The Path to Weariness
The Catholic Thing, 30 November 2024
Advent comes, a new year beckons. Jubilee 2025 awaits. But after the turmoil of the past year and other points in the current papacy, Rome shows much weariness and little vitality.
As the liturgical year 2024 ticks down to its final moments, there is a touch of weariness in the Roman air, even though a Jubilee Year is soon to begin,
The synodal assembly on synodality expired at the end of October, but the synodal process for a synodal Church continues. Just this past week Pope Francis issued a reminder not to forget what the synod had been speaking to all the churches. Not even a month out and it seems that the Holy Father is concerned that the whole matter will simply wither away.
Weariness in Rome does not mean weariness everywhere. Rome is not the whole Catholic thing, after all. But weariness at the center is worse than vitality there, radiating out to all the local churches. I have seen both, and vitality is better.
The contrast first struck me at the penitential vigil, which opened October’s synodal assembly. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna asked, in the name of all, for “forgiveness, feeling shame for the obstacles that we place in the building of a truly synodal, symphonic Church…”
“Symphonic” caught my ear, because a “symphony” is the image that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used to capture the beauty of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Schönborn was its general editor. The English edition was published in 1994.
If synodality means anything at all, the Catechism remains the single most synodal project in the recent life of the Church, perhaps in recent centuries, perhaps ever. It was born of the extraordinary synod of 1985, and involved over six years a vast global consultation of the worldwide episcopate and an international array of scholars, all led by Ratzinger and Schönborn. The latter, in that capacity, has fewer sins against synodality to confess than most.
It’s a long way down, however, from the symphony of faith to feeling shame about offenses against synodality. So much is different from thirty years ago, a timely reminder that nothing endures permanently – or even for very long.
Cardinal Schönborn is a Dominican, one of the more prominent of his generation. Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, belongs to that same generation and was master general of the order when Schönborn was created a cardinal in 1998. Next week, Radcliffe – retreat master of the recent synodal process – will be created a cardinal himself. He is 79, so he quasi-belongs to the company of distinguished over-80-years-old ecclesiastics raised to the scarlet in recognition of outstanding service to the Church, particularly in theological work. Henri de Lubac and Avery Dulles were also so honored.
How was it thirty years ago? St. John Paul the Great created Yves Congar, another Dominican, a cardinal in November 1994 at age 90. He died seven months later. Whatever one might think about Radcliffe’s oeuvre, it’s a long way down from Yves Congar, who was an adornment to the rather unremarkable cardinalatial class of 1994.
The talk in Rome in November 1994 was about Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul’s book released that fall. An international publishing sensation, the Holy Father’s wide-ranging responses to the questions of journalist Vittorio Messori brought the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ to tens of millions of readers.
Thirty years later, Pope Francis has his own recent book with a similar title, Hope Never Disappoints. The scant coverage it received, even from Vatican News, only referred to his call for an investigation to see if “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.”
This year has marked a rather remarkable back and forth about the possibility of women deacons. The Holy Father was asked by 60 Minutes in April about the possibility of women being ordained deacons. “No,” was his curt response. So that would have seemed to be that, given that Pope Francis himself was privy to the work of two special commissions which had been studying the matter.
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