicitude for all the churches” ; and these experiences can usefully be shared with the rest of the Church. So far so good. Yet there is a danger of the synod becoming too much of a formal and routine exercise, a gesture towards the idea of collegiality rather than an instance of it.
As an institution the synod is neither very confident nor very free. No self-confident assembly would decide to meet every three instead ol every two years. As for freedom although it has been endlessly repeated that the synod is neither a parliament nor a mini-council, nevertheless if it is held on too tight a rein it will never grow up to be a healthy and vigorous body. Its freedom was severely restricted. The synod was not allowed to choose its own theme: a majority of episcopal conferences wanted to discuss the Family, and very few of them even mentioned Evangelisation, no doubt finding it altogether too vague. Nor was the synod allowed to elect its own drafting committee, and this was partly the reason why the prepared texts were thrown out on 22 October.
This was true, for example, of what was for many the central discovery of the synod: the vitality and zest which characterise the Church in Africa, despite its poverty. Once we were treated as sons, said Bishop Sangu of Tanzania; now we wish to be treated as brothers. He insisted (against the position taken up by the French missionary magazine Spiritus) that expatriates were still much needed, but they must remember their place and be clearly at the service of the local church. The Church must be implanted, not transplanted. Archbishop Zoa of Yaounde, Cameroons, became the unofficial leader of the African group, gaining 127 votes in the election of the synod consilium. He was one of the most articulate and determined advocates of “Africanisation” which he presented as a life-or-death matter for the Church in Africa. “Africanisation,” he believes, extends not only into the field of liturgy, where it is already well-advanced, but into sacramental discipline and theology itself. African theologians have to do for their continent what the Fathers of the Church did for the first Christian centuries as they expressed the .Christian message in Greek and Roman categories. The same holds good, of course, for other continents with their specific problems and characteristics, like Latin America or Asia—as a letter from Bangla Desh in this issue shows.
It is not that the synod was under-organised: on the contrary, it was too well-organised and would have run on, welloiled and predictable, to the end but for the unexpected mishap of the rejected texts. There the synod displayed a touch of freedom. But finally, and most seriously, if the function of the synod is to “advise” the Pope, it is not a little disturbing to find that, already by the final morning of the synod, the Pope appears to have digested the advice overnight and, for the most part, to have rejected it.
Now none of this was significantly reflected in the final 12-point declaration of the synod. Indeed it was for all practical purposes flatly rejected in Pope Paul’s final discourse when he said that “ it is dangerous to speak of diversified theologies according to continents and cultures.” This left some loyal but rather puzzled Africans who had taken heart in their difficult enterprises from the Pope’s own statement at Kampala in 1969: “You can, and must, have an African Christianity.” They had also been encouraged by talk of “pluriformity” and by the varied approaches manifested in
