ROME — Pope Francis has enlisted the help of sympathetic journalists to help him put a positive spin on the upcoming “synod on synodality” after several prominent cardinals have criticized the event.
“I dare to ask you, the experts of journalism, for help,” the pontiff told a meeting of journalists in the Vatican this weekend; “help me to narrate this process for what it really is, leaving behind the logic of slogans and pre-packaged stories.”
Synodality, as numerous pundits have observed, is notoriously difficult to define and critics have suggested that such is the express intention, since a lack of clarity leaves the process open to greater manipulation. A synod is a meeting or assembly and synodality would be a movement toward a system of decision-making where such meetings take on more central importance.
In its spirit of “openness” and “listening,” this fall’s synod on synodality proposes to revisit a series of issues within church teaching that most assumed had already been definitively decided. The idea that nothing is off the table has proved disconcerting for Catholics who look to the Church for truth and stability rather than moral trendiness and cultural accommodation.
American Catholic intellectual George Weigel has suggested that there exists a fundamental dichotomy in understanding within the ecclesiastical community between a “Church in mission” and a “Church in meeting,” the latter his gentle swipe at the idea of a synod on synodality.
The only people fully engaged in the consultative “phases” before the Synod have been “people who love to go to meetings in order to share with like-minded spirits their complaints about The Way Things Are in Catholicism,” Weigel warned.
File/Pope Francis talks to journalists during a press conference he held on board the flight to Rome, at the end of a five-day visit to Colombia, Monday, Sept. 11, 2017. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, pool)
It is not self-evidently clear how discernment about a “synodal Church,” is going to chart a path beyond the abandonment of rock-bottom Christian beliefs, which is “at the root of today’s rapidly declining Catholic practice,” Weigel proposed, concluding that now “is not the time for a Church in meetings.”
In his address this weekend, Pope Francis acknowledged that the idea of a synod on synodality “may seem something abstruse, self-referential, excessively technical, of little interest to the general public,” and hence his appeal to journalists to help repackage the event in more positive terms.
“We have opened our doors, we have offered everyone the opportunity to participate, we have taken into account everyone’s needs and suggestions,” the pope pleaded. “We want to contribute together to build the Church where everyone feels at home, where no-one is excluded.”
The problem many of Francis’s critics have pointed out is the blurred line between including “everyone” and including every idea and practice, even the bad ones incompatible with the Church’s doctrine and moral teachings.
As Breitbart News reported, conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke has warned that the move toward synodality is causing “evident and grave harm” to the Church.
Burke observed this month that the Catholic Church in Germany has already experimented with synodality, with disastrous results, spreading “confusion and error and their fruit, division – indeed schism.”
The same confusion and error and division could well “be visited upon the universal Church,” Burke cautioned.
The cardinal also highlighted the innovative and indeed “revolutionary” nature of trying to redefine the Church by synodality.
From the time of the Apostles, he noted, the Church has been characterized by four marks, namely that it is “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic,” but never by synodality.
Indeed, Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1964, never even mentioned the word synodality.
The late Australian Cardinal George Pell similarly called the upcoming synod on synodality a “toxic nightmare,” asserting that it is “hostile” to the Church’s apostolic tradition.
The synod’s working document focuses on radical inclusion, listening, participation, and co-responsibility with believers and nonbelievers, while ignoring central themes of Christian teaching and practice, Pell wrote.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, has called the synodal path a “hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
“If they succeed, it will be the end of the Catholic Church,” he said of those promoting the synodal process. “And we must resist it like the old heretics of Arianism.”
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