Larry Chapp's Synod Diary part three

Once again, scroll down to find my diary essay:

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https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-3

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Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary

October 4, 2024

Yesterday I had the great fortune of being able to attend the ordination of fifteen deacons from the North American College in St. Peter’s Basilica. The circumstances of my invitation to attend the event are themselves instructive of just how infectious the joy of Catholicism can be, if just given the chance. A young seminarian (Robert Williams of the Diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma), who is a reader of my various online scribblings, saw that I was going to be in Rome covering the Synod and reached out to me with an offer of tickets to attend his diaconal ordination. I happily accepted, and not only participated in one of the most moving liturgies I have attended in years, but also made a new friend in the young deacon whose priestly ordination I will now attend next year, God willing. My wife Carrie was with me, and we were able to meet Robert’s mother and share in the joy of this special event.

We were not alone in this joy. There were over a thousand people jammed into the area around the Altar of the Chair, all of whom were there to offer their love, support, and prayers for their sons, brothers, students, and friends who were being ordained. The mood was joyous and positive, and I would wager that not a single person in attendance felt that they were somehow disenfranchised and alienated from the Church simply because they were not the ones being ordained. Nobody wore armbands expressing discontent over this or that Church policy. In fact, the dominant focus was not on the movement of the Holy Spirit in the subjective dispositions and emotional vagaries of those in attendance, but rather on the presence of that same Spirit in the Sacrament of Holy Orders being conferred on young men brave enough to give their lives to the service of God’s holy Church.

I could not help but draw a contrast between the prayerful sanctity and sacramental gravitas of this event with the lugubrious chatterings of some of the synodal cognoscenti going on in the nearby Paul VI Audience Hall. In the first few days of the Synod, we have been allowed a peek into the deliberations of the various extra-synodal committees established by Pope Francis to look into the allegedly “closed but not closed” questions of women’s ordination to the diaconate and the Church’s moral teachings on human sexuality. Framed in the fractious mindset of the ever-disgruntled and “alienated” dissident Catholic malcontent, the questions raised in these committees seem filtered through the lens of endless grievance. And filtered as well through the lens of a joyless interpretation of Church “reform” as an interminable daisy chain of linked “issues,” all of which are in immediate need of “radical paradigm shifts” (i.e. scuttling of traditional Church teaching), lest the Church fall off the cliff into demographic oblivion.

Absent in these synodal fulminations is the spirit of joy that comes from the engraced reception of God’s gift of grace. Absent is any sense that one is not only not “burdened” by one’s Catholicism, but that the faith one has been given in grace, via Christ’s Church, is a gift beyond any metric tied to the penultimacy of fleeting opinions on topical agitations of the moment.  

I myself am a laicized deacon, having in my youth stopped short of priestly ordination because I discerned that someday down the road I wanted to pursue marriage and family. And yet I did not sit at yesterday’s ordinations stewing in the wort of any fabricated alienation, and I never once thought, “if only the Church would get over its medieval fixation on celibacy, I too could have been up there getting ordained.” In fact, I thought the opposite and felt an exhilarating pride in these young men who were willing to give up that which I chose not to.

My wife has a Ph.D. in theology and is a dean at a major seminary. She, too, was filled with the joy of the faith yesterday and, I can assure you, never once recoiled from the event as an exercise in patriarchal sacramental oppression since no women were being ordained. She supports the Church’s teaching on the matter and therefore did not “endure” the ordinations as “painful” stabs at her baptismal dignity, but rather as the altogether magnificent outpourings of a divine prodigality that knows no limits. She felt joy: the joy, too, of knowing that someday she might be privileged to receive the sacraments from one of these fine young men. She did not feel anger. She did not feel “disenfranchised” and/or “disempowered.” She felt instead the privilege—the exhilarating and limitless privilege—of being a Catholic.

The ordaining prelate was Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Oregon. His homily should be framed and posted in every house of formation. The central theme was that the diaconate is a ministry of service and not one of self-promotion. This can perhaps sound a bit boilerplate to those who were not there and did not experience the percussive force of his words and the profound unpacking of this concept in his message. It was lightning in a bottle, and it stood in direct contrast to the voices of nearby synodal participants who had been framing diaconal ordination as an act of empowerment: who speak as if ordination to Holy Orders is the only pathway to service in the Church that is worthy of consideration, since it alone, allegedly, opens up the corridors of ecclesiastical power.

Would that the synodal “Spirit listeners” had listened to that homily. Because there are an endless variety of ways for service to be exercised in the Church, and the only “power” that matters is the authority that comes from the sanctified gift of self, no matter one’s station in life.  

In my youth, I worked at a soup kitchen in Alexandria, Virginia. One of the regulars there was an impoverished, elderly gentlemen named Sylvester Triplett. Yet despite his lowly status in terms of social “power,” Sylvester helped us out in countless ways and was a man possessed by the deepest wellsprings of charity I have ever seen in a human being. Sylvester died of a heart attack while I was working there, and a few of us decided to attend his funeral. There were no more than five or six people in attendance. Sylvester was one of the anonymous little ones of God that few noticed.

And yet, forty-three years later, I still pray for his intercession at every Mass. Because there was more “power” in one of his tiniest acts of charity than in all of the combined blatherings about “governing structures” in every synod ever convened. Sanctity, not “changed structures,” is the only reform we need.

Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology at De Sales University and the co-founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Pennsylvania.

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