An end to the Roman Church?

Juliet Palmer — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 05:13:37 +0000

Most of us have grown up in a highly centralised European "Catholic" Church, and so we feel uncomfortable with many of the changes being promoted by Pope Francis.

After his visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore last month, Francis was heard to remark that "some people are still too Eurocentric" when they think of the Catholic Church.

He said that his visit showed that in fact "the Church is much bigger — much bigger than Rome or Europe — and, let me say, much more alive in those countries [he recently visited]."

There's a reason for the pope's comment. Christianity was born in Palestine, West Asia, and grew up along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean (Greece, Egypt and Turkiye). Still, no one thinks of it this way anymore, so thoroughly has it been Europeanised, especially after the Reformation.

Is the Western Church doomed?

The popular image of Christianity is that of a Western religion, with Western feasts and customs, largely European saints and practices, ruled over by a pope who sits in a Western city.

But the Christian faith which grew up in Europe, has also died there.

Perhaps that was the inevitable result of popes who behaved like Caesars, and so provoked schisms, reformations, and rampant persecution from atheistic ideologies like fascism and communism.

Europe is certainly a richer place than most of the rest of the world, but it has an inner turbulence of spirit which is unsettling to many immigrants.

The fact is that the Christian faith, as the pope sagely observed, "…is much more alive in those countries," where it is persecuted, and where it is a minority.

How to make sense of this conundrum?

One way may be to understand that we are all living in an age of seismic shifts, not only ecological but also technological and demographic.

Put in simpler words, not only have we to live with tsunamis, acid rain, and global warming, but we also live in a digital universe that has shrunk space and time to the dimensions of a hand-held smartphone, even while we struggle with migration and identity politics in our backyards.

What does this do to a religion born in a completely different time and place? How does it address the anxieties of 21st-century men and women?

What synodality gives us

Pope Francis has given one answer: synodality.

It is not a static answer, for it describes a church in movement, "in pilgrimage to its destination." Even more, today's Church is not like a flock of sheep, awkwardly stumbling along, always guarded against falling out of line by sheepdogs. It is not blindly obedient, but always questioning, sometimes in dissent, usually in dialogue — "the new way of being church" (Paul VI).

And as Francis says, unlike collegiality which was mainly for the bishops and the ruling elite, synodality is for everyone: pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, sisters, married men and women, the young, the old and the middle-aged, the smart ones and the unlettered, the rich and the poor and the middle-class, which forms the bulk of our congregations.

Not everyone wants synodality, and Pope Francis has many enemies who want him out of the way so that we can all go back to the "smoke and incense" of a Eurocentric Church, which dominated the little congregations on the periphery with stuffy dogma and rigid morals.

Is this the reason why the same Pope Francis dug in his heels and refused to concede even debating points to the women scholars of Louvain/Leuven, Belgium, who contested him regarding women's ordination? Is this a topic really worth discussing in this day and age? Then why such resistance from Rome?

For what synodality has revealed is that there is no "one size fits all" whether in the Roman Catholic Church or any other religion. This "one size" was usually meant to suit the local hegemon, and was adjusted to his pleasure, not that of the majority.

Synodality tells us that in listening patiently to what the "other" has to say we can find a way to the truth — be these "others" women, young people, the sick and disabled, tribals and Dalits, even people of other faiths.

For example, how comfortable would we be — not with a papacy, but — with a patriarchate, where faith and morals would be not standardised across every area and place, but relative and particular to various regions, allowing for differences?

This would introduce variations into styles of worship, and even change the form and nature of those who minister, instead of having just one male celibate presbyterium.

It's a new "catholic" — the term originally meant "universal" — Church and can hold unity and diversity in strategic balance. Can synodality hold the key to this relationship, as baptismal conversion once was?