My latest in First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-7
Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary
October 13, 2024
Whenever my wife and I come to Rome, we always make a pilgrimage to the Church of St. Augustine to pray at the tomb of St. Augustine’s mother, St. Monica. We bring with us innumerable prayer petitions from friends and relatives asking us to pray for their children who have either strayed from the faith or are trending in that direction. We repeated this pilgrimage last week, whereupon I posted to social media a photo of my wife, Carrie, praying at St. Monica’s tomb. That post garnered the largest response I have ever gotten to anything I have ever posted on social media, and that is saying a lot.
Evidently, the topic of young people falling away from the faith struck a nerve which is, as almost everyone knows these days, corroborated by the sad statistics of how much the Church is hemorrhaging young people from her pews. The causes of this sad reality are, no doubt, multi-focal but one thing is certain: This phenomenon is not limited to the Catholic Church and there is a steep decline in religiosity among the young in Western liberal cultures across the spectrum of differing belief systems. Therefore, one is justified in identifying secularity as such as a key contributing factor—if not the central factor—in this erosion of religious faith in the West.
This is a sociological reality that, strangely, usually goes unmentioned by progressive Catholics, who continue to press the argument that the only way for the Church to staunch the hemorrhaging of young people is to agitate for the Church to change many of her more “unpopular” teachings in order to bring them into conformity with secular modernity. For example, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, Germany (president of the German episcopal conference), has stated, in response to the fact that the German Church has lost almost 1.7 million adherents over the past five years, that this proves the necessity of following through on the putative reforms of the German Synodale Weg (Synodal Path). Never mind that the German Protestant churches—all whom have already instituted these secularizing changes for decades now—have suffered even steeper declines. Never mind all of this, because the narrative of “reform as secular liberalization” must go forward at all costs, even if its effectiveness as a pastoral strategy has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a null set.
We saw this same argument put forward yet again the other day, at a Synod-2024 press briefing where Deacon Geert De Cubber of Belgium made the claim that, unless the Church pursues a “synodal path” without turning back, the Church in Belgium will not survive. As per usual at this Synod, he did not bother to define what he meant by synodality. Nor did he address the causes for why the Belgian Church, which is by all outward metrics already moribund and on life support, is in such dire straits already. Indeed, one cannot but be amazed by the outsized influence of Europeans at the Synod, since the dioceses they represent constitute a living witness to what should not be done pastorally.
What is emerging at this Synod is that the goal of progressive Catholics is not simply a Church that “listens” more to the laity, but a Church that listens only to those lay people who seek changes to the Church’s perennial teachings on sexual morality and women’s ordination. Anything short of this is deemed a “disappointment” and a “failure” of the synodal process. Latent within these assertions is the idea that a listening Church is a more “democratic” Church, wherein the majority opinion of lay people in the secular West should be taken as indicators of the Holy Spirit speaking to the Church. Therefore, failure to act on these allegedly populist impulses is also a failure to obey the promptings of the “Spirit.”
Further evidence of this progressive narrative and its project may be found in the report given to the synodal assembly by the Study Group on controversial issues in moral theology established by Pope Francis. Space precludes a lengthy rehearsal of its various arguments. Suffice it to say that it is a call for a return to the proportionalist moral theologies that were definitively rejected by Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor. What this amounts to, as we saw in past iterations of these theologies, is a baptizing of the sexual revolution via the path of reducing all moral decision making to a consideration of “lived experiences” in all our “complex circumstances.” In other words, and to stay on my main point, it is a call for a radical shift away from the Church’s perennial teachings grounded in natural law, and toward a more capacious embrace of the sexual values of modern secularity.
Returning then to where I began, the question arises as to the pastoral strategy involved here for regaining some evangelical traction with young Catholics. And from where I stand, there are far too many simplistic answers to this problem being proffered on both sides of the ecclesial aisle. The path of doubling-down on secularity is clearly a dead-end, and one hopes that Synod-2024 resists the siren song of worldly popularity that important synodal leaders seem to be singing. But equally problematic is the assertion of many so-called traditionalists that the dead-end of secularity means that we must engage in a scorched-earth rejection of all things modern—a rejection that includes Vatican II and the post-Vatican II magisterium—and return to a largely High Medieval/Tridentine/Baroque Church of Latin Masses and a claustrophobically narrow reading of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation).
I had a conversation the other day with a religious sister who works in Rome, who pointed out that “average Catholics” simply do not care about Synod-2024. They do not know what it is or, in most cases, even that it is. She stated that the concerns of most, hidden underneath their opinions on various “issues,” are the perennial concerns to see in the Church something supernatural, something of God, and something that shows that Christ is indeed real and alive.
But is our synodal “listening” attuned to this tonality? The tones of the supernatural? I am reminded of a brief interview I saw the other day with the popular historian Tom Holland (author of the wonderful book Dominion), who stated boldly that the only true path forward for the Church is to make Christianity “weird” again by way of emphasizing, in every way imaginable, the reality of the supernatural. And to go on from there to a reiteration of the Church’s core message: that all things in this world are a sacramental, iconic, and epiphanic eruption into time and space of a “Kingdom not of this world.”
The re-weirding of Christianity would make for a great Synod. Because the current one is a colossal bore and a monumental pastoral exercise in missing the point.
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 Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania.
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