It highlights some of the inherent tensions between the use of synods and the power of the papacy in modern Catholicism.

Speaking to Jesuits in Belgium on September 28, Francis said Eastern Christians have not lost synodality, but the Western Catholics "have lost it."

In the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, synods of bishops are responsible for the election of new bishops and the establishment of inter-diocesan laws within each province. Eastern Catholic Churches also use synods for such purposes.

In the West, synods were often held in the early centuries of the Church, and included important theological debates.

However, as the powers of the papacy grew, the synods became less common, although "councils" - which are arguably synods by a different name - still continued.

Ecumenical Councils, such as Vatican II, continue to issue theologically definitive statements, but more localized councils generally tackle administrative affairs, with theological questions reserved to the Vatican.

However, synods did take on some different definitions in the West.

First, diocesan synods - which used to be required to happen once a decade (admittedly, a rule observed more in the breach than in the execution) - involved both clergy and laypeople. Much like the more traditional synod, it involved looking at local diocesan laws and reforming them if needed.

More prominently, after Vatican II, Pope Paul VI established the Synod of Bishops, which had no real authority at all.

This synod could make "proposals" which could be accepted or rejected by the pontiff.

Soon, these meetings became talking shops, where many of the participants were more interested in Church gossip at the local restaurants in Rome than the official issue being discussed at the Synod meeting in the Vatican.

When Francis was elected, he wanted to make the Synod a more prominent feature of the life of the Catholic Church - but which Synod was he talking about?

"Synodality is very important. It needs to be built not from the top to the bottom, but from the bottom to the top," he told the Jesuits on Sep. 28.

Yet, historically, synods at best were built from the top down, although the little-used diocesan synod did allow lay participants.

"Synodality is not easy, no, and sometimes this is because there are authority figures that do not bring out the dialogue aspect. A pastor can make decisions by himself, but he can make them with his council. So can a bishop, and so can the pope," he said.

However, in the case of the papacy, his council is usually very much "his." The Ecumenical Council of Vatican I confirmed the doctrine that the Bishop of Rome has universal primacy over the Church and is "infallible" when he speaks ex cathedra.

In practical terms, this means a "Synodal Church" is whatever the pope says it is. Read more

• Charles Collins is an American journalist currently living in the United Kingdom, and is Crux's Managing Editor.

Virtual discussions roam over many small things (e.g., the kerfuffle last spring over Harrison Butker's graduation address at Benedictine College), rather than one or two big things.

And there is no bigger question for Catholics today than this: Why should anyone become or remain Catholic?

Pre- Second Vatican Council

Before the Second Vatican Council, the answers commonly given to this question focused on individual well-being in the afterlife. As many Catholic characters in movies and novels attested, a basic reason to be Catholic was "so I won't go to hell."

The Catholic faith, in their view, is the best guarantee that they will not spend eternity suffering the excruciating flames of eternal torment. Instead, they will enjoy heavenly paradise.

Catholic teachings provide a roadmap of the best route to heaven, and the sacrament of penance was a sure way to correct course if you lose your way.

This position is easily caricatured in several ways.

First, heaven and hell are often depicted as destinations external to the soul, corresponding to external rewards and punishments. The soul is the same soul in heaven or hell—but it is happy in the former and miserable in the latter.

Second, sacraments and other religious devotions are portrayed as external sources of energy that are used by the soul, but do not change its fundamental character.

I go to Mass on Sundays in order to fill up my spiritual gas tank, so that I can drive my soul-car to heaven. But it is still the same old me that is driving the soul-car.

Third, the system is presented as both predictable and arbitrary. Suppose I commit a mortal sin on Friday and intend to go to confession on Saturday. If I am hit by a car leaving church on Saturday, I go to heaven. If I am hit by a car walking into church, I go to hell.

The sacramental system is depicted as an elaborate set of machinery, almost a soteriological Rube Goldberg machine. The rules are clear, even if they are not always fair.

The actual theology, however, has always been far richer than the caricatures.

Catholic theologians would say that the process of moral living itself transforms you, because it is an encounter with God's grace. You adopt good habits out of fear and obedience.

Then you begin to see the holiness and beauty of God, and you continue those habits, which gradually allow you to love God and want to live in God's presence in eternity.

A famous question in The Baltimore Catechism asks "Why did God make you?" The answer is that "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."

Heaven and hell

After Vatican II, however, the more individually oriented account of the reasons to be Catholic began to be supplemented—if not supplanted—by a different view that approached questions of salvation in a somewhat different way.

One difference was the reduced emphasis on the details of eternal punishment.

With the advent of mass media creating widespread exposure to the atrocities of war, people in the 20th century understood well the horrors of torture and suffering.

Theologians and ordinary believers alike began to question the depictions of hell found in poets like Dante and lesser writers.

How anyone with a shred of compassion could subject any creature to torture or torment, much less eternally, was beyond the grasp of many both morally and existentially.

For a divine, omnipotent being to inflict such pain on any sentient creature is monstrous; such a god might reasonably be placated, but would never be worthy of worship.

Consequently, the God who became fully human in Jesus Christ could never behave in such a fashion.

Even the more sophisticated notion of hell, as a state of the soul entirely separated from God, love, truth and light for all eternity, began to seem morally and existentially problematic.

How could a good God, who sent His only begotten Son to save us, who pursued every lost sheep, allow any of his creatures to be definitively lost?

On a more terrestrial plane, it could sometimes seem that the defenders of hell were (like Dante) too inclined to populate it with their own enemies, while reserving heaven for themselves and their friends.

Pope Francis recently critiqued this danger when he wrote that heaven is for everyone ("tutti, tutti, tutti") and warns against imagining it as a gated community for self-proclaimed upright souls.

Building the kingdom

After Vatican II, however, the chasm between heaven and hell receded from both academic theology and the popular imagination. The post-Vatican II worldview did not so much bridge the chasm as sidestep it, by reframing the issue.

Drawing upon the council's "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" ("Lumen Gentium") and the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" ("Gaudium et Spes"), many Catholics envisioned their predominant duty to be helping to build the kingdom of God.

This kingdom of God is already in our midst, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is not yet fully complete. With the grace of Christ, who is the cornerstone, our task is to cooperate with other Christians and all people of good will in bringing it to fruition.

The focus on building the kingdom of God displaces the heaven-hell chasm in two ways. Read more

• M. Cathleen Kaveny is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Law and Theology at Boston College.

The instant outrage the tableau aroused — right or wrong — tells a larger story about something that has happened in Catholic life across the last four decades. But it has not been the only recent indicator.

In a January report on religious liberty the U.S. bishops told us somewhat alarmingly of their concern that "the very lives of people of faith" are threatened in the United States.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan inveighed in June against New York's proposed Nonpublic Dignity for All Students Act with complaints about "bullying" Catholics and forcing Catholics to "toe the line on "gender ideology."

One of the first attacks leveled at Kamala Harris once she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president was that she "hates what [Catholics] believe."

We Catholics have come to prize a little too much being outsiders set against the culture and the world. Quite often, Catholics seem crouched defensively as though the church were under constant attack.

That's not a coincidence. For several decades, Catholics in the U.S. have been taught to see the world as a hostile place set against us, and to think of ourselves as a "sign of contradiction" set against that world.

This point of view has been nurtured within the church for two generations. Forty years can make it seem like Catholics always have seen our relationship with the world this way. We have not. And, in fact, that idea does not reflect our tradition very well.

The world as a partner

No matter how the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council called the church to turn toward and embrace the world — indeed, no matter how St. Augustine reminded us that our faith "does not repeal or abolish" the laws and norms of the world in which we make our earthly pilgrimage — we Catholics insist more and more on what historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler has called "Catholic difference."

We have come to be intoxicated by being different, standing apart, and the idea that the world is out to get Catholics.

It was not always this way. Vatican II itself proved that while the world is not the same as the Church, the Church can and must see the world as a partner.

The world is the field of salvation given to the church (Matthew 13:38).

A sign of contradiction

A temptation to stand apart from the world has always dogged the Church. The last 40 years have seen Catholics succumb thoroughly to that temptation, desiring to be a "sign of contradiction."

That phrasing — "sign of contradiction" — deserves particular attention. We find it in the Gospel of Luke (2:34) and in the Acts of the Apostles (28:22).

But the phrase came into its recent popularity during the John Paul II papacy. He used the phrase as early as a 1979 Angelus message, three months after his election.

But Pope John Paul began to speak of Catholics as a sign of contradiction to the world with considerable frequency after 1987.

A quick search of the Vatican website discloses 45 uses of the phrase "sign of contradiction" during the John Paul II papacy, 39 of which came in 1987 or later.

The Seventh General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops which took place in October 1987 may well have been the turning point that gave so much life to that oppositional, "sign of contradiction" narrative that we live with even today.

Addressing "the vocation and mission of the lay faithful in the church and the world," the synod took up the most neuralgic questions that had dogged the church since Vatican II.

They included the role of women and the participation of laypeople more generally in church leadership.

In 1987, NCR described that synod as the "first clear test of strength between papal loyalists and post-Vatican II church leaders" — we might say, between those who preferred to restrain the Council's reforms and those who intended to press them forward.

Looking back, it seems clear that those who preferred to restrain the Council prevailed, and something shifted in the church after the 1987 synod.

The influence of leaders like Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland and Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin waned.

Others like Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law and New York's Cardinal John O'Connor ascended, and the overall trajectory of the U.S. bishops has traced the path of their influence since 1987.

It seems inescapable that under Pope John Paul the church began to embrace its identity as a "sign of contradiction," a church in opposition to the world. Read more

• Steven P. Millies is professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Our parish priest tells us that relieving priests are more difficult to find.

These are all striking moments in church life.

Yet the biggest shock has been to learn of the seemingly inevitable decline of the National Council of Priests (NCP).

Clergy central to Church

In any likely version of a future Church the clergy will play a central role.

They will do this either as the traditional church's clerical workforce in a largely unchanged hierarchical church or as equal partners with lay Catholics and religious in a newly reformed and co-responsible synodal church.

Pope Francis certainly recognises this fact and often gives the impression, when he condemns clericalism, that he frets about whether the modern church's male priesthood is fit for the task and committed to his synodal agenda.

As part of the consultation for the second assembly of the Synod of Bishops he called 300 parish priests from around the world to Rome to learn more about their views.

Within Australia church lay reformers have always been conscious of the role of parish priests as reform leaders and allies or stumbling blocks and adversaries.

Reform couldn't have proceeded without many priests and former priests playing their part.

Where parish priests were indifferent or opposed to reform the going was very tough indeed because of their role as gatekeepers.

This was the case in mundane matters such as communication with parishioners through access to parish newsletters and church noticeboards and in more serious matters such as the role of priests as spiritual and liturgical guides.

Clearly the priesthood in the church in Australia has been undergoing radical change.

Attention often focuses on the quantitative decline in the numbers of vocations to the priesthood and on the dramatic upsurge in the recruitment of foreign-born priests.

Attention also focuses on the character and values of younger priests coming up the traditional route through Australian seminaries who often hold different values to their predecessors.

This has led to frequent dissonance when a new priest takes over an established parish and overturns established practices. Parishioners are often outraged at the abrupt return by more conservative young priests to the old pre-Vatican II ways.

Polarisation and cultural conflict within the church has certainly contributed to parishioners ‘shopping around' for a ‘compatible' parish priest. Generational change among clergy is one important part of this story.

Such generational change is not new; it is inevitable.

Changing times

Many older Catholics grew up with Irish-born parish priests and have seen them disappear. But as the church in Australia fights for its very survival there is something new about this more recent cultural change.

The current dilemma of the National Council of Priests (NCP) is a striking example of the impact of such cultural and generational change.

It is sketched in the current issue of The Swag, the newsletter of the NCP, by its chairman, Rev John Conway, committee member Rev Bill Burt SVD, and editor, Rev Peter Matheson.

The NCP, an Australia-wide organisation of Catholic priests and Associate Members (Lay, Religious and Seminarians), was founded in 1970 ‘in the spirit of Vatican II'.

It is ‘committed to the fraternity and further education of clergy and to representing clergy in the public forum'. Its national conventions, the next one is planned for March 2025, have served as important gatherings open to issues of church reform.

Its members and friends have included some bishops, although it has also been disdained by some others. In the current edition of The Swag the main feature article is written by the late Emeritus Bishop Peter Ingham.

The spirit of Vatican II was and is central to NCP.

As Peter Matheson points out, its motto, ‘Sign of Unity. Instrument of Peace', is taken from the first paragraph of Vatican II's The Dogmatic Constitution of the Church (Lumen Gentium).

At its peak, perhaps about 1800 members, the NCP attracted large number of priests to its ranks. But now, in the words of its chairman Conway, it is ‘floundering' and diminished.

Its future is uncertain. Bill Burt describes the current membership as in a ‘dire state'.

Of the current c.3,000 priests in Australia, c.780, only about a quarter, are NCP members and their average age is about 80 years old. As Burt says, ‘By far the majority of these are senior citizens, mainly from Anglo-Irish/Caucasian backgrounds.'

Clearly, the trajectory of the ageing membership is heading downwards.

Examining the membership, Burt concludes, ‘Very few priests from other ethnicities are current NCP members and almost no younger clergy from overseas in recent years have indicated any interest in joining the NCP.

"Quite frankly, we do not represent the body of active Catholic clergy today'.

This decline may not be irreversible, even though it looks likely. The NCP executive and The Swag team are trying to attract those who are presently choosing not to join.

Why the decline?

There are several possible contributing factors to this decline, most of which the NCP leadership has considered. NCP is not alone in its decline.

Interestingly, the possible explanations mirror those found in the discussion of the future of other declining organisations.

Some of these organisations are mainstream like trade unions, and others within the church like religious orders and certain lay organisations, which have also failed so far to find solutions.

The most disappointing explanation would be that it signifies an active rejection of the Vatican II ethos represented by the NCP. If that is the case it endangers the success of synodality, an idea which draws heavily on Vatican II.

Alternatively, it could reflect the individualism of younger priests who see no attraction in the idea of collective effort and networking.

Perhaps they prefer to ‘bowl alone', the term of the American social scientist Robert Putnam, like an increasing number of the wider community.

It could be that the NCP itself has failed to reach out effectively to newcomers.

It could be that new immigrant priests find their support networks within their own ethnic communities or that new religious order priests increasingly find no need for networks other than their own order.

Perhaps NCP membership is actively discouraged by church leaders during seminary priestly formation, itself a subject of synodal discussion.

There is probably some truth in all these explanations.

The NCP leadership is seeking feedback.

Hopefully remedies will be found to enable some revitalisation. If not, it will pass away and the church in Australia will have lost something extremely valuable.

Church reform will become less likely without this Vatican II-inspired generation of priests.

• First published in Eureka Street
• John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.

It encourages the healing of divisions between churches.

Divisions rule

In culture, politics and religion, however, division provides most of the news of the day.

The religious headlines emphasise fractures within churches.

They tell of discrepancy between the professed values of churches and the bad behaviour of their representatives.

They headline division between church leaders and people in the congregation.

It is understandable that church leaders focus on holding their own churches together than on their relationship to other churches.

Christian Unity movement

The history of the movement for Christian Unity, and particularly of Catholic attitude to it, however, suggests deeper things at stake.

It may also illuminate the broader tension between unity and division in Western societies.

Catholics came relatively slowly to the ecumenical table.

The roots of the movement for unity lay in the late nineteenth century at a time of vigorous missionary activity by European and American churches in the colonies.

Those involved recognised how far their rivalry and exclusive claims for their own churches had weakened efforts of each to win converts.

Non-Christians among whom they worked were also deterred by the contradiction observed in people who fought with one another while they preached a Gospel of peace and unity.

The Week for Christian Unity was one of many initiatives aimed at healing the divisions of the past, at restoring unity among Christians, and at encouraging shared prayer and action.

It was part of what became known as the ecumenical movement.

Attitudes towards the movement among church leaders and members were ambivalent: in favour in theory but cautious in practice.

The Catholic Church

In the Catholic Church the initial attitude to the ecumenical movement was generally suspicious.

It was seen to downplay the vital importance of unity of belief.

It risked giving the impression that all churches were equally valid, so failing to recognise that the true Church already existed in the Catholic Church.

For it, unity meant abandoning error and returning to the Catholic Church.

Differences vs similarities

In the Second Vatican Council, however, disunity among Christians was seen as a scandal.

The many elements shared with other churches were recognised, and the urgency of church unity was stressed.

Catholic leaders and theologians joined their fellows in other churches in seeking common ground on disputed points of doctrine and practice.

Local congregations of different churches prayed together and sought to cooperate on common projects.

For many of us Catholics this was an exhilarating journey of discovery.

It involved moving beyond the emphasis in Catholic identity of being different and superior to other so-called Churches to find unsuspected similarities, and ideas and practices and expressions of the Gospel commendable in their difference.

We began to centre our identity in the faith that we shared with others, and not in the ways in which we differed from them.

Unity, identity, culture

More recently, however, the passion for Christian unity has waned as church congregations have declined.

The place of Churches in society has diminished, and Churches have become more preoccupied with their own identity and questions of governance, including the scandal of sexual abuse of children.

As all churches cope with more limited resources there is less energy or enthusiasm for deepening relationships with other churches.

Among the few young Catholics for whom faith and Church are central to their lives, too, many emphasise its separateness from the secular world and from other Churches.

These changes have affected all churches in the West.

In the Catholic Church, Vatican II was not their cause. It formed part of a distinctive cultural change that affected all Churches.

The identity of the Catholic Church had been defined by its superiority to other Churches and to the secular world in general.

This distinctive identity was expressed in a strong community cohesive in its understanding of faith and its ritual practice.

The changes of Vatican II were designed to foster an identity defined by openness to the world and other religious bodies, expressed in a strong and cohesive community renewed in its faith and its reformed ritual practice.

In practice, however, the move from superiority and difference to hospitality was accompanied by a widespread loss of cohesion and of commitment to a defined faith and ritual.

For an increasing number of Christians church allegiance and belief were seen in terms of personal history and individual choice, not as a commitment to an authoritative tradition.

The movement for Church union then seemed quixotic to people who felt free to move between churches and to make what they wanted of Christian doctrine. The unity of the Church was seen in spiritual and not in institutional terms.

Wider social change

This change is echoed in the political culture.

Once large political parties with a distinctive, shared and often polemical vision of society and a strong allegiance to it, have been replaced by small parties, united by interests more than by convictions.

These in any case are subordinated to the winning of elections.

Candidates for Parliament are drawn from those for whom politics is a career not a calling.

The current hatred that marks politics seems to flow as much from ambition and entitlement as from policy.

In response, voters are correspondingly more detached from political parties.

They favour individuals who appear to be authentic in their principles or who share their interests.

Pope's challenge

In this situation, Pope Francis' approach to Christian unity may be of wider interest.

He has challenged an inwards-turned vision of Church that identifies itself either by what it is not or as a collection of loosely bound individuals.

He has encouraged Catholics to go out to the edges of the Catholic Church to engage with disengaged members of the Church.

He's also encouraged Catholics to go out to Christians in other Churches, people of all Churches and none who suffer from poverty and discrimination, and to all to whom Christ came.

Ecumenical mission

This broad sense of mission draws its energy from and encourages a deep faith in Christ who embodied God's love in suffering rejection and rising from death.

It invites an ecumenism in which the faith of members and congregations of different Churches leads them to reach out beyond their doors into the world around them and its needs.

Today our public culture appears largely to have given up hoping for a unity of vision that transcends division.

Perhaps the call to go beyond the comfort of like-minded people to those on the margins of our society and to attend to them and their needs might reinvigorate commitment to the common good and to the democratic habits that sustain it.

• First published in Eureka Street
• Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.

The nutshell of the article is this sentence: "Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to Church doctrine".

This news report is based on a few carefully chosen examples of Catholic parishes, schools, centres, and college campuses — it cannot offer the complete picture of a Church as big and diverse as Catholicism is in the United States.

But it tells a story of what those who work in the American Church today have seen in the last few years: students and colleagues on school campuses, new magazines and academic institutions, to say nothing of social media and various kinds of ministries available on the internet.

The article says that "despite their growing influence, conservative Catholics remain a minority. Yet the changes they have brought are impossible to miss."

Yes, it is hard to deny that we are seeing a slow process to replace a certain kind of "Vatican II Catholicism" (granted the many ways in which this expression can be interpreted) with younger Catholics (lay men and women, clergy, members of religious orders) who privilege different formulations of Catholic theology, spirituality, and mix between action and contemplation.

It is a generational movement of young Americans looking for a sense of identity that they can claim is distinct and different.

This quest is articulated in doctrinal leanings, individual and communitarian lifestyles, and liturgical styles.

But it is not just young people.

It's a moment of rebalancing, a swinging of the pendulum of theological thinking and religious needs that is trying to find a way to deal with a post-20th century material and intellectual world and its uncertainties, and in the United States especially, different from the expectations of the Vatican II period: persisting and heightened social and economic inequalities, the normalisation of war and militarisation of social control, the debate on gender, etc.

Discerning a healthy sense of the Church

This return of conservative Catholicism exists in different ways, not only in the United States.

It is a fact, and the sooner we stop denying it, the better.

The question is how to interpret and relate to it.

One option is to let these different identities develop in separate worlds and let a certain Darwin-like idea of life in the Church have its course.

Coexistence is possible but does not always happen naturally: unity takes work.

Putting this in the hands of "cultural warriors" would be potentially destructive, augmenting polarization and mutual alienation.

It would probably not lead to a formal schism but to a house divided, which, in the long run, cannot stand.

A different option would be to reconstruct spaces and moments for mutual recognition of the Catholicity of others' Catholicism and a process of discernment, in all these different identity camps, of what is conducive to a healthy sense of the Church, of the Catholic tradition, of a Jesus-like life, and what is instead just an ecclesial mirroring of identity politics.

The Synod on synodality is just the beginning of this.

However, we cannot pretend that the Synod will succeed, even in opening spaces for this process, without some acceptance of uncomfortable reality.

Liberal-progressive Catholics today must find a different and alternative way to deal with the past and the tradition of the Church.

They must avoid the "burn it down" blindness and willful ignorance of self-flagellating intellectuals who refuse to see how much is true and good in the Catholic tradition and are incapable of seeing its good use.

An ostracising reading of the past responds to goals that are more political or of academic politics than ecclesial ones.

The other side (and it must be said that there are so many variations of the traditionalist-conservative movement in the Church) needs to find a different and alternative way to a neo-traditionalism which is incapable of criticising and, when necessary, changing the theological and ecclesiastical Catholic traditions on the grounds that "it cannot change because it never changed".

A blanket glorification of the past is just a variation of the ideological fury of the self-righteous who think they are always "on the right side of history", and it's not how the Catholic magisterium deals with the past.

A sense of what the living tradition is

As French theologian Pierre Gisel wrote in a chapter recently published in a book, the central issue is the relationship with the past.

Gisel urges "a structuring relationship with the past [which] occurs in a scenario of differences".

The quest of younger generations for identity is a way of rejecting the slippage from equality based on imago Dei to (self)enforced uniformity.

Dealing with this quest requires leaving behind any fantasy of having direct contact with the truth in real-time immediacy.

This means restoring some trust in the importance of mediations for the faith: mediations that are intellectual, liturgical, and institutional.

It's a task that applies, in different ways, to both the neo-traditionalist and the post-ecclesial, futuristic Catholic imaginations.

For most of my life, as a Catholic born five years after the end of the Council, I found it easy to wear lightly and comfortably my Vatican II theology and spirituality as both a lay member of the Church and an academic.

This has become more complicated lately.

Sometimes, conservative Catholicism claims or attempts to be a return to the "real" Vatican II.

Sometimes, the return of traditionalism is dismissive of the theology of Vatican II or outright anti-conciliarism.

This has dangerous consequences on all levels—the return of antisemitism in some Catholic circles, for example.

The fact is that to respond to the ills of neo-traditionalism, you must have a sense of what the living tradition is, how it has worked in the past, and how it can work in today's world.

And this is where we need to begin.

• 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.

His remarks came around the 60th anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy that was issued during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

"'Go and prepare the Passover for us' (Lk 22:8): these words of Jesus,'" the pope said in his February address, "express the Lord's desire to have us around the table of his Body and Blood."

Significantly, gathering "around the table" is not an image of an auditorium or a lecture hall, it is one of intimate involvement around a banquet table.

No fan at a football (soccer) game wants to view the game from one end of a long, narrow stadium. And although we are not talking about football, but active participation in the Paschal Mystery, the same reaction is true.

In addition to some specific suggestions about formation for ministers, the pope noted that liturgical formation is not a "specialisation for a few experts, but rather an inner disposition of all the People of God".

He also referred to formation paths for the People of God and the concrete opportunity for formation that is offered by "assemblies that gather on the Lord's Day" and feasts during the year.

The beautiful Easter liturgies in which the global Church has recently engaged to celebrate the Paschal Mystery could not have been possible without the latest reform of the liturgy, now more than a century in the making.

Worship, thanks, and memory will never change. But due to the liturgical movement, the People of God have prayed in song and voice, and have celebrated the sacred mysteries, in their own language.

They have more actively and consciously participated in the source and summit of the Christian life than ever before.

Is that enough?

The vision of a distant priest praying almost privately at an altar affixed to a far wall with his back to the people, separated by all manner of architectural splendour and obstructions, is now a distant memory.

But the overhang from those days remains.

There is no doubting the essence of the sacred ritual and majesty that often attended the distant performance.

Nor can one diminish the reverence of the congregations that occupied pews far removed from the sacred action at the altar.

It is no wonder that "attendance at Mass" for many was an occasion of mostly private devotion with a focus on the reception of Holy Communion as the pinnacle of the sacred celebration.

But it is past time to centralise altars better, as the Council Fathers who crafted Sacrosanctum Concilium imagined.

It's time for churches to configure the altar table, the sign of Christ, so that, as Pope Francis asked the Dicastery for Divine Worship, the people truly are "around the table of his Body and Blood … so that we may together eat the Passover and live a Paschal existence, both personal and communal".

As Richard Vosko writes in God's House (Liturgical Press, 2006), "Catholic worship is not like a theatre or lecture hall.

"The liturgy demands active, conscious participation … A sociofugal seating plan (rows facing the front) does not work for our liturgy."

I sometimes imagine a host who invites guests to dinner and then sits at the end of the room. Clearly not the hospitality of the Lord Jesus, nor a basis for social action by the guests!

"We are not simply human beings; we are human interbeings and share in the interrelatedness of all cosmic life," says the American Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio.

While we recognise that in an increasingly secular society, we must more often step outside the brick walls (on the altar of the world, as the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined), let's properly reflect our sacred celebratory unity when we are inside.

The altar, truly at the centre

What happened to the directives about the faithful being gathered around altars that are central?

The most recent General Instruction of the Roman Missal (no. 299) specifies that "the altar should, moreover, be so placed as to be truly the centre toward which the attention of the whole congregation of the faithful naturally turns".

That injunction is reflected in the official rite the Vatican issued in 1977 for the dedication of a church.

"Here may your faithful, gathered around the table of the altar, celebrate the memorial of the Paschal Mystery and be refreshed by the banquet of Christ's Word and his Body," it says in the prayer for dedicating the altar (Dedicationis ecclesiae, no. 62).

This has been the official position of the contemporary Church is since the time that Vatican II was still in session.

"It is proper that the main altar be constructed separately from the wall, so that one may go around it with ease and so that celebration may take place facing the people; it shall occupy a place in the sacred building that is truly central, so that the attention of the whole congregation of the faithful is spontaneously turned to it" (Instruction of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, September 26, 1964, Ch. 5, II, 91).

If we want to move people from spectators to real participants, in an assembly of unity, where they actively celebrate the sacred mysteries they need to have genuine connection as Pope Francis describes.

Proximity, space, light and actions that enhance involvement are all part of that equation.

Entrance procession with the Book of the Gospels, thoughtfully selected participants for the Offertory Procession, the Word proclaimed from a suitably located ambo, lectors who read well supported by good sound amplification, a good homily, trained acolytes, a sonorous choir which leads appropriately selected hymns, among others, all contribute.

The need to gather around the central altar is talked about but reluctance to actually make the move in most places stubbornly persists.

Let's delay no longer!

Need to advance awareness and to educate

But that's not all.

The presider will have to give much more attention to his part, in persona Christi, at the Lord's table and his communication by inclusive language with the co-celebrating congregation.

Artful presiding, as Paul Turner describes it in Ars Celebrandi (Liturgical Press, 2021), includes a real consciousness and the sense of the sacred that are intrinsic components of the celebration. There must be a focus on appealing to people to "grow in the awareness and joy of encountering the Lord (in) celebrating the holy mysteries", he notes.

The awareness and joy that Pope Francis highlights require pastoral education apart from a physical setting that encourages connection.

Ensuring congregations have a clear understanding of Eucharist is essential.

I suspect that the multifaceted elements of the gem which is the Eucharist remain elusive to older congregations who are steeped in old ways.

A proper understanding of the sign of unity and charity, the significance of the assembly of the congregation present as co-celebrants, joining in the thanks to God the Father, listening to the Word and being part of the real memorial of Jesus and the Paschal mystery may still have a way to go.

Because they are then called to go out as missionary disciples: not to suspend the celebration until next week.

How many understand, as Sacrosanctum Concilium says, that

"... in the liturgy full public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and His members"?

Old misconceptions die hard, especially among Western congregations that have an aged demographic with strong recollections of old ways.

Fundamentally, communicants receive communion from the hosts consecrated at the Eucharist they are celebrating.

But this absolute essential is too often routinely breached in practice. No Eucharistic celebration should be make access to pre-consecrated from the Tabernacle. And where congregation size allows, communion from one loaf is most, even while recognizing the challenges involved in realizing this ideal.

Past reforms and those still needed

Reform of the liturgy has clearly contributed to reform of the Church.

Given we are no longer a Eurocentric Church that, in the West at least, serves a secular and increasingly entitled world, reform must continue by all participants.

The essentials of the Passover Meal that we memorialise are not the subject for reform, but how we celebrate as community is.

It is possible to enhance participation by ardently responding to people who seek engagement and active involvement in worshipping their God.

They do so for a reason.

Given the drift of young people away from regular attendance, a more engaging space, including the truly central location of the altar, will contribute to participation, as it will for all.

For too long have we suffered poor translation of key prayers, including the Eucharistic Prayers.

For example: "Consubstantial with the Father" in the Nicene Creed might sound meaningful for theologians, but it is not part of the language of the people.

Also the failure to move to gender-neutral language in the Lectionary given current parlance is plainly offensive to more than half the congregation.

A review of the Lectionary is, in my opinion, embarrassingly overdue.

How would Pope Francis have stimulated the world with Evangelii gaudium (Joy of the Gospels) to a people with poor knowledge of the scriptures?

How would they have responded to his incitement to embrace Jesus' call to missionary discipleship?

The idea of a synodal Church and the adoption of synodality by the whole People of God would have been unthinkable.

Others will have additional preferences for reform.

It would be instructive to hear what they are because the pope has raised this matter fairly and squarely.

He has called for action. In a synodal Church now is the time to register your suggestions.

• Justin Stanwix is a deacon at St Mary Star of the Sea Parish, Milton in the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong (Australia).
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Actually, once the members of the October 4-29 gathering have voted on a final document (Saturday evening) and then celebrated the concluding Mass in St. Peter's Basilica (Sunday morning), they will not have ended the Synod assembly on synodality.

They will only have ended the first session of that assembly. Pope Francis, the Synod's president, has scheduled a second session for 11 months from now - in October 2024.

What happens in the liminal space between now and then is anybody's guess.

That's because there are numerous issues and events - both in the Church and in the world - that will pose serious challenges to advancing the momentum of the synodal "conversations in the Spirit" that many participants said they so positively experienced.

The Marko Rupnik saga

Let's start with the issue that is no longer the elephant in the room, as it was just a few days ago.

Obviously we're talking about the likely role the pope played in the way the Vatican and the Diocese of Rome dismissed the testimonies of more than 20 women who accused the famous ex-Jesuit mosaic artist, Marko Rupnik, of sexually abusing them.

The Jesuits believed the women, however. And they slapped tight restrictions on Rupnik's work, ministry, and travel.

When the celebrity priest-artist brazenly flouted them, his religious superiors kicked him out of the order.

Demands for full transparency in how Rupnik abuse cases were handled at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) were always ignored.

And not a single Vatican official, including anyone at the Holy See Press Office, has ever addressed the issue - until last week when it was revealed that Rupnik was recently incardinated in the Diocese of Koper (Slovenia) as a priest in good standing.

Under intense media pressure, and with emerging signs on social media that many Catholics - including some the pope's most loyal supporters - were scandalised and angered by this new development in the ongoing Rupnik saga, the Vatican said Francis had instructed the DDF to re-open the Slovenian priest's abuse case.

Naturally, it did not acknowledge that the pope decided to do so because of the above-mentioned pressure and outrage. It does not matter.

It's regretful to have to say this, but we are long past expecting any real transparency in this pontificate - at least across the board and on a consistent basis.

You are probably asking what all this has to do with the Synod assembly and the next 11 months before its second session.

At least three issues seem to be at play here:

• the lack of transparency in the Church, especially from its leaders;
• the commitment of the Church, and especially the pope, to continue making the clergy sex abuse crisis a top priority;
• and how women are treated by an all-male clergy and hierarchy.

Priests sexually assaulting minors and vulnerable adults

The members of the Synod assembly could not even acknowledge in their "Letter to the People of God" that hundreds, certainly tens of thousands and perhaps even millions of people - minors and vulnerable adults - have been sexually abused by Catholic priests over the past 70 or so years alone.

The best they could muster in their anodyne text was to mention "victims of abuse committed by members of the ecclesial body".

Seriously? This was not a tough one. And it is extremely worrying that they could not even agree that the issue at hand is about priests sexually assaulting vulnerable people.

As for transparency, there was little of that from this first session of the Synod assembly.

Those of us who were not given access to the closed-door gatherings inside the Paul VI Hall - all but about 400 of the Catholic Church's reportedly 1.3 billion members - have no real idea how the discussions were even conducted.

Yes, the "method" was explained to us, but we were not able to witness even a few moments of it actually taking place.

The only things shared with the public were the occasional spiritual reflections, witness talks, theological mini-lectures and general introductions by the assembly's rapporteur.

It was very difficult to get the "feel" or sense of what was really going on in the discussions. We had to rely on participants who shared their "experiences" at press briefings.

And then there's the issue of women and the Church - what type of responsibility and ministry they are allowed to exercise and how they are treated by the male clerics.

This, in the minds of many serious Catholics, is the most crucial issue in the Church today, right up there with the clergy sex abuse crisis.

And, of course, the hierarchy's response to the Rupnik allegations (not believing or meeting with the women he allegedly abused and then putting him back in ministry after the Jesuits dismissed him) hits both issues!

The pope also did his part deflect attention away from the women's issue and focus it, instead, on the way the Church treats gays and lesbians, one of the other hot topics going into the October 4-29 assembly.

It did this by holding much-publicised private meetings with James Martin SJ and Jeannine Gramick SL, two icons of Catholic outreach to the LGBTQ+ community. Fine people, both of them.

And, yes, Jeannine is a woman, but the pope met her and two male officials of her organisation, "New Ways Ministry". It wasn't about her gender.

Trickle down synodality?

How all the above will affect the next 11 months, which Timothy Radcliffe OP - one of the assembly's spiritual directors - has likened to a gestation period or a pregnancy, is hard to say.

The final document is supposed to highlight themes that will require further and more in-depth reflection and discussion, as well as - one supposes - issues that are not on the table.

And where will such discussions take place? In universities, parishes, diocesan chanceries?

The two-session model of this Synod assembly - which actually began in October 2021 with a series of consultations that were held (theoretically) with all the members of the Church at the local, national and regional levels - has, at times, been likened to the process that unfolded during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Preparations got under in various places around the world, beginning in early 1960.

Then the first session was held in autumn 1962 at the Vatican.

Between that and the next three sessions there were those liminal periods when the Council Fathers returned to their dioceses or religious communities and the theologian returned to their universities, academies or research centers.

It has been recognised that this helped bring the Council to the local level and engage Catholics in the work and spirit of Vatican II as it was unfolding.

The Synod fathers and mothers and all the other participants at this year's assembly will also return home for the next 11 months before returning in October 2024 for Round II of the "Synod on synodality", as the two-pronged assembly is often called.

But they will not be able to bring their experience from Synod assembly or engage local Catholics with it in the same way that those who participated in the Council were able to do.

For one thing, it's numerically impossible.

In theory, all the bishops of the world were at Vatican II. Most of them said they were transformed by their experience at the Council and they enthusiastically brought its vision and decisions back home to their priests and people.

Only a tiny percentage of the world's bishops are part of the Synod assembly.

Therefore, the vast majority of the world's dioceses have no direct personal connection to what happened in the Paul VI Hall this past month.

And because of the pope's insistence on a virtual media blackout, they have not had much other connection, either.

You may have heard the old saying "Will it play in Peoria?" It's often used in the United States to ask whether a product, idea or person will appeal to the mainstream, as it is reflected in so many places like this small, typically average city in Illinois.

We might ask the same question regarding the work of the Synod assembly.

The problem is that it can't play in the countless Peorias of the worldwide Church if it's never taken back to the people there.

And how likely is that to happen if their bishops - like the one in the real Peoria - are not part of the Synod assembly?

• Robert Mickens, LCI Editor in Chief, has lived, studied and worked in Rome for 30 years. His famous Letter From Rome, brings his unparalleled experience as senior Vatican correspondent for the London Tablet and founding editor of Global Pulse Magazine.
• First published in La Croix. Republished with permission.

Altering customs and thought habits, especially when linked to faith, takes a long time. Simply getting the word out of a council's teaching and its implications can take decades.

Then, there are people and institutions for which new directions, practices, or emphases appear as threats to ideas and practices that have taken years to master.

Some people have a vested interest in preventing or holding back change.

Habits of thought that have been nurtured over a lifetime of individuals and institutions do not change easily. And so it is not surprising that it can take a century for a council to have its full impact on the life of the Church.

The generation of slaves who left Egypt under Moses's leadership struggled halfheartedly or reluctantly or not at all and with little success to lose Egyptian religious habits and a slave mentality.

Ultimately, they had to die out before the new people of God could enter the promised land in freedom. Likewise, the degree of change a council like Vatican II calls for takes generations to become second nature.

So, what of Vatican II? It is a half-century since that council. Are we halfway to a Vatican II Church? Probably not.

When that council ended, many hoped that an era of change was ahead for the Catholic Church.

• There would be more participation by the entire People of God in setting directions and practices for the Church;
• Scripture would become the guide for thought and action;
• there would be empowerment and perhaps even ordination for women;
• there would be new strides toward Christian unity;
• there would be more engagement with a world that had changed drastically in the twentieth century;
• there would be more interest in and acceptance of non-European thought and experience;
• there would be a move beyond a medieval monarchical model of Church leadership.

They did not happen.

Cooperating today for the sake of the future rejuvenated Church

The forces of inertia, clericalism, and vested interests abetted by two papacies retarded and even reversed the tentative first steps toward a Vatican II Church.

Those who welcomed Vatican II and were ready to engage in the renewal it should have sparked are now elderly, and age and a half-century of frustration and disappointment have sapped their energy.

Now, after more than half a century when the impetus of Vatican II was impeded, we have the first pope who would have studied the council in his student days and who is restarting the process that had barely begun before being stymied when he was a young man.

With the Synod of bishops' first session intended to put the Catholic Church back on the ancient path of synodality weeks away, we should let history temper expectations, hopes, or fears.

Huge changes are unlikely, even with a second session planned for sometime next year. This synod meeting will simply be restarting a delayed process that will likely take a century.

It is turning on the ignition for a journey that should have started in the 1960s, and it is likely to take a few generations to reach whatever destination is ahead.

Some people's extravagant hopes for this gathering must be tempered because they are otherwise guaranteed to be disappointed.

This is the start, not of a sprint, but of a marathon.

There will be disappointments along the way right from the start, but not likely so great as the big disappointment of the past half-century.

There will be incremental progress. There may even be some unexpected big spurts of progress.

We must be prepared for the fact that this "marathon" is actually a relay, and those of us alive today and hoping today will not see how it all ends.

However, we can have faith that the Holy Spirit, who guided the ecumenical council, will be part of the restarted life of Vatican II. And we can and must enter into the process, cooperating today for the sake of the future rejuvenated Church.

• William Grimm is a missioner and presbyter who since 1973 has served in Japan, Hong Kong and Cambodia. He is the active emeritus publisher of UCA News where this article first appeared.
• Published in La Croix. Republished with permission.

First, was the disappearance of Latin (which had become a de facto badge of identity for many Catholics), and the second was the fact that now the president of the Eucharistic assembly ‘faced the people.'

This was visually different, obvious, and - as is the way with that which we see with our own eyes - imagined to be self-explanatory.

‘He now faces us!' and ‘We can now see him and see what's happening!' were the comments at the time, and the whole church-building re-ordering programme was expressed in ‘turning round the altar so that the priest faces the people.'

For the ‘average person' not thinking about liturgy, theology, or the Vatican Council, this was what liturgical change was about: literally, a shifting of the furniture.

It is probably for this reason that those who are unhappy with the reforms of the Council imagine that if they can change back the furniture and make the language more Latinate as in the 2011 English-language missal, then they will have broken the symbolic heart of the renewal.

Is it about communication?

The new shape of the liturgical arena, the president facing the rest of the congregation, was presented at the time and is still most often presented today in terms of communication and the theory of communication.

The president could now be seen and heard, and this was perceived as a welcome development because it fostered understanding and comprehension (which it does).

This, in turn, was expected to lead to a deeper appreciation of the Eucharist (as it has to an extent that is not often acknowledged and in ways that were not expected).

However, this emphasis on being able to see the priest made him and his role in the liturgy central to the whole event - and this dynamic (one actor with an audience) is actually a hangover from the eucharistic spirituality that Vatican II set out to challenge.

Selling the reform short

But did those who implemented the reform in parishes sell it short?

Was it simply a matter of communications?

Perhaps it was something far more fundamental - indeed, was it such a fundamental aspect of the reform that neither they nor their congregations could take on board the rationale of the shift in one move?

Therefore, they ‘explained it' by simplification - and, in the process, traduced it?

This seems to be exactly what happened: in well-intentioned attempts to communicate ‘the changes' in the liturgy they opted to use ‘communication' as the rationale for the new physical arrangements, and once embarked on that road, then every arrangement had to explained in a similar fashion: it must be seen by all, all the time.

So why did Vatican II want the president facing others in the assembly and every building to have the ancient basilican arrangement?

The fundamental rationale of the reform was the renewed awareness of the early and patristic understanding of the assembly as gathered around the table of the Lord.

The Eucharist is many things, but in its fundamental form, it is a meal of eating and drinking, a banquet, a sacrum convivium, and its visible focus is the visible focus of a meal: a table.

We may interpret that table theologically as an altar - the table is ‘our altar' as distinct from the altar in the Jerusalem temple or the many altars found in ordinary homes in antiquity - but it is, in its own reality, first and last, a table.

The Lord gathers us at his table: there we discover his presence and bless the Father.

The table is at once in unity with our own tables - for a table is a reality of the ordinary world - and in union with the table of the heavenly banquet.

The table transcends the dichotomy, which is a false dichotomy for Christians, of the sacred and the profane: the domestic is the locus of the sacred.

This is a typical Greco-Roman altar found in Caesarea Philippi. Altars such as this one could be found in every building - including most homes - across the Roman world. Photo - Thomas O'Loughlin

A priestly people

The Lord has come to our table, we gather as a priestly people at his.

We can interpret the table in many ways, and interpreting it as ‘an altar' has been the most common, but our eucharistic thinking must start with what it is.

This use of the word ‘table' did, of course, produce allergic reactions to Catholics of an older generation: Protestants had the ‘holy table' or brought out a table for a ‘communion service'; we had ‘an altar' - and the physical object in a church-building was never referred to by any other name: it was an altar, and altars were for sacrifice!

But we still referred to ‘the mensa' in many of the rubrics; the shape never took on that of either an Old Testament nor a pagan altar; and it was expected that a vestigial four legs (just like the table I am writing upon) should appear as four columns or pilasters on the front of ‘the altar.'

There is only one problem with tables: you cannot just use them in any old way, they create their own space for us as dining animals!

How we humans behave

Let us imagine the smallest possible table gathering: two people meeting for a cup of coffee in a café.

Unless they are not focused on their own meeting - i.e. they want to watch a TV screen rather than talk to one another - they will take up positions opposite one another across the table.

The table creates a common space, a space for eating and talking and for sharing a common reality in a way that cannot take place when people sit side-by-side at a bar.

If you are alone, it is as easy to sit at a bar and eat, drink, read the paper or play with your phone as at a table (and you do not risk having a stranger sit opposite you); but if two people go to drink instant coffee or have a magnificent meal together, then they will face one another.

We watch each other eating, and around the table, we become a community - however transient - and not just two individuals.

This is also a space of deep communication between us as people: we can share our thoughts with our food, we can pick up all the richness of facial expression, tone, body language - and really communicate.

This is the communication we long for as human beings, not ‘the communications' of the media or of communications theory that is better described as information transfer.

The table is an intimate place - yet curiously, it is also a public space, a place of respect for one another (hence ‘table manners'), and a place where our humanity and our relations with other humans are enhanced.

The importance of the table is written as deep in our humanity as anything else: it is studied by behavioural scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists - but it suffices here to remind us of the references to tables in the Psalms (Ps 23:5; 79:19; or 123:3), the gospels (Mt 8:11; 9:10; 15:27; 26:7; 26:20 - and this is in just one gospel), and many early Christian stories.

The table is at the heart of our humanity and at the heart of our liturgy.

But what of a table with more than two people? The fundamental logic continues:

We arrange ourselves around the table and create roughly equal spaces between each other.

This continues until we have used up all the space around the table - and then, traditionally, we extend the table into the longer form we find at banquets, in refectories and messes, and even in domestic dining rooms where the table ‘pulls out' for those occasions when we have extra guests.

The Eucharist is our common table as Christians and our sacred table as guests of the Lord: it was to re-establish this fundamental table-logic that stood behind the changes of Vatican II.

The move in the president's direction was not that ‘he could face the people' in serried ranks of pews, nor be visible as a science teacher's bench must be visible to her class, nor as a lecturer on a podium - but so that if he stood at the Lord's table, everyone else could arrange themselves around that table as human beings do.

This seems impossible!

But is this not simply impossible?

How does one put hundreds of people at a packed Sunday Mass around a table?

People need to be in pews: which means that only the president can be at the table!

Well, first, the shift in the position of the table has been done in most buildings in a minimal way.

It was just ‘pulled out from the wall' rather than made the centre of space for the assembled banqueting community.

Second, in many places, it has been found possible to create a long table in an otherwise uncluttered space and arrange well over a hundred people to stand around it such that all could see they were gathered around the Lord's table.

And third, the Eucharist is a human-sized event - and a gathering of over a hundred should be considered very exceptional - as they were for most of Christian history.

However, it is important to note just how deeply set this reality of ‘being around the table' is within our tradition.

First of all, in the directions for gathering at meals that come from Jewish sources that are contemporaneous with the earliest Christian meals, we find that when the guests assembled, they had a cup of wine (‘the first cup'), and each said the blessing individually; then they went to the table, and there was another cup (‘the second cup') and now one person blessed for all.

The reason for the shift is explicitly spelt out: only when they were at the table were they a community, and so only then could one bless all.

Now think again about the Last Supper, the other meals of Jesus, the blessing of the cup in 1 Corinthians, or the ritual instructions for the community meals in the Didache.

Second, consider the words of the traditional Roman eucharistic prayer (Eucharistic Prayer I): Memento, Domine, famulorum famularumque tuarum et omnium circumstantium, … . A literal rendering (still too daring for translators!) supposes the arrangement of people that existed when the text was created: ‘Remember, O Lord, you male servants (famuli) and your female servants (famulae), indeed all who are standing around … '.

Could it be that the venerable Roman Canon assumes that the community, both men and women, are standing around the table of the Lord?

And third, we have from the patristic and early medieval periods directions for how the broken parts of the loaf are to be arranged on the paten, and these often assume that the arrangement around the paten's rim reflects the people around the table.

So, once again, table gathering is not a new ‘secular' or imported idea but a return to the depths of our own tradition.

A whole community gathered

If we start thinking about the new orientation not as ‘priest facing people' or ‘people looking at priest', but as the whole community gathered around an actual table we not only have a more authentic expression of the Eucharist, a deeper appreciation of the many prayer of the liturgy that suppose this physical arrangement, but we also how shallow has been our taking up of the reforms of Vatican II over the last half-century.

A fuller renewal, with a deeper appreciation of its inherent logic, is going to mean more shifting around in buildings a gradual exposure of the ideas so that people feel comfortable with them and see why we are abandoning the ‘theatre-and-stage' arrangements.

Moreover, and it will run into cultural problems in that many modern households do not eat together at a table at home and so lack a basic human experience upon which grace might build the community of the Lord's table.

A recent UK survey found that one in four households now have no dining table / kitchen table at which they take meals as a household - the human consequences for society are frightening!

Over the last few years there have been calls from some liturgists - including bishops and cardinals - for a return to the ‘ad orientem' position (i.e. president facing away from the assembly), while others, needing to reply to these calls, have tried to make out that the present arrangements are nigh on perfect!

But both the present arrangements of ‘the expert' being visible at his bench and pre-reformed notion of only one person at the table - in effect not facing the same way as the people, but turning his back on them and keeping them away from the table behind him and railings - are fundamentally flawed as being neither true to Christian tradition nor human nature.

If we think about how tables are part of our heritage, we might also appreciate why Pope Francis has insisted that there can be no question of going backwards as if the pre-Vatican rite and the current rite are simply ‘option.'

Sixty years ago, Sacrosanctum Concilium made a definite change upwards.

The theological bottom line is this: if the Logos has come to dwell among us (Jn 1:14), then every table of Christians is a place where one can rub up against him at one's elbow.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.
• His latest book is "Shaping the Assembly: How Our Buildings form us in Worship".

It was expected by most of the bishops that it would ratify a series of documents prepared by the curia covering a raft of issues - but in essence, this was seen as an exercise in tidying up a few loose ends that had been debated since 1870 - and the whole affair would be over by Christmas.

The expectation of many bishops as they arrived in Rome in early October was that the council would involve just that single trip.

Some suspected that the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 would be a most appropriate day on which such an event could end, and so the bishops (allowing some time to visit Gammarelli's, the papal tailors, for some new kit) would be home well before Christmas.

Those bishops expecting a short, rather technical council were right about one thing: it ended on the Immaculate Conception feast, except that they got the year wrong. It ended on 8 Dec 1965 - three years and four ‘sessions' later - making it the second longest council in the history of the western church.

Moreover, what we would now call its ‘outputs' - formal documents ranging from binding constitutions to messages of goodwill - dwarf in volume, range, and complexity the productions of any previous council.

‘The documents of Vatican II' is a hefty paperback!

Then, on 4 December 1963, came the first bombshell: Sacrosanctum concilium. The liturgy would change.

Now, sixty years on, we have enough distance to take stock of where we are in relation to it.

Mixed messages

Some months ago, Pope Francis annoyed many who express their great regard for pre-1969 liturgical practices.

Francis stated that they might be using those liturgical claims as an excuse for a much wider rejection of the teaching of Vatican II.

Such a rejection, the pope has made clear now in several documents, is simply not an option for Catholics.

This position is clear and consistent: an ecumenical council with the approbation of the Bishop of Rome is the highest teaching authority.

While one can find any number of individuals - and their websites - who disagree with the pope on this and who view Vatican II with a range of attitudes from being "a rant by trendy liberals in the ‘60s" to it being the demonic invasion "foretold in Revelation 12," the situation is otherwise when it comes to bishops!

However, to a man, they are staunch supporters of Vatican II and add a few footnotes to it in everything they write.

But, one suspects that for some of them, this is simply ‘the party line.'

In fact, we all know that for some bishops - and quite a number of presbyters and deacons - their acceptance of Vatican II is little more than ticking the obligatory box and expressing the right sentiments.

There are many who would like to skip the council as a blip, and, since that is impossible, give it as minimal an interpretation as they can.

Would it be good to face this?

The idea that all the bishops appointed or all teachers in seminaries in the last 60 years would be equally enthusiastic about the vision of Vatican II is, of course, an illusion, albeit a pious one.

Even the credal text of Nicaea in 325 - which was, after all, what we today would refer to as a ‘convergent text' - left many of its signatories wondering whether they had gone too far.

But Catholic episcopal unanimity is a deeply entrenched illusion that has been fostered with care since the time of the Reformation.

While Protestants, those ‘others,' might speak with many voices and have ever more divisions, we Catholics speak clearly with one voice and all in harmony with and under Peter.

That was the theory; and for many, that is still the theory, and it is just that: a theory.

One has but to read some of the pastoral letters of several bishops - and they are present in every episcopal conference - to see that there are ‘church parties' as alive and well in the Catholic Church as they are in every other Christian communion!

The same range of attitudes can be found among presbyters - and the tensions can be felt in any number of parishes.

The claim, plus those few quotes from Vatican II documents, is that Vatican II is wholly accepted.

The reality is very different.

This pretence is unhealthy.

In a way, Pope Francis, in pointing out that liturgical ‘preferences' were/are being used as an analogue for rejecting the council, has lanced a boil.

Perhaps the time has come for an open discussion of whether or not we accept, partially accept, or reject what was set in train by Vatican II.

This would require jettisoning the myth that we all think ‘with Peter,' but it might inject honesty and realism into many debates in our communion.

A couple of decades ago, we still imagined that a ‘few bad apples' - with reference to sexual abuse by clerics - could be dealt with ‘discreetly.'

Now we know it was not only morally wrong but a mistake.

We might learn from that mistake.

There are deep tensions over the legacy of the Council.

Within the church, there has been a great deal of laziness in regard to studying its implications and this results in confused messages and practices.

There are some whose theological vision and/or pastoral approach is tantamount to a rejection of Vatican II, and it might be healthy to bring this into the open.

Bringing it into the open would indeed be in line with the pilgrim People of God ecclesiology advocated by the council.

Moment or process?

Some years ago, there was a wonderfully vibrant debate at a conference of theologians.

The debate concerned whether Vatican II, and its subsequent enactments was to be construed ‘strictly' in terms of what is written in its documents or was to be seen as the beginning of a process that began with John XXIII, window-pole in hand, and then continued with ‘the spirit of Vatican II.'

The debate rumbled on from the lecture room to the meals to the evening relaxation - without a clear victor.

What did become clear was that this was a clash of hermeneutical perspectives.

It is a version of the question as to whether the US Constitution should be interpreted in terms of its original eighteen-century moment - and to accept ‘the mind' of the framers as a limitation - or whether it should be interpreted in the light of the evolution of society and needs.

Likewise, this is the question of whether a text - even a sacred one - somehow contains the truth or is to be seen as a momentary witness within a trajectory?

These distinctions often overlap with the social binary of ‘conservative' / ‘liberal', but they are not identical, nor can they be mapped one onto the other.

Does Vatican II condemn us to theological ‘culture wars'?

From another perspective, is it possible that there is a genuine conciliar hermeneutic within theology - or are these approaches a function of individuals' epistemology?

I am convinced that there is a conciliar, and strictly theological, hermeneutic that has to be applied - and has been applied historically - to conciliar judgements and that this approach has to map onto our theology of tradition rather than be justified by an appeal either to a particular view of what constitutes a right judgement, a criteriology, or to a wider position within jurisprudence.

The argument can be sketched out in this way.

The church is a community ‘stretching out' over time, and so we never experience more than our moment - a tiny ‘slice' of the reality, a still within a movie.

In this, our koinonia is fundamentally different from a political institution whose public commitment is to a set of rules and procedures.

A community - as a living organism - is constantly changing, both for better and for worse, and no moment can be considered ‘golden' or definitive.

The Spirit is ever active - and there was no moment of a divine ‘go slow' such as after the last canonical book was written, the last ‘apostle' died, or some event such as Christianity becoming a religio licita in 313.

The Spirit, celebrated as active by Luke at Pentecost in Jerusalem, was celebrated as equally active at the council in 1962, and will be celebrated as just as active in the synod in 2023.

Only at the eschaton will the community ‘possess the truth' and, meanwhile, over the whole of her life, the Church relies on the leading and guiding of the Spirit.

But the Church is also truly human - and like the Logos made flesh exists in history - and so the Spirit is a presence, not a mechanism.

Similarly, the object of our koinonia is not the community itself (such as is the case in a political or judicial body), but the mission entrusted to it, which it must carry out ‘in season and out of season' (2 Tim 4:2).

The community, therefore, does not know the exact parameters of its task tomorrow any more than it knew yesterday what are today's challenges.

God, and our following, is full of surprises!

Moreover, when the church reflects - in a local community, a regional synod, or ecumenically in a council - her ‘object' is always beyond definition.

When the church imagines that God, or the mystery of the Christ, or the mystery of salvation can be defined, she has forgotten the very first element of monotheism: the divine is always greater than can be imagined, and all our statements are momentary stutters.

We need to refine, renew, and re-invigorate them continually - once they get ‘stuck,' they rapidly lose their value.

We know this when we refuse to surrender to textual literalism or to confuse revelation with a book, but it is a temptation to falsehood that we must shun as an insidious virus.

If we freeze the moment of a council, we deny that through its dynamic influence, the Spirit might be active now in the Church.

Moreover, Nicaea was revisited by Constantinople, then by Chalcedon, then by any number of Western councils - until in the aftermath of Trent, we had one Christology being preached by the Jesuits - the Sacred Heart - and another by the Redemptorists - the Merciful Redeemer - and any number of combinations.

But these were at odds not just with one another but with the Nicene vision.

But we lived with this because each theology was a sincere attempt to get around the problems of late medieval scholasticism.

Our responses to the divine cannot be grasped in any one way.

Our expressions of our worship and its abstraction as teaching constantly evolves.

We never step into the same river twice, but there is a river for we live within it.

Vatican II was but a moment in the process, and being loyal to it (as to any council) is a dynamic affair of seeking out, in the Spirit, its spirit rather than its letter.

In this sense, it does not matter whether we are six or sixty years after Vatican II: this was the last time we came together in such a meeting, and so we must journey in its wake - far more elusive than its text - until there is another.

This constant journeying is not only what will allow us to grow towards a deeper life together within the Catholic Church but is the way forward in our relations with other churches.

… never deformed?

There is an adage that ‘the church is ever in need of reform but has never been deformed.'

This is similar to the dilemma of the washing powder brands who are always pitching ‘the new, improved formula' powder but are unwilling to admit that the older stuff was not as good as the competition and might even have been useless!

Three and half centuries of telling Protestants that they were mistaken when the said Rome had lost its way (e.g. in using an academics' language for worship), and nine centuries of telling the East that there was no basis for their complaints about what the west did in either practice (e.g. introducing unleavened wafers at the Eucharist) or theology (e.g. adding ‘and the Son' to the creed) had left their mark.

When Vatican II wanted to introduce changes, it felt compelled to do so while insisting that there was nothing wrong with what was already there!

This, perhaps naturally, produced a reaction to the council's innovations akin to the mechanics' maxim: ‘if it ain't broke, don't fix it!'

If something was ‘fit for purpose' one day, why was it unfit the next?

And, if the council's teaching was the polar opposite of what went before (e.g. Unitatis redintegratio (1964) compared with Mortalium animos (1928)), then were we wrong then [i.e. in the old position] or are we wrong now [i.e. having changed it]?

The position was, and is, made more confusing in that in most documents - indeed, in texts still being written - there is a lengthy praise of the older position to show, ingeniously, that nothing has changed.

The effect of this strategy - saying nothing has changed [when it has] and we have never erred [when we must have or we could not have had to make such drastic changes] - is dispiriting and, more perniciously, generates a suspicion that it is but a game of words or ‘the fashion' of those in office.

It would be far better both for our appreciation of the Council and its changes, and for our ongoing relationships with other churches if we just put our hands up and confessed: yes, we did get things wrong in the past, confusions and bad practices did embed themselves, and for every development of doctrine and practice that we find valuable there was a another that is corrupt.

Only when openly asserting our inherited defects can we appreciate that change was needed and that the result is a true reform.

Moreover, as a conscious attempt ‘to renew all in the Christ' (Eph 1:10), Vatican II is more than just an option.

In short, after 60 years, implementing Sacrosanctum concilium is still very much a work in progress.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.
• His latest book is "Shaping the Assembly: How Our Buildings form us in Worship".

The last time the church said it was going to make changes was in 1965.

Fifty-eight years ago. In the meantime, all the changes to be seen were basically meaningless ones.

Not because change was forbidden.

On the contrary.

The Vatican documents of 1965 oozed theological life.

They were clearly meant to dispense with the church of the Middle Ages, to bring the church into the modern world rooted in Scripture and the model of Jesus.

But as the ocean liner that brought so many of the American Catholic hierarchy back from Rome disembarked, the New York press corps, snapping pictures and shouting questions, suffered one bishop after another shrugging their questions off.

Nothing had really changed, it seemed. Nothing newsworthy, at least.

In essence, the assumption was correct.

Whatever changes the people had wanted from the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council were, it seemed, formless, silent, lost in the bustle of a busy church frozen in a medieval mind.

Instead, after 400 years without a council of reform, the kinds of changes the people had expected from this council lay yet in Rome, drying in wet ink there and largely ignored here.

Even more to the point, few, if any, priests taught the council documents to their congregations.

Few if any priests admitted that they themselves had not bothered to read the documents either.

Oh, a few churches redesigned their confession boxes and a few more took down the altar rails, but really, other than that and the move to the vernacular in all liturgical events — nothing much did happen.

Most of the changes were window dressing.

No one talked about a reunion with the Christian family of multiple denominations, for instance. No one moved to include women as fully baptized members of the church.

Quickly chosen lay consultants and episcopal advisers were disposed of in short order.

The lay ministers that had been so long awaited were educated in local seminaries by the thousands and then shrunk quietly away in great numbers, too, as fewer and fewer of them were really deployed in the ministry of the church itself.

The male church in large part stayed male despite the few women allowed in minor offices like readers or altar servers "as long as men were not available."

The prayers and pronouns of the church pronounced the church to be male in every particle while women remained invisible and left the church in large numbers quietly now.

Why did nothing change when change was called for?

Well, to be clear, the 2,000-2,500 bishops from around the world who attended this 21st ecumenical council voted yes for all of its documents, but once back on home soil, many simply ignored them, that's why.

The two popes, John XXIII and Paul VI, who had led the way to these times died. The popes who had called the Second Vatican Council to bring the church into the modern world lived on in the hearts of the new church in the pews.

But both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI resisted the full force of Vatican II. Though they never denounced the council, they never really promoted it either.

This synodality is different. Continue reading

• Joan Chittister is a Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania, Joan Chittister is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer on topics of justice, peace, human rights, women's issues and contemporary spirituality in the church and in society.

[That's leaving aside Sixtus V. He's the hard-nosed pope who, in just five years (1585-1590), created the Roman Curia that still exists today in only slightly modified form, and the one who totally transformed the city of Rome. But why digress?]

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected to the Chair of Peter on October 28, 1958, and died less than five years later on June 3, 1963.

His lasting legacy can be summed up as Second Vatican Council.

John was already 77 years old and just three months into his short pontificate when he announced plans to hold the Council, catching many of the Church's cardinals and Vatican officials completely off guard.

The Good Pope, as many called him, got the conciliar ball rolling, but he only lived long enough to open the first of what would eventually be the Four Sessions of Vatican II.

He did that on October 11, 1962, a day that has been hailed as one of the most momentous in the modern history of Christianity.

And then, eight months later, he was gone.

An inspiration of the Holy Spirit

Pope John was beatified during the Great Jubilee of 2000 and officially declared a saint in 2014, did not change the Church dramatically during his four years and eight months as Supreme Pontiff.

That is, he did not make any significant modifications to Church practice or structures, even if he did strike a new and refreshing tone for Catholicism the world over.

Rather, it was the Council that he convened — through an inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he said — that began a process of reform in the Church more significant than anything since the 16th century Council of Trent.

John's process, which Paul VI tried in various ways to continue during his 15-year-long pontificate (not always successfully), was brought to port at some point during the long reign of John Paul II.

There is no doubt that Pope Francis is trying to revive the Vatican II project of reform that John XXIII set in motion. But sixty years after the Italian pope's death, some wonder if it might be too late.

The fervour to give new life to a more dynamic sort of "People's Church", as the late Vatican II enthusiast and chronicler Robert Blair Kaiser called it, is nowhere near as alive today as it was even twenty-five or thirty years ago.

The current pope's audacious gamble to make synodality (all the baptised — clergy and laity — "walking together") a constitutive part of the Church's very nature and reason for being has aroused great interest.

But that interest is found mainly among older Catholics — the so-called "Vatican II generation".

That's not to say that no young people have been involved in Francis' project.

It's just that, compared to those over the age of 60, they are in the minority.

To put this generational gap into context, consider that only one man alive today was a bishop at the time of John's death. He's 101-year-old José de Jesús Sahagún de la Parra of Mexico.

The temptation to turn back

It's no secret that the Catholic Church — like all the mainline Christian Churches and communities — is experiencing a drop in membership, a crisis in leadership, deep ideological divisions, and uncertainty about how to best carry out its "missionary" or "evangelising" presence in our rapidly and frighteningly changing societies.

So much has happened in the world and the Church during the 60 years since Pope John died that it's tempting to long for the good old days before everything became so uncertain, complicated, and unravelled.

And, honestly, going backwards is not only the temptation of traditionalist Catholics.

The so-called reform-minded types also tend, at times, to want to return to the old debates of the post-Vatican II period that they ended up on the wrong side of, and fight them all over again.

Meanwhile, the young people.... where are they?

Again, it's not like there are no longer any Catholics under the age of 50 or 60. But they are fewer and fewer in number.

That goes for those involved in the traditionalist groups in the Church, as well, which are just more clever and adroit than the "progressives" at marketing themselves as thriving communities, especially on social media.

But attempts to recapture or recreate a bygone era almost always end up badly.

There is no going back — not to the halcyon days of the 1960s Council nor the "golden age" of Catholicism that preceded it.

A prophet in his time

The God of history moves us forward.

Always.

Just read the history of salvation in the Hebrew scriptures, especially the story of the Exodus.

God freed the Israelites from their captivity in Egypt and led them into the desert.

There they would wander for 40 years before finally reaching the land God promised them.

All the while, they defied God and tried to find ways to turn back.

They did not trust in God's Word as it was spoken through the prophets, Moses chief among them.

Many believe that John XXIII was also a prophet in his time.

The Holy Spirit prompted him to move the Church forward just as the world — the one that "God so loved..." and still loves — was also moving forward.

But moving forward means we cannot take everything with us on the journey, only that which is essential, useful, and faithful to the mission.

We must let go of many things (including structures, procedures, and attitudes) that are collapsing, dying, and no longer relevant.

Yes, the journey the Church has been on these past six decades has been extremely rough and very uncertain at times.

We've probably stopped more times than we would like to admit.

And we've even turned back.

But this is all part of the plan of God, in the presence and workings of the Holy Spirit.

So as we remember Pope John with gratitude on the 60th anniversary of his death, let us also give thanks and lend a helping hand to Pope Francis, who is trying to move us forward once more.

"Saint John XXIII, pray for your Jesuit successor, and pray for the Church you served so faithfully."

• Robert Mickens is LCI Editor in Chief.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Maguire, who has died aged 88, defiantly and tirelessly advocated for the underdog using his most powerful tool: charisma.

Candid and controversial, he brought a legion of new adherents to the church with his distinctive approach and unwavering commitment to feeding and housing the poor, the hungry and the homeless of Melbourne.

He also regularly butted heads with the church hierarchy, who found his forthright, populist approach to Catholicism difficult to contain and who eventually drove him from his parish after almost four decades.

His enthusiastic embodiment of the principles of Vatican II, a modernised Catholicism initiated by Pope John XXIII in 1958, led him to clash with the church's more traditional members, among them Cardinal George Pell who, according to Maguire, considered Vatican II devotees to be "cafeteria Catholics".

"Some people have said I'm a saint; to others I'm more the devil incarnate," he told his biographer Sue Williams in 2013.

At 77, having spent 38 years as priest of St Peter and Paul in South Melbourne, Maguire found himself without a parish. He had declined a request from then archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, to retire at 75 but fought the church for two years before giving way.

Maguire vigorously contested allegations by the church that he had mismanaged parish funds.

Charity and Compassion

Without a pulpit, Maguire turned his formidable vigour to sharing his message of charity and compassion in other ways and found social media, radio, television and online forums the ideal tools.

He had almost 126,000 Twitter followers ("The Larrikin priest … patron of the unloved and unlovely"), 37,000 views of his cover version of Kanye West's Jesus Walks, and sold bobblehead dolls to raise money for the Father Bob Foundation.

In 2014, in an effort to gauge the happiness of Australians, he organised a competition offering as first prize the chance to work in one of the foundation's soup kitchens.

In May 2022 Maguire criticised the NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, for his government's decision to pass voluntary assisted dying laws.

Williams remembered Maguire as a wise, caring, smart and very funny man, although trying to pin him down became one of her most difficult assignments.

"It was like trying to catch a shooting star, and every time you felt you had a firm grip, you just had to close your eyes and hang on, with absolutely no idea where you'd end up," she said. Read more

The pope, on February 20, ordered the Dicastery for the Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (DDWDS) to publish a rescript that says bishops must get Vatican approval before they allow priests in their dioceses to celebrate the Old Latin Mass.

The new rescript and a DDWDS letter to bishops in December 2021 were issued to help clarify and properly implement Traditionis custodes, the "motu proprio" Francis published in July 2021.

That text reversed Summorum Pontificum, a "motu proprio" from 2007 in which Benedict XVI invented the novel idea that there could actually be "two forms of the one Roman Rite" — one called extraordinary (pre-Vatican II) and the other ordinary (post-Vatican II). This theo-linguistical sleight of hand basically allowed for the perpetuation of a rite that had been completely re-ordered and reformed.

Stomping on the authority of local bishops?

When Traditionis custodes came out, traditionalists were furious with the current pope and now they are even angrier with him over the new rescript.

They and certain commentators who continue to look for any opportunity to discredit him have accused Francis of stomping on the rightful authority that local bishops have to regulate the liturgy in their respective dioceses.

Such accusations have no merit whatsoever.

In fact, it was Benedict XVI who took such authority away from the bishops when he issued Summorum Pontificum, which stipulated that a priest required "no permission from the Apostolic See or his own ordinary" to celebrate in the Tridentine Rite.

Moreover, the late pope put the now-defunct Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei" in charge of regulating — and, it turned out, "promoting" — use of the Old Rite everywhere throughout the world.

This commission was established in 1988 to facilitate a return of traditionalists who had followed the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre into schism.

Thankfully, Pope Francis disbanded the "Ecclesia Dei" Commission in 2019.

Andrea Grillo, professor at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute at Sant'Anselmo in Rome, went even further to debunk the ideas that Francis had curtailed the authority of local bishops.

He noted that such authority is to regulate the Church's liturgy (ritual) in their territories.

But that ritual is only the current reformed Mass. Traditionis custodes, Grillo explained, abolished the fictitious ritual dualism of the so-called extraordinary and ordinary forms.

"The Council Fathers perceived the urgent need for a reform"

Thus, there is only one rite.

Anything that deviates from that — which is what the Tridentine Mass does — is an exception and that is why it must be approved by the Apostolic See.

Its use should also be rare, as Paul VI (and most bishops at Vatican II) envisioned when the late pope begrudgingly conceded to requests immediately following the liturgical reform that elderly priests be allowed to continue celebrating with the last (1962) edition of the unreformed Roman Rite.

The bishops who attended Vatican Council II voted overwhelmingly in support of the constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, which begins with these words:

This sacred Council has several aims in view: it desires to impart an ever-increasing vigour to the Christian life of the faithful; to adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change; to foster whatever can promote union among all who believe in Christ; to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church. The Council, therefore, sees particularly cogent reasons for undertaking the reform and promotion of the liturgy (SC, 1).

Cardinal Arthur Roche, the DDWDS prefect, reiterated this in his December 2021 letter to bishops around the world.

"One fact is undeniable," he said.

"The Council Fathers perceived the urgent need for a reform so that the truth of the faith as celebrated might appear ever more in all its beauty, and the People of God might grow in full, active, conscious participation in the liturgical celebration," the cardinal stated, making specific reference to Sacrosanctum Concilium, 14.

Not all the bishops — indeed not all Catholics — were pleased with how the liturgical reform turned out in the end.

But no one could have imagined that 50 years later, a Roman Pontiff would allow a tiny group of people — Catholics with fundamental disagreements over the general thrust of Vatican II and even specific reforms stemming from it — to live in a parallel liturgical (and ecclesiological) universe within the Church, and even allow them to promote its further spread.

Thankfully, another Roman Pontiff has moved to phase out this anomaly completely. Because, pure and simple, it was never the intention of Vatican Council II that it exist in the first place.

• Robert Mickens is LCI Editor in Chief.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

And there are the books by those bishops and cardinals who refer to the late pope and former doctrinal chief in support of their views on the issues at the center of the ecclesial debate today.

Not to mention the flood of supposedly news-making interviews some of these prelates have been giving.

This publishing spree began with remarkable speed in the very first hours after Benedict's death, even before his funeral was celebrated.

This indicates how the media can dominate intra-ecclesial conversations - a point that Ratzinger understood and emphasized often, one that his followers should have received and applied to themselves.

In part, this is all about marketing. But it's also Church politics, vanity and personal revenge, although it's not clear which is more important.

Benedict XVI's death has marked the end of an era and has triggered a "jump start for the conclave", even though Pope Francis is still fully in charge of the Church's governance and shows no signs of slowing down or that he's ready to step aside, as his German predecessor did.

End of the first post-Vatican II era

The first post-Vatican II era has come to a definitive end with Ratzinger's death.

It marks another point of transition within the context of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which was called by John XXIII.

When Pope John died in 1963, the papacy and the conclave were part of a larger ecclesial context dominated by Council.

The conclave that elected Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini) to succeed the "good pope" was part of the conciliar dynamics between primacy, conciliarity, and collegiality-synodality.

In some sense, the situation of Pope Francis' pontificate almost ten years on, which coincides with the beginning of the crucial phase of the synodal process (2023-2024) is similar to the one of the Catholic Church in 1962-1963 at the beginning of Vatican II.

But there is a big difference today.

It has to do with the way in which the synodal process could change the Church.

It is this, and not the bickering about Benedict XVI's legacy, that is the real target of the some of the statements that have from a number of prominent churchmen these last few weeks. One example was the late Cardinal George Pell's article in The Spectator, written shortly before he died, in which he called the synod a "toxic nightmare".

In a memorandum which he wrote and circulated under a pseudonym in March 2022 the same Australian cardinal warned that "if the national or continental synods are given doctrinal authority, we will have a new danger to worldwide Church unity" and that "if there was no Roman correction of such heresy, the Church would be reduced to a loose federation of local Churches, holding different views, probably closer to an Anglican or Protestant model, than an Orthodox model".

Council and Synod: same but different

The current situation is not the same as that preceding the opening of a new council like Vatican II, which would be impossible today with more than 5,000 bishops and superiors of male religious orders with the right to participate.

Then there is the problem of how representative an assembly of bishops and superiors of male religious orders would be for the Church of today.

Still, the prerequisites for a conciliar event or an ecclesial event with council-like consequences are there, where what has happened up to now in the councils precedes it.

But the "synodal process" now underway is taking place according to a completely different preparation compared to the one that took place between 1959 and 1962 to prepare Vatican II.

The synodal process is much more decentralized and is involving the entire People of God - at that those who could and desired to participate.

This process is also taking place in a Church where, compared to the time of Vatican II, the institutional loneliness of the pope is much more evident: for Benedict XVI when he resigned, for Pope Francis today.

The Catholic Church today needs new ways to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That proclamation will have to be made more and more by the People of God and less by the clerical elites.

Those who appeal to Benedict XVI are understandably scared by the undeniable fact that the Church is trying to find those new ways and that will require a new form for the Church.

It's clear from the very title of the "working document for the continental stage" that general secretariat of the Synod has prepared: "Enlarge the space of your tent" (Is 54:2).

Attempts to reset the narrative

There are a number of key issues at stake: some kind of de-hierarchisation of the Church's government, a different role for the episcopate, and the relationship between unity and diversity in the one Catholic Church.

One of the questions is what kind of regulation will be part of this new form of the Church, given the highly pluralistic ecclesial system such as the one in which we are and will be part of.

Surely some of the movements of the last few weeks, for example the book-length interview by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2012-2017), are part of the attempts to accelerate and prepare the next conclave.

But no one (or perhaps only one) knows when the next conclave is going to be.

We all know that the Synod is underway and now entering the crucial stage. Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod's secretary general, put it this way in a recent interview with the Italian Catholic magazine Il Regno:

"The Synod has already begun. According to a new experience. The Holy Father opened it in October 2021 and now there are various stages. The phase completed in August was not a preparatory phase for the celebration of the Synod, but is already part of the synodal process."

The immediate target of those who are trying to reset the narrative in post-Ratzinger Catholicism is not one particular issue or another.

The target is the Synod itself.

• 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.

Yet few organizations have such hierarchically clear levels.

The clue is in the name: the Church claims to be hierarchical (in the original sense of its having a divinely-appointed government and in the popular sense of ranks in a pyramid); other power pyramids are only "hierarchical" by analogy.

Vatican II used the image of the Church as the People of God to emphasize that it is all the baptized, as one community, that witnesses, preaches, works, suffers, and prays.

Put another way, the basis of the Church would be centred around baptism, not ordination.

A pilgrim Church

A Vatican II Church would also be a pilgrim Church; it has not yet reached its goal, so it cannot think of itself as a societas perfecta.

In the older church understanding, the Church was the perfect beacon that not only other religious organisations, but all other societies, should imitate.

Vatican II saw the community of the baptized as serving the larger human family, growing, learning, and humbly aware of its incompleteness.

But after several centuries of triumphalism, taking the pilgrim image on board has been just too much for many of us.

Many of the divisions within contemporary Catholicism can be seen in terms of a willingness, on the one hand, and a reluctance, on the other, to take this image of the Church as a "pilgrim people" to heart.

This is the background to Pope Francis' repeated calls for a "synodal Church".

His hope is that synodality will give flesh to Vatican II's vision.

When we are faced with new images of the Church, our instinct is to look backwards to "the early Church", to see if we can draw lessons or inspiration from there.

This longing to recover the golden age of the first Christians is not new.

Already in the early second century, when writing the Acts of the Apostles, Luke presents us with this vision of unity, harmony, and dedication:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved (Acts 2:42-7).

Luke raises some important questions.

How accurate is his picture of the first Christian communities?

Does looking backwards reflect a Christian vision? And while it is rhetorically powerful, is it pastorally effective?

The goal of the pilgrimage of faith lies ahead, not behind us (Photo by Thomas O'Loughlin).

However, if it were not for the conflicts in the Aegean churches, at least a generation before Luke's time, we might never have had the letters of Paul.

There were disputes over religious practices and an unwillingness to welcome one another as equals (1 Corinthians) and about what was to be believed and expected (1 Thessalonians).

We know of arguments between followers of Jesus who were Jews and those who were Gentiles, over circumcision and the sharing of resources.

Abuses over hospitality and support for the "apostles and prophets" generated the first internal Church regulations, and it wasn't long before the term "christmonger" was coined for ministers greedy for money.

There were "clergy on the make" within a few decades of the crucifixion and several centuries before "clergy" formally emerged.

Also, far from holding all in common, the wealthy kept their slaves. And most did not like practices that challenged the social status quo, such as sharing at the Eucharistic table.

It was not all 'sweetness and light' in the early churches

In other words, the first Christians were as challenged by the Word as we are today.

Far from being plaster-cast saints, it was their willingness to keep trying to live the Gospel in a culture which saw them as fools and odd-balls that was their claim to being "among the saints" (Eph 5:3).

Graeco-Roman civilization looked back to "a golden age" since when things had been going downhill. Christians were different.

They looked to the future: to the coming of the Son of Man.

At the heavenly banquet - to which they looked forward ­- people would be gathered from north, south, east and west (Lk 13:29). They were on a journey.

This colours our thinking about the Church, and about synodality.

We do not imagine that there was a perfect time which we are seeking to re-create, but we, confident in God's help, ask what we should become. The Gospel of Matthew puts it this way:

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me (Mt 25:34-6).

We are not engaged in a restoration project.

We have to restore our church buildings periodically, but living the life of faith must not be confused with a restoration project. (Photo by Thomas O'Loughlin).

Nostalgia is not a Christian virtue

Luke's device of imagining a perfect past as a blueprint - a technique he borrowed from Greek history writing - engages the human propensity for nostalgia: "We shall not see their like again!"

But the sense that it was somehow easier for the first Christians — that they belonged to the "age of the saints", to "the springtime" — disempowers us.

Inherent in this is a lack of faith that our moment is as beloved of the Creator who holds it in being as that of those called to witness in the first days.

The times have changed, but the call to follow and witness - amid the particular difficulties of our age - is always the same.

Those early Aegean churches and our churches today are one in hearing: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe" (Jn 20:29).

Nostalgia is, in many ways, the antithesis of the courage of faith.

This was the point Pope Francis wanted make last June when he lampooned seminarians who love wearing lace.

The past always seems to be a safe place to run to and take refuge, but faith requires that we push out into the future, trusting in God's grace being with us.

We are, as we claim to believe, more valuable than many sparrows! (Lk 12:7).

Diagnosing deeper problems in the Catholic Church

That said, we should not just criticize the seminarians who want to wear lace surplices and whose nostalgia is for an imaginary past where they were not seen as odd-balls but as "valuable people".

We should study in detail - a task that will need sociologists and psychologists - what it is that makes presbyteral ministry (as currently configured) so attractive to these young men so intent on the past rather than the present.

Such a study might reveal important illnesses besetting the Catholic Church today.

We should look on this nostalgia as the presenting-problem that might reveal some of the problems the up-coming synod needs to address.

If we are attracting un-suitable candidates for ministry, perhaps the problem lies in our forms of ministry. Perhaps, we need to change the ecclesial structures of that ministry.

Discipleship

Something else distinguishes the pilgrim people from the societas perfecta: discipleship.

Until the 1930s most mainstream Churches were united in thinking of belonging in terms of identification and the acceptance of specific beliefs.

The matter of identification was seen in their desire to be recognized within legal frameworks: ideally, establishment, but at least giving their leaders a say in education or social policy.

Likewise, individual belonging was presented as assent to certain propositions. Churches and denominations had their "truths to be accepted" (the credenda).

There was a list of boxes to be ticked.

Then came movements such as Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Identification and assent to propositions were no longer enough to "belong" - as was recognized by theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

One had to become a disciple.

The disciple - more an "apprentice" than a "student" - knows that one does not just talk the talk. but must also walk the walk.

And this is the walk of the pilgrim.

Discipleship costs. Or as our formal memory (Mark 10:38) presents the desire of disciples looking towards their destination: "You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

The "synodal Church" is not an exercise in nostalgia, an attempt to recreate an illusory early Church without disagreement or dissent.

Pope Francis' dream seems to be that synodality will bring about Vatican II's vision of a pilgrim Church of disciples "among the saints" — not because they are perfect, but because they are humble witnesses to the Gospel of mercy.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Now known as Dun Laoghaire, it is also where most passenger ships arrive at and leave from Dublin both then and now.

The idea of the Kingstown Pier as a disappointed bridge, unable to go all the way across the Irish Sea, says much about our many journeys.

And for those of us with an Irish background, it also tells of our ancestors who, forced by circumstance, nevertheless had courage to leave home.

Piers take you beyond the restrictions of the coastline.

They offer a different view and, most importantly, some bracing fresh air.

Bridges, on the other hand, take you over obstacles from one side to the other and enable you to continue the journey.

The Second Vatican Council of the mid-1960s could at first be considered a pier, a vantage point from where, leaving the safety of the shore, new visions could be seen.

John XXIII talked of "opening windows", many of which had been screwed shut for years.

There was excitement in the air, a springtime of expectancy, openness and confidence.

The Council remained no more than a pier for some.

Because of the anxiety, this new vision raised, they sought to make sure the pier never became a bridge.

At the first opportunity, they headed for the safety of the shore.

They seemed to disregard the words found in the Book of Proverbs: "Where there is no vision, the people perish" (29,18).

Kevin Kelly, in his book Fifty years receiving Vatican II, described the Council as "a continuing event" — in other words, a pier becoming a bridge.

That is, it's still leading us somewhere.

It is a gift that has been given.

• by being who we profess to be, a community brought together through the love of Christ.
• by listening to each others' story, sensitive to others' joys and sorrows, being willing to walk awhile in their company; not being afraid.
• by talking with each other, by being with each other and by praying together with sincerity; in that way we make our parish community real, we love one another.

"What is parish"

Too often our view of parish is a blend of motorway service station and imposed obligation.

Where is the outreach?

Where is the living liturgy that goes beyond patterns of words to offer inspiration to the people?

Given the increasing crisis in vocations to the priesthood, one of the crucial discussions we should be having, both priests and people, revolves around just three words — "What is parish?" For only when we have some grasp of what is, after all, a complex structure, can we continue bridge-building.

One thing we easily forget is that, although it has become a convenient construct of organization within a diocese, a parish needs a great deal of effort to make it a living, vital community.

Francis of Assisi, the inspiration of our current Bishop of Rome, directly said to the first friars, "You only know as much as you do!"

A parish of passive attenders falls short of the mark.

Not so long ago, those who shared in the Eucharist knew each other by name, they were "local". But not necessarily the case today given our increased mobility.

We are often away from our parish home and become visitors in another place sharing their Eucharist, welcome guests at the table of the Lord.

We need to find new ways forward and not be afraid of change.

• Chris McDonnell is a retired headteacher from England and a regular contributor to La Croix International.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Except that we're not talking about condemnations emanating from the pope. Instead, the condemnations found in world beacon of the liberal press are often hurled against the pope.

The latest instance was the October 12th column by Ross Douthat titled "How Catholics Became Prisoners of Vatican II".

Published for the 60th anniversary of John XXIII's opening of Second Vatican Council (1962-65), it offered the usual post hoc, propter hocnarrative on Vatican II that is typical of those who identify Catholicism with the trajectories of post-industrial, secularized Western societies and who completely ignore the global Church.

In keeping with his personal style, Douthat also made no effort to give a fair presentation of the Council's theology to readers of one of the most important newspapers in the world.

This particular column elicited very effective responses on social media, especially a sharp rebuttal on Twitter by David Gibson.

But a column published in print and online in the New York Times evidently carries some kind of journalistic infallibility, one that's even less subject to scrutiny than papal infallibility.

And the audience reached is infinitely larger than any twitter thread or blog post.

Due deference to the pope?

I once debated Ross Douthat in public.

It was in 2018 at Fordham University, a very interesting event followed by a cordial dinner together.

Trying to talk about theology with him was frustrating because his real expertise is American politics, culture, and society. And that is the filter through which he interprets anything that happens in the Church and in the Vatican.

But he also commits a fair amount of intellectual malpractice.

His book on Pope Francis (or rather against the pope) listed sources that would not be acceptable in an undergraduate students' term paper.

One of the genuinely humourous things was to see how Douthat characterized Cardinal Walter Kasper as a dangerous liberal whom Pope Francis was using to deviate from orthodox doctrine and break apart the Church through the Synod assemblies of 2014-2015 and the post-synodal exhortation Amoris laetitia.

I suggest Douthat ask German Catholics if Kasper is a dangerous liberal, especially in light of the cardinal's repeatedly stinging criticism of their "Synodal Path".

But Germany is a bit too far out of the way from the Connecticut-New York-Washington D.C. corridor, as we all know.

One of the most memorable moments in Douthat's pronouncements on the Catholic Church was during the television interview he gave to American journalist Charlie Rose in 2009.

When Rose asked him about his relationship with the papacy, Douthat replied that Catholics must have a certain amount of deference towards the pope.

Those were the days of Benedict XVI, of course. Douthat evidently forgot all about such deference when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to the papacy in 2103.

Indeed, during these last nine-and-a-half years, he has accused Francis of a number of theological heresies and canonical crimes.

In doing so, he has gone far beyond the criticism liberal Catholics levelled against John Paul II and Benedict XVI, popes that were closer to his theo-political views. But don't blame John Paul and Benedict for this.

Douthat's paeans to them should be taken no more seriously than his screeds against Francis.

Fellow travelers in the neo-traditionalist Catholic right in the USA

Here are just a few examples of titles his op-eds in the New York Times: "The Plot to Change Catholicism" (October 17, 2015), "Expect the Inquisition" (September 20, 2017), "Pope Francis Is Beloved. His Papacy Might Be a Disaster" (March 16, 2018), "What Did Pope Francis Know?" (August 28, 2018), "The Slow Road to Catholic Schism" (September 14, 2019).

Douthat's columns are not the only ones that have painted a certain image of Pope Francis and of the Catholic Church to the readers of the Times.

There are also articles by some of Ross Douthat's fellow travellers in the neo-traditionalist Catholic right in the United States.

For instance, there are Michael Brendan Dougherty and Julia Yost who have published, "The Pope Has Put Undue Political Spin on a Spiritual Message" (September 17, 2015), "Pope Francis Is Tearing the Catholic Church Apart" (August 12, 2021), and "New York's Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church" (August 9, 2022). Of course, to be published in the Times works like an ordination to the priesthood for intellectuals in the public square: it elevates the profile, confers authority, and opens other doors.

Pope Francis himself was published in the Times on November 26, 2020.

But that did not change the substance of what I believe is a disservice done to the readers — Catholic and non-Catholic, Christians and non-Christians, religious and secular — by the op-ed page articles on the Church.

Mainstream Catholic intellectuals have not been frequent guests of that opinion page in recent years and the lack of balance is evident (Garry Wills is in a category of his own, but also one more evident of the way the Times covers Catholicism).

I do not know if this is also happening to other Christian denominations and religious traditions, but it's clear that, if one does not know anything about Catholicism and happens upon these columns in the New York Times, they will find a very eccentric and idiosyncratic view of the Francis pontificate and the Church he leads as Bishop of Rome.

A change in the way mainstream media has traditionally covered religion

Now, we must distinguish between the Times' reporting on religion, which is mostly thorough and fair, and its opinion page. Indeed, most of its op-ed pieces on Catholicism illustrate some important things.

The first observation is that journalistic coverage of the Catholic Church has changed in ways that are more profound than the mere fact that the current pope gives frequent interviews to the media (most of the time, secular media).

Mainstream journalism, with its shrinking readership, is more influenced by political agendas and money in our polarized democracies. And the Church is more influenced by journalism, but it no longer has any control over it.

Also gone is the era when religion reporters and columnists in mainstream media were intellectuals with whom one could discuss — and read about in their columns — the great theologians and philosophers.

This made Catholicism intelligible beyond the very narrow parameters of politics.

In the US, one remembers the Times' Peter Steinfels and Newsweek's Kenneth Woodward, whereas in Italy there was Luigi Accattoli, who wrote for Il Corriere della Sera.

We are now in a more global Church, but one that is also more parochial and short-sighted at the same time.

The theological ignorance feeding the negative view of Vatican II

The second observation is the de-theologising of the debates concerning religion.

In the United States, especially Catholic public intellectuals and politicians, as well as the business world and philanthropic circles, are increasingly represented by neo-traditionalist Catholics with a markedly negative or derisive view of Vatican Council II.

This is usually due to minimal knowledge of what the Council was about theologically: Scripture, liturgy, ecumenism, religious liberty, inter-religious dialogue, and missionary activity.

The theological concept of "Catholic tradition" as a living tradition has become subservient to a political concept of tradition as something to take back from the party on the other side of the aisle.

Theologians (like me) are also to blame because we failed to engage these voices, being prisoners of an academic environment where diversity has often become the mission.

The paradoxes of the liberals' emphasis on diversity — a largely de-theologized and big-business-like idea of diversity — has helped skew the Times' view of Catholicism, which then echoes the preferential option for the exotic that is currently found in academia.

Thanks to this appeal to ideological "diversity", anti-Vatican II and anti-liberal Catholic voices have gained access to liberal mainstream media. Ironically, they have found in the New York Times the American liberal equivalent of L'Osservatore Romano — a platform that is denied to those who are identified as mainstream, liberal "Vatican II Catholics".

Catholics reinforcing anti-Catholic bias

The final observation is that this image of a Church in disarray, with a "liberal" pope under assault by neo-traditionalists, fits a certain established image of Catholicism the New York Times has held for a very long time.

In these last twenty years, the tragedy of the sex abuse crisis has reinforced certain stereotypes of a bigoted Church of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and of Pius XII who is portrayed as Hitler's lackey.

The ongoing opinions that are expressed in the daily bible of American liberalism by Catholics who attack the pope are perversely reassuring for a certain kind of Times reader.

They serve less as interpretations of Catholicism than as specimens.

It is like looking through a keyhole and seeing this weird world of Catholicism vie with itself, where devout believers try to take down the pope as if they were students in a graduate seminar trying to impress the professor.

There are Catholic ways for Catholics to disagree with the pope in public. But this is obviously not something they teach in Ivy League universities.

This approach to Pope Francis and Catholicism echoes what Zena Hitz wrote about a certain academic culture in her recent book Lost in Thought. She describes it as a blood sport, a battle of ideas interpreted as gladiatorial contests where celebrity is the currency of success.

It's no wonder that these kind of Catholics, my brothers and sisters in the faith, are so afraid of Francis and the currency in which the Church under his guidance is so clearly trafficking.

It's called the Gospel.

• 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.

The Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (sacred Council, 1963) charted the course because the Liturgy is the heart, source, centre, and pinnacle of the Church!

Paragraph one of Sacrosanctum Concilium sets the agenda for us today: ‘The sacred Council has set out to impart an ever-increasing vigour to the Christian lives of the faithful; to adapt more closely to the needs of our age those institutions which are subject to change; to encourage whatever can promote the union of all who believe in Christ; to strengthen whatever serves to call all of humanity into the Church's fold. Accordingly, it sees particularly cogent reasons for undertaking the reform and promotion of the Liturgy.' (SC.1)

We believe that this Council is the work of the Holy Spirit and the highest teaching authority of the Church (pope and bishops in Council). It is to this sacred agenda that Pope Francis is calling us back through his writings and through the synodal process.

Synod

During late 2020 and 2021, we engaged in the synodal process. We encouraged parishioners and schools to form synodal discussion groups, and the diocesan team set up online groups.

The Church has engaged in this process internationally, and many issues have been exposed. In some countries, the abuse scandal has driven the process; in New Zealand, this is not the case. Although an issue of concern, our outcomes reflect old grievances that remain unfulfilled and reflect more modern political agendas in New Zealand society and the Church.

There is a clarion call for greater inclusion of the Rainbow community, a richer parish life, and new and different liturgical experiences modern New Zealand Catholics can engage with and understand.

Sadly, the synodal process here has not engaged most Catholics in New Zealand, including the clergy. ere In three surveys through our Kotahi Ano Newsletter, more than 60% of respondents have consistently indicated that they did not attend a synodal meeting or participate in the feedback process. Their reasons included:

• not understanding the process,
• not seeing any value in it (it has been done before, and nothing happened),
• not seeing any need (because we are already a synodal parish).

We must take the findings with caution because not all the synodal findings represent the majority of lay parishioners, but we cannot ignore them.

Synod and Parishes

The synodal findings suggest that parishes must become places of welcome and engagement because they are not. This issue is addressed to lay people in the pews—priests are not parishioners. The findings suggest the following:

• lay parishioners are unwelcoming, unfriendly and non-engaged people
• the laity does not want their children and grandchildren—or anyone else's—attending Mass with them.
• laity want new liturgical styles of worship
• laity want opportunities for worship that are not sacramental
• laity want to foster and give lay-liturgical leadership
• the laity are deeply dissatisfied with priests and priesthood as it is current lived and with the men who are priests and bishops
• laity want fundamental change in the Church and they experience change is frustrated by clergy who stand continually in the way of reform.

Opportunities for growth

Where all, or some, of these concerns are true, there is enormous work to be done. There is also an opportunity for growth. Change requires a substantive movement in our approach to parish life. Attitudes would have to evolve, and people would have to become engaged.

Change requires more than just intentional language or virtual signalling. Change needs large numbers of parishioners to engage with the movement for growth through reform. Growth happens when we reform our thinking of what the Church is and for whom she exists. We are reformed to follow the mind of Christ and the precepts of the Gospels and reject the Zeitgeist of the age, the comfort of nostalgic religiosity, and the narrowness of cultural catholicisms. This is a continual process of ecclesia semper reformanda (the Church is always being reformed).

Welcoming those who are not Present

Circular arguments are difficult to deal with: where a person has to feel welcome before they turn up, how do you contact them and tell them they are welcome so they will turn up? To be welcomed, a person needs to be present to feel welcomed. You can't sell a person a pie from your pie shop if they never come through the door. Perhaps they're not coming through the door because they don't like your pies, don't want a pie or don't know that you provide pies. You cannot welcome someone who isn't there and can't get people there if they think the welcome does not exist.

In all its documents, the Council calls us to mission and engagement with the men and women of our time and culture:

‘In every age, the Church carries the responsibility of reading the sign of the time and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel; it is to carry out its task. In language intelligible to every generation, it should be able to answer the ever-recurring questions which people ask about the meaning of this present life and of the life to come and how one is related to the other. We must be aware of and understand the aspiration, the yearning and the often dramatic features of the world in which we live.' (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, 1965, 4).

• Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).