Is there an enlightening, non-church analogy for the synod? Is it akin to a legislative session of parliament, the annual meeting of corporate shareholders, or an event like a concert or Test match? The question is germane because how we frame the synod will influence our perception of its outcomes. Whether enlightening or not, the above analogies are in play when critiques of the synod denounce its failure to do x or y, lament its endorsement of existing ecclesial structures, or dismiss it as a one-off experiment likely to leave no lasting effects.
What if, however, there are no appropriate analogies for synodality? What if the most reliable path to ‘getting’ synodality, to understanding and receiving it into the everyday life of the church, requires subordinating other forms of discourse, including the political and organisational, to a renewed focus on the church’s identity and purpose? This approach neither reserves interpretation of the synod exclusively for theological illuminati nor attempts to remove the church from the complexities of history and culture. Rather, it affirms that the ‘logic’ of the synod, its way of proceeding, conclusions, and potential for reforming the church, yields its richness only when viewed through the lens of the church’s particularity.
The opening sentence of the synod’s Final Document (FD) illuminates the church’s specificity, while also establishing the primary criterion for authentic change in the church: ‘Every new step in the life of the church is a return to the source’. This source, of course, is the life of grace, the self-giving of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
The FD’s first chapter centres the role of grace in bringing the church into being, forming Christians for missionary discipleship, and guiding the pilgrim community to the fullness of God’s reign. Through grace, then, the church is unique among all human endeavours. Still, relationship with God does not spare the church the ravages of sinfulness or inhibit the community’s avoidance of its mission. Grace, in fact, is the ever-present stimulus for the conversion of the Christian community; this emphasis suffuses the FD.
Since grace and human freedom are both constitutive of the church, the authenticity of the Christian community is inseparable from discernment of the Holy Spirit, from choosing what accords with grace. Discernment, as Pope Francis notes regularly, decentres those who practise it. For Francis, discernment is ‘an authentic process of leaving ourselves behind in order to approach the mystery of God’ (Gaudete et Exsultate [2018], article 175). This is a hard saying: all of us can assume that God’s desire for the church coincides with our own, that God is even happy to take direction from us. Discernment, on the other hand, underscores that without openness to one another we will fail to be open to God, and so be prisoners to the ‘rigidity, which has no place before the perennial “today” of the risen Lord’ (Gaudete et Exsultate, article 173). This warning surely applies to both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’, to me as well as those I judge to be resisting the Spirit.
The dynamics of grace and discernment bring into relief what is perhaps the great gift of synodality to the church: recognition that all of us must give priority to ‘listening to the Word of God, contemplation, silence and conversion of heart’, actions that presume the embrace of ‘asceticism, humility, patience and a willingness to forgive and be forgiven’ (FD, article 43). In short, the ‘synodal spirituality’ that the FD promotes differs radically from a call to the barricades, either to lobby for our preferred outcomes or oppose our adversaries.
One way to consider how a ‘return to the source’ can be a catalyst for ‘new steps’ is through the credal declaration of the church as ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic’. Since all four elements are both the work of the Spirit and a task addressed to the church in every age, they exemplify the need for discernment. When suggested changes in the church appear on the horizon it can seem that ‘apostolic’, often understood narrowly as synonymous with ‘unchangeable’, trumps all of other factors. A genuinely apostolic church, however, must also be, at the same time, one, holy, and catholic, open to the Spirit’s all-embracing presence.
The grace that interweaves the four marks calls the church to engage in missionary discipleship, building history while simultaneously looking beyond history. Synodal discernment is not only necessary but urgent if the church is to be a sacrament of this grace. The changes that this discernment will or will not bring about in current ecclesial practices, structures, and teaching elude prediction. What is certain is that grace triumphs ‘when the daily life of the church is marked by unity and harmony in pluriformity’.
Richard Lennan, a priest of the diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, is professor of systematic theology and chair of the Ecclesiastical Faculty in the Clough School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College (USA). He was a member of the theological panel for the Plenary Council of Australia (2020-22).