An Omnium Gatherum of Articles and Books on Synods and Synodality

Disarmingly published last week as a mere "note," this text from Rome portends major shifts in the ecclesiology of the Latin Church and by extension the entire Catholic communion. 

It does not arise out of nowhere and nothing, however. In his 2015 address, the bishop of Rome laid out a vision of synodality for the Latin Church that is striking and surprising.....only to those who haven't been paying attention. For those who have attended not only to Francis but also to (admittedly slow-moving) trajectories in Catholic ecclesiology for a half-century now, this vision is not really a surprise. Perhaps the only surprise is that it is this pope, rather than his immediate predecessor who wrote so much about ecclesial reforms, who is enacting a vision of synodality now.

I have been writing about synods, synodal structures, and "synodality" for well over a decade now in the Church of the West as of the East. My first contribution was in my first book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

In the book and elsewhere I have tried to stress, especially to Catholics worried about the dangers of synodality, that there is no one model all must follow. If we look to the East, we find a diversity of structures arranged according to need, context, and history. Moreover, it is very important to note that a properly functioning synodal structure can only come about where both synod and primate are functioning together. (The great Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas is crystal clear on this point.) A strong primate (whether diocesan bishop, patriarch, pope, or catholicos) is needed for synods at every level. 

In other words, a synod does not exist at the expense of a primate, but only in concert with him, each acting as a check on the other. In this light, there is no reason to believe that a more robust synodality in the West would in itself weaken either the papacy or more generally the Catholic Church. Her problems are already significant and longstanding, and they have come not in the presence of robust synodality but in its absence; they have come in a time of papal centralization and maximalization.

That book has been followed up by more articles than I can count for on the topic of synods published in such places the Catholic Herald in London; Our Sunday Visitor, based here in Indiana; Catholic World Report on many occasions, most notably here; for The Catholic Thing; and for other periodicals as well. 

My most recent contribution, published in the Herald this week, is here. I told the Herald's splendid editor Christopher Altieri I had an indecent amount of fun writing that piece. Is it satirical? Is it serious? Is it both? I cannot decide; perhaps you won't be able to either. In any event, what I was trying to suggest was that if we are to have synods, then let us have them to an ultramontane degree: let us go beyond the mountains north of Rome to find healthy models of synods where they still exist--in places like Armenia, for example. 

My unrequited love affair with the Armenian Apostolic Church continued in my 2019 book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. There I went into even greater detail about local synods--at the parish, diocesan, and regional levels. If Catholics are to have synods, they must not be the chaotic talking shops in Rome since 1965 misleadingly called "synods." They must be organs of governance, with real powers, at every level of the Church. 

Others have begun to cite my work, most notably the cardinal-archbishop of Newark, in a piece just published here in Commonweal. In addition, Fr Bob Wild of Madonna House (whom I have known for some time and count a friend) has recently discussed some of my work on synodality here.

I mention all this not to brag or to feel smugly satisfied that at long last Very Important People are starting to discover my great work. (Truth be told, I have an absolute horror of the idea of being anything close to "famous" or a "celebrity" or even moderately well-known. I am a middle-ranking scribe whose "schizoid" tendencies--so well captured by Nancy McWilliams' invaluable essay--thrive best in one of the obscurer provinces of the American imperium. Leave me alone in my classroom and consulting room with students and patients respectively, and I might be useful.) Instead, I mention all this only as a service to those who still feel wildly unsure about what synods and synodality are and do. I have tried to allay those anxieties by showing the concrete tasks that real synods, proper synods, properly do. 

Will we get such synods? It is up to us to work for them and not be fobbed off with pseudo-synods. 

The Messiness of Synodality

It always astonishes me that my students are astonished at the development of Christian doctrine. These innocents, knowing very little even recent American history, know absolutely nothing about ancient Christian history. They seem fondly to have imagined—if they have thought about the matter at all—that, e.g., the Nicene Creed “had fallen from heaven quite unexpectedly during Good Friday luncheon some years back” (to use one of the lines from Evelyn Waugh’s uproariously politically incorrect novel Black Mischief). When they discover that it did not—that the creed was a lengthy process of synodal or conciliar debate going on for decades—they are not only amazed but some of them even a little disgusted. The raw humanity of the Church--which, I must remind them, has two natures, as Christ did: divine and human--seems to be rather disdainful to some. (Others, of course, can see only the human side, and therefore reductionistically and simplistically assume that every decision was the result always and only of political machinations of the most sordid and self-interested variety, with no possible room for the Holy Spirit to drop His ready-made creeds into the diners' laps.)

When we cover the era of The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology, starting at Nicaea I in 325 and ending with Nicaea II in 787, and spending the most time on Chalcedon in 451, every one of them in classes going back nearly a decade has professed to be amazed at how messy, protracted, polemical, and confrontational the process was by which Christological doctrine was shaped and defined, not least in the creed. In the passive-aggressive argot of today, they ask: Why was everyone so “divisive”? Wasn’t the reaction to Arius rather “extreme”? Couldn’t they have just tolerated a diversity of opinions? After all, who cares how many natures Christ has, or what the relationship, if any, between them is. This is all irrelevant nonsense--isn't it? We can still be nice persons whether Christ has one nature, two, or 391,704.

Eventually, of course, the Church was guided to understand the dyophysite nature of Christ, and to settle other related and controverted matters. But it took time and effort lasting centuries. There was, then, no neat, tidy, simple, quick process for the formation of doctrinal claims that most of us take for granted today and have seemed settled for ages if not forever. It was a process taking decades and centuries, and in the meantime there was a lot of unsettled opinion and a great deal of vigorous, and occasionally violent, fighting. A very good, if dense, book for the formation of Christological doctrine remains that of Khaled Anatolios (whom I interviewed here), Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine.

Such is the way of synods and councils, East and West, ancient and modern. As we finish the seemingly endless commemorations of Vatican II this year, Catholics of a certain age--now fewer and fewer with each passing year--will remember the tumult in the post-conciliar period. Those with longer historical memories will know that whether it is Nicaea I, Chalcedon, Lateran IV, Trent, or some other synod, it takes decades for things to settle down, and in the meantime the process remains often painfully messy. Indeed, in not a few cases, things get worse after a synod/council, and the question is often raised: was the "cure" not worse than whatever the precipitating "disease" was? Such is the way synodality down through the ages.

I mention all this in anticipation of what I fully expect to be a shambolic synod in Rome in October, picking up where last year's session left off. I've talked to many people who have been disconcerted by the messiness and controversy last fall, but such concern is, in part, likely a function of just how unfamiliar the West is with synodality, though there is a long history of the same going back to the earliest centuries, as I documented in my book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

For those wishing more depth and detail on the topic, see the hefty scholarly collection (of uneven quality, and with articles in French and other European languages), Synod and Synodality: Theology, History, Canon Law and Ecumenism in New Contact.

Other works, most of them mentioned or reviewed on here over the years, that may be of interest would include Paul Valliere's rather uneven but still insightful Conciliarism: A History of Decision-Making in the Church.

Valliere's title does not really treat what one expects under the heading of "conciliarism," on whose history, in the West, Francis Oakley is the doyen. As I have noted before, Oakley's book on the topic, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870, discussed in depth here, is a deeply disturbing one raising age-old questions that nobody has bothered to answer--preferring instead to ignore them or "forget" them. I am using part of it in a lecture I am giving at Fordham next month at the OTSA meeting.

Finally, I would recommend a rich collection discussing ecclesiological and ecumenical issues, including synodality: Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism.

The So-Called Synod of Bishops

One of the surprise moves made by Pope Paul VI during the Second Vatican Council was his (ironic) motu proprio that created the so-called synod of bishops. If you read my book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity you will see that it's not a real synod at all insofar as it is a purely advisory body with no legislative authority, which is the defining hallmark of a synod properly so called. As a result, some figures such as Maxim Hermaniuk rather archly dismissed the synod as nothing more than "international study days for the Catholic bishops."

These gatherings tend to be highly regulated, very tightly scripted affairs with little room for freewheeling debate and discussion, let alone actual decision-making. The pope can ignore them entirely, though he usually pays them some selective attention. Still, they are but the palest imitations of real synods, which is a great, and wholly unnecessary, pity--not least because there is no reason, theological or historical, to prevent real synods from functioning in the Church of Rome as happened until at least the twelfth century (a history I recount in detail in my book). Nothing in synodal practice threatens 'papal primacy' but only strengthens it.

The problem with the synod, apart from its unilateral if well-intentioned creation, was aptly described by Yves Congar. His wonderful diaries record in several places his thought that the problem with Pope Paul VI was that Paul's gestures, often dramatic and incredibly gracious and humble though they could be, were totally mismatched to any coherent ecclesiological vision, and as a result the gestures fulgurated strikingly and then faded to nothing as the conservative, stultified, unhistoric, Rome-centric ecclesiological status quo reasserted itself. 

Set for release late this year is a new book that proposes to examine the whole history and functioning of the "synod": Ignatius Aniekanabasi Edet, Ideal and Reality of the Synod of Bishops (T&T Clark, 2013), 272pp.

About this book we are told:

The Second Vatican Council envisaged a more prominent role of the synod of bishops in the Catholic church. However, the idea of the fathers of the council never came to full fruition. In this survey, Edet discusses why the reality does not meet the expectations of many of the fathers at Vatican II in terms of collegiality, communion and trinitarian theology. Edet emphasizes that this failure has implications for the church's life and mission. The concentration of decisive authority in the pope and his curia largely undermines the significance of the conciliar teaching on collegiality-dialogue and participation in the exercise of authority in the church. Edet offers an explanatory comparative investigation and evaluation of the Roman Catholic synod of bishops in relation to similar institutions in the Eastern Catholic and Anglican churches, as well as to the reflections on collegiality and synodality in some of the ecumenical dialogues.