2023 Synod on Synodality: A Process About Processes

National Catholic Register, 27 May 2021

The protracted ‘synod on holding synods’ runs a grave risk of diverting the Church’s energies from the mission field to the sacristy.

Just as the 2019 Amazon Synod marked the death of the Aparecida vision of 2007, the 2023 synod on synodality risks marking the death of Evangelii Gaudium, the bold call to missionary discipleship that serves as the charter for Pope Francis’ pontificate. The Church may find her energies diverted from the mission field to the sacristy.

Pope Francis announced that the 2022 synod on synodality — formally entitled “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation and Mission” — will be postponed until October 2023 in order to leave time for a massive two-year consultation at the diocesan, national and continental levels. 

The Vatican proposal calls for six months of meetings at the diocesan level from October 2021 to April 2022. There will be a delegate to coordinate this local consultation. It will conclude with a “presynodal meeting” at the end of that phase, and all the paper generated with be sent to the national episcopal conferences, where it will be reflected upon and massaged into some kind of document. Then the bishops of each continent will meet from September 2022 to March 2023. 

Gathering all this material from around the world, the Vatican secretariat for synods will produce an instrumentum laboris (working document) that will be taken up in October 2023 by the actual Synod of Bishops.

And the topic of all this consultation? The synodal process itself, which is a way of governing the Church. That much is clear — and not clear.

“The dynamic of the synod is such that everybody had a sense of what it meant, because we were doing it,” Cardinal Michael Czerny said at the conclusion of the Amazon Synod. “Whether everyone could explain it in words, I’m not so sure, but I’m not sure that mattered.”

What exactly will it do? That remains to be seen. What is clear is that there will be a 24-month diocesan to intercontinental process to survey a vast array of views on how to listen to a vast array of views, a broad consultation on how consultation should be done. It’s a process about processes. 

Oscar Wilde quipped that the problem with the participatory processes of socialism is that they took up too many evenings. Synodality may suffer from the same flaw.

Pandemic and the ‘Panzer-Synod’

In a letter to bishops, Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary-general of the synod secretariat, anticipated the principal object to his surprise announcement. 

“As I write this letter, I am aware of the many difficulties caused by the pandemic, as well as those countries suffering from war and violence,” Cardinal Grech wrote with admirable understatement. “I hope that this synodal process, in a sense of renewed communion, might help the local Churches notwithstanding the great challenges they face.”

Given the global struggle to get back to regular Mass attendance, sacramental life, school function and charitable works — to say nothing of reestablishing a secure financial basis for all that activity — the timing could hardly be worse. After a year of limiting the number of people at Mass, few local pastors will have as a priority convening meetings to discuss a synod about how to conduct synods. 

So why now, when the timing is obviously most unsuitable? 

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