2023 Synod Faces a Credibility and Practicality Gap
National Catholic Register, 17 September 2021
The planetary process leading up to the 2023 synod has to confront two major challenges before it begins.
Six weeks before the Catholic Church-wide consultations for the 2023 synod on synodality are set to begin, the Vatican released a vademecum, or “handbook,” that will guide a process that is supposed to occupy every single diocese in the world from October 2021 to April 2022.
The most massive set of meetings ever conducted in the history of the Catholic Church was announced only four months ago, between the third and fourth waves of the coronavirus pandemic in many parts of the world.
The vademecum did not address whether dioceses where the dispensation from the Sunday Mass obligation is still in force should be convening consultative meetings as part of a process to discuss the role of consultative meetings in the life of the Church.
The handbook listed “ten thematic nuclei,” including “journeying together,” “co-responsible in the mission” and “forming ourselves in synodality.” There is a mandate to consult with those who never come to church.
It is an ambitious plan, intended to be a “participative and inclusive ecclesial process that offers everyone — especially those who for various reasons find themselves on the margins — the opportunity to express themselves and to be heard in order to contribute to the edification of the People of God.”
The process suffers from two main challenges before it begins — credibility and practicality.
Recent synods have had something of a credibility problem in terms of how consultations were done. For example, the 2014 and 2015 Synods on the Family appeared to exclude certain views from among the participants — views that were the magisterial teaching of the Church.
In the 2018 Synod on Youth, Cardinal Oswald Gracias, one of the Holy Father’s closest advisers on the “council of cardinals,” admitted that the draft report’s emphasis on “synodality” and “discernment” were not what the synod fathers had discussed, but were inserted by the synod managers.
The planetary process for synod 2023 requires that every diocese, after six months of consultative sessions, submit a 10-page report, summarizing the findings. The rather short page limit is a matter of practicality; if every diocese in the United States submits a report, that alone would be nearly 2,000 pages. All of that paper will be chewed over by the national episcopal conferences, which will meet in continental conferences to massage the mass of material into a final report that will be delivered to Rome. The synod secretariat will then produce its own preparatory document for synod 2023.
With the enormity of paper generated, it will necessarily fall to the editorial team in Rome to select those themes that will be emphasized, just as was the case in the recent synods. Will the result be any different this time, even if the process has been inflated to elephantine proportions?
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