Even bigger than a Church battle between progressives and conservatives

Thursday, March 16th, 2023

We do not know what the final result of the Synod on synodality will be.

But we already know that the synodal process is a crucial moment in making real the transition from a Eurocentric Catholic Church to a global Catholic Church.

We are now in a crucial moment of the multi-stage process that will culminate in two Rome-based assemblies of the Synod of Bishops in October 2023 and October 2024.

The continental assemblies for Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania have already been held. And a group of delegates representing 268 dioceses in the United States and Canada gathered in Orlando (Florida) from February 13-17 to compose the response to the Working Document for the Continental Stage.

The Latin America and the Caribbean assembly is unfolding in four different regional meetings between now and the end of March. The assembly for Asia took place at the end of February in Bangkok (Thailand), and the assembly for Africa and Madagascar was held from March 1-6 in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).

Every continental assembly for the synodal process is revealing and exposing the complexity of what the Catholic Church is going through at this moment.

The assemblies for the Middle East and Europe offer a good example.

The Eastern Churches and synodality

“Synodalism is a core of the heritage of our Eastern Churches,” noted the closing statement of the continental assembly for the Middle East, which took place in Bethania from February 13-17.

Besides the neologism “synodalism” — which is used instead of synodality in the translation from Arabic to English – it was interesting to see how much the Catholic Churches in the Middle East have in common with those in other parts of the world.

It was also interesting to see how this continental assembly escaped the Vatican’s somewhat romantic view of the synodal tradition in the Eastern Churches (Catholic and Orthodox), which Rome sometimes evokes against more progressive demands that surface in other synodal assemblies.

At the same time, the Eastern Catholic Churches can singularly demonstrate the long tradition on which Pope Francis’ synodal process is building and how synodality is helping ecumenical dialogue move forward. (In November 2022 the Pro Oriente Foundation in Austria and the Angelicum University in Rome organized two conferences on listening to Orthodox and Eastern Churches on their theology and experiences with synodality.)

The Eastern Catholic Churches are essential – and this was very visible already at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) – in offering a more catholic view of Catholicism: the Church’s Roman and Latin identity has often been ideologised (see the ongoing and exacerbating controversies on the pre-Vatican II “Latin Mass”) to make it co-essential with the Catholic faith – something that is both historically and theologically erroneous.

Europe and the East-West rift over Vatican II

The second example is the Continental Assembly for Europe which took place in Prague (Czech Republic) from February 5-12.

Besides the obvious and expected attempts to contain the bold theological proposals coming from the German “Synodal Path”, a series of rifts emerged within Catholicism on the Old Continent.

There is a rift between the Eastern and Western parts of Europe on the reception and perception of Vatican II.

For the Churches that have survived Communism and the Cold War on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it is much more difficult to have an optimistic view of the possibility for the Church to coexist peacefully and creatively with secular culture.

Czech theologian Tomas Halík has often talked about the fact that the Catholic Churches beyond the Iron Curtain during the Cold War had a very different relationship with Vatican II compared with the Catholic Churches in Western Europe, and how that has created a certain mindset of denial about the abuse crisis in the Church.

There is also an intra-continental divide between Southwestern Europe and the small but militant Churches north of Germany, with Catholicism in Scandinavia and the Baltic States concerned that Church reform must always defend Catholic teaching and never “capitulate to the Zeitgeist” – as the Scandinavian bishops wrote in their March 2022 letter to the German bishops.

The list of signs and symptoms of intra-continental rifts that emerged from the synodal assemblies could go on and on.

But what’s important to note here is that the synodal process is more than a battle between progressives and conservatives – even though there are clearly different and opposed agendas in play.

The de-Europeanization of Catholicism

The defining feature of this process is that it is redesigning some important features of our common home, the Church, because it coincides chronologically and is part of a historical turn towards a de-Europeanization of Catholicism.

This is more complex in the United States than it is in the geographical area stretching from the Baltic States to Portugal – not to mention the question of whether contemporary Catholicism in the UK is culturally and theologically closer to, say, France and Germany or to the United States.

Church leaders are adamant in emphasising that the synodal process is not primarily about changing structures.

But the process is already doing that, by letting different continental Catholic styles and traditions express themselves in unprecedented ways.

John Paul II had “invented” the “special assemblies” of the Synod of Bishops dedicated to each individual continent. But they always took place in Rome and under strict control of the Roman Curia.

This time is different, as it was different already at the Synod assembly for the Amazon region in 2019.

We will see how the different continental synodal assemblies of February and March 2023 will inspire the assembly of the Synod of Bishops’ assemblies that take place in Rome in October 2023 and October 2024.

Important procedural aspects of these two assemblies are not clear yet. For instance, who will be included among the members will be, how will they be chosen, and who will choose them?

The institutions of the Catholic Church – the Synod included – are still largely based on institutions of the Roman Empire.

Canon law is also still largely based on Roman law.

Already decades ago, legal historian Stephan Kuttner said the Catholic Church’s law must redefine its relationship with its roots in Roman law. This is one of the things that the synodal process, which deceptively has very little to do with canon law, might be able to accomplish.

Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.