During this month of October I will be writing several posts on the Synod in First Things. It will be called "Larry Chapp's Synod Diary" and will appear below the columns of George Weigel on the same topic. Soon I will also be writing for The National Catholic Register and Catholic World Report on the Synod as well. Take heart. When this Synod is over I will be done writing on it for quite a while! In what follows I will simply post the links to the First Things page. You have to scroll down to the end to get to my essays.
Here is the first entry:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-1
Here is the second entry. There is an excellent introductory essay from Fr. Robert Imbelli, followed by Weigel's essay, followed by mine:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-2
if you do not want to negotiate the First Things web page here are my essays directly from my desktop:
Larry Chapp's Diary #1
I am off to Rome for part two of the Vatican’s big meeting on meetings known otherwise as the Synod on synodality. And if that sounds a bit cynical for an opening line I can only say that such cynicism is a thoroughly proper and justified response to this endeavor given the lack of any definitional clarity – after three years of preparation – as to what “synodality” means. We are told that it means a variety of things all of which seem drawn from the lexicon of the island of misfit verbiage, with the castaway phrases which have been marooned there since 1978 being suddenly rescued and repackaged as the very vocabulary of the Holy Spirit. A Spirit which has apparently been silent for centuries and is only now being allowed to speak again via the alchemy of round tables and “dialogue facilitators” in the Paul VI Hall.
Apparently what synodality means is “listening” in an “inclusive” manner that is designed to generate “dialogue” wherein “voices” that have “not been heard before” can now be heard. Or something like that. But no criteria have been provided for adjudicating between voices that are genuinely grounded in the faith and those that are grounded in a different spirit. No criteria are given for distinguishing tissue from tumor since the surgical eye of the magisterial tradition has been replaced with the magical movements of the invisible hand of sentiment in a seditious register.
And now we are told in an official Vatican press release about an upcoming penance service in Rome that we must confess any sins against this synodality thing even if we do not know what it is. I guess I need to go to confession then since my mind has not yet been properly converted to the party line , such as it is, and I have expressed my doubts about the whole affair publicly. But it is hard to imagine anyone sinning against synodality since, given the absence of definitional precision or even a modicum of clarity, in all cases invincible ignorance would apply. I might as well be confessing piracy on papal waters or the burning of neighborhood witches, both of which are impossible anachronisms, but which at least have some basis in clarity.
In all of this, as I have written elsewhere, I am reminded of a famous scene from Seinfeld where Kramer smashes Jerry’s stereo, puts it in a box to be mailed, insures it, and then wants Jerry to make a claim for damages. When Jerry complains that this is criminal mail fraud Kramer responds dismissively that it is no big deal since all of these big companies “just write this stuff off.” Jerry asks Kramer if he even knows what a “write off” is. And Kramer responds by saying, “No, but they do, and they are the ones writing it off.”
I get the same whiff of linguistic legerdemain with the Synodal publications as well, and the synodal organizers use the same circular logic to deflect any attempts to pin-down what kind of game is actually afoot here. When asked what “synodality” means they dodge and weave and eventually resort to saying something like, “No, we do not know what synodality means, but the synodal participants do since they are the ones doing the synodaling.”
And the vagueness in all of this is a “Poker Tell” since in actuality it should not be that hard to give a precise definition of what a synodal Church is. Any competent theologian could do it. If they asked me I could provide them with a one paragraph definition in about fifteen minutes. Other, and more competent, theologians could do it in five.
Therefore, one can only conclude that the definitional opacity is deliberate especially when one sees the adamantine stubbornness with which queries for clarity are greeted. It feeds the definite impression that the publicly stated aim of the Synod for a more “synodal Church” is a smokescreen designed to hide the fact that the entire affair is merely a stalking horse for something else. Does anyone seriously think that the progressive wing of the Catholic Church really cares about synodality in and of itself? I would imagine that if the Pope came out tomorrow and in a motu proprio mandated women’s ordination, approved of same sex marriage in the Church, allowed for contraception, allowed for married clergy, and communion for the divorced and remarried, that the push for a more synodal Church would be over and the most ultramontane form of rhetorical bombast would ensue. And if the more conservative wing of the Church responded that we need a synod to resolve such issues they would be told to go pound Gallican sand.
Therefore, many have asked me, “what do you expect out of this year’s Synod?” Well, as the above would indicate, not much that is good. A Church that is less centralized in Rome and with a heightened authority for local bishops would be a good thing. Almost everyone agrees that this is the technically specific definition of a properly collegial or synodal Church. And if that is what this Synod is about then more power to it. But if last year’s Synod is any indication, and if the new Instrumentum Laboris for this year is a true indication of things to come, then this is not in the cards. What do I expect? More of the same and a “wash, rinse, cycle, repeat” mode of evasive discourse.
It was initially heartening to see in the Instrumentum Laboris that all of the hot button issues had been removed. But then came word that the Pope was establishing various extra-synodal committees to look into these issues further. And this is a further indication that strategic moves are in play (dare I say “Jesuitical”?) to accomplish through the “drift” created by endless chatter what cannot be done via raw fiat. Because one does not talk to death issues that are truly settled.
There is no papal committee on whether Arius was right after all. Hopefully, there are not a few Athanasius’s in the wings in order to combat the current silliness. But we shall now see what this Synod brings.
Larry Chapp's Diary #2
The difficulty in writing on the Synod this time around is that it has now been covered from just about every angle imaginable, especially among its critics, and it has long since become largely a set of social media memes and blurbs that hammer away at the same themes again and again. After all, there is only so much criticism with which one can freight the synodal train before the critics themselves, myself included, start to look like cranks who are out to torpedo the process before it has actually done anything of note. Like the two old muppets in the balcony mocking even legitimate acts, the synodal critics run the risk of becoming cynical curmudgeons throwing stones from a safe distance at people of good will while doing nothing themselves to advance the conversation.
Nevertheless, as the old saying goes, “just because you are paranoid it does not mean that they are not out to get you”. Similarly, just because the synod has been an occasion of endless criticism it does not follow that the criticism is not justified. I had to remind myself of this as I was flying to Rome and feeling a bit jaded to the entire cottage industry of synodal criticism of which I have been a part. And as soon as I got here I was given a bracing ice bath of mind clearing shock therapy in the form of the penance service held at the Vatican to open the Synodal discussions.
I will not dilate on the easy target of the call to overcome our sins against synodality – a self-caricaturing chimera of intellectual vacuity and adolescent bravado – and would like to mention instead something I think is of far greater importance. And that is the penitential prayer of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn that asked forgiveness for the many times we may have used doctrine in uncharitable ways as a weapon against our neighbor. I think this is important because it gives us a window into what “synodality” actually connotes in the minds of its chief protagonists.
Critics of the now three year old synodal process have pointed to the similarities in language and style between much of the synodal literature and the thought forms and vocabulary of the progressive theologies that emerged in the aftermath of Vatican II. In and of itself this is not necessarily alarming and may even be mere coincidence. And the use of terms like “dialogue” and “inclusive listening” are capable of a thoroughly Catholic understanding of things. However, the Ariadne’s thread that runs throughout the labyrinth of progressive theologies is precisely a view of doctrine as largely an ecclesial social construct invented almost entirely by white celibate men for the purpose of super-imposing a hierarchical, pyramidal authority structure on a Church which is in its essence – and by contrast -- an egalitarian democratic polity of the baptized.
Like a palimpsest in need of a repristinating restoration, in this view the Church must be engaged in a “second Reformation” wherein the varnished layers of ecclesial hierarchy are scraped away in order to reveal the true Church from beneath the surface. This is, by all metrics, a version of the Protestant historiography of the Church as a sad history of the slow decline from apostolic purity to Constantinian corruption to the imposition of a medieval-Gothic-Baroque inflation of the monarchical court model of governance on the entire Church.
Those of us of a certain age remember these theologies well and suffered under them in the almost total control such narratives had in the Catholic academy and in seminaries. This is not a figment of our imagination nor did these theologies disappear from the Church despite the best efforts of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Like a cancer in remission, it has now returned and threatens to metastasize throughout the Church via the dulcet tones of prelates like Schönborn, Fernandez, Hollerich, McElroy, et. al. who speak of the sin of using doctrine as a weapon against the simple.
People might say that I am making too much of such language. But I am not. Because who is using doctrine as a weapon? Seriously, who? I suppose one can point to a few so-called traditionalists who have freeze-framed the Tridentine Church as the apex of all things holy and good as an example of weaponized doctrine. But they are an extreme minority and therefore one is thoroughly justified in suspecting that the idea of doctrine being wielded as a weapon and foregrounded as one of the sins against synodality in a Vatican penance service is a major red flag of worse things to come.
Pope Benedict often spoke of our era as marked by a crisis of truth. More specifically, as a crisis within the Church about the truth of her core evangel. He spoke of the crisis of faith in the very concept of an absolute Revelation from God in Christ, now vouchsafed to his Church and underwritten in Word and Sacrament by Christ himself. He warned that in its place was a new ecclesiology grounded in largely sociological and political categories wherein Church doctrines are treated as expressions of power that need deconstruction. In short, he spoke of the dangers associated with pitting “lived praxis” against truth, and “mercy” against doctrine.
Pope Francis has thrown fuel on this fire throughout his papacy. He has spoken often of the obfuscating and unnecessary complexification of the faith by theology. He has spoken of the need for doctrine – especially moral doctrine – to be held up as an asymptotic goal which no one achieves, and which therefore justifies an almost “Simul Justus et Peccator” approach to pastoral practice. We have seen “accompaniment” and “discernment” used as weaponized terms in their own right in order to caricature and dismiss those who, like John Paul in Veritatis Splendor, resist the conversion of the law of gradualism into a gradualism of the law.
These are not idle fears. Pastoral sensitivity is indeed needed across the board in all phases of the Church’s life. But can anyone seriously argue that the thing that most characterizes the modern Church in the West is a draconian moral scrupulosity and an oppressive adherence to narrow construals of doctrinal definitions? Is it not true instead that our culture is marked by an excessive moral latitudinarianism, if not relativism, and a disdain for doctrine as useless pharisaism?
Therefore, as the Synod proceeds watch for the false binary of opposition between doctrine and pastoral praxis. When it rears its head know that there is more going on than meets the eye.
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