My latest in First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-8
Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary
October 16, 2024
As I was standing in line on Tuesday to get into St. Peter’s Basilica, I looked at one of the fountains in the square and noticed a seagull land on the top level of the fountain. He stayed there without moving for as long as I was in line, leisurely standing in the spray coming off the fountain. It was a strangely comforting sight since it was hot outside, and I was envious of the opportunity to just bask in the fountain’s cooling mist.
It struck me that seagulls have probably been doing this for centuries and will be doing so for centuries to come, long after all of us are gone. And I thought of how happily oblivious the seagulls must be to all the court intrigue and acrimonious in-fighting that had gone over time in the surrounding buildings.
And I was envious of that as well, since I’ve spent the past two weeks in Rome focusing on synodal controversies: which, in many ways, is an exercise in anxiety-inducing cogitation on penultimate realities. I was going into St. Peter’s to pray at the tomb of Pope St. John Paul II for a very dear friend back home, who is seriously ill and had just been admitted to the hospital. At that moment I was overwhelmed with a sense of what is truly important and a deep feeling of gratitude for the joy of being a Catholic.
If the result of the Synod in the years to come is something that increases the possibilities for an ever-larger number of people to feel that same joy at being a Catholic, then I will tip my hat to the “synodal process” and thank the Lord for his providential guidance of his Church. Nevertheless, I cannot help but be sad that all the media focus is on the penultimate issues of the moment, rather than the perennial ultimacy of God’s outpouring of love in Christ. To be sure, the issues of concern are not unimportant, but they will remain in the end unresolvable, and in an interminable way, if the sought-after answers to these questions are not grounded in the ultimacy of Christ as the singular and absolute inbreaking of God into time and space.
Some might say that I am being simplistic and unfair to the ongoing synodal deliberations since the issues in debate are being contested precisely on the grounds that fidelity to Christ requires “reform”—“reform” in the direction of changed teaching in some areas. It is precisely a deeper reflection on the meaning of God’s revelation in Christ, it is claimed, that is compelling us to move in a new direction, no matter how painful it might be to admit that the Church has been wrong for millennia on matters of central concern.
However, when one is speaking of a fundamental alteration to the Church’s Christocentric anthropology on matters relating to gender and sexuality, caution is in order. St. Paul admonished us to “test everything” (1 Thess. 5:21), which immediately follows his warning not to despise those who make prophetic utterances. Here we see that St. Paul is open to the movement of the Holy Spirit among the baptized, even as he cautions us that we need to analyze such promptings in the full light of “what is good.” Likewise, the apostle John warns that we should not trust every so-called movement of the spirit, because many “false prophets” have gone out into the world (1 John 4:1).
In other words, it is the ultimacy of God’s revelation in Christ, as this has been delivered over to the Church for safekeeping, that must be the ultimate barometer for adjudicating between true and false movements of the Holy Spirit. And it is precisely the loss of this central focus on ultimacy that short-circuits the process of discerning the spirits. The penultimate concerns of “the world” have a tendency to crowd out this focus, and to create a thick bramble of sophistries in order to press their case.
In the light of this, one of the most troublesome aspects of this entire synodal process has been the tendency to treat every opinion on contested issues as in some way expressive of the mind of the Holy Spirit. In none of the synodal documents are we given criteria for “testing everything,” beyond boilerplate acknowledgements of the need to stay true to divine revelation. But this is an empty gesture, since it is precisely the meaning of that revelation that is now being contested, as it is filtered through the lens of these various opinions.
The Australian theologian Tracey Rowland, winner of the Ratzinger Prize and no theological lightweight, in a wonderful essay in the substack What We Need Now, has noted that the Church has always judged whether or not one has “the sense of the faith” by how faithful he or she is to the settled teachings of the Church. She goes on to ask just how many voting members of the Synod meet this standard. Was faithfulness to Church teaching a consideration in deciding who to invite in as a Synod participant?
She is not questioning here the sincerity of those concerned. Nor is she questioning whether they are devout Catholics in some sense. But at what point do we acknowledge that not all opinions are equal? Granted, the last word will be with the pope, and the Synod does not bind whatever he might decide in the end. And certainly there is a value in letting disparate voices to be heard. But as Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has recently noted, traditionally a synod of bishops has only bishops as voting members, and that what we have now instead is more like a theological “symposium” than a true synod.
Perhaps that is a debatable point. But one thing is certain, and that is that the impression has been given that matters assumed to be long settled are being relitigated in the light of a dubious understanding of both the teaching of Vatican II on “the People of God” (which was not a nod in the direction of a democratic egalitarianism of all of the baptized), as well as how it is we are to “test everything.”
What is being occluded is that what is most important and ultimate is the only true foundation for how to test the spirits. The penultimate is malleable and changeable. And it too shall pass.
I really envy that seagull.
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.
