The Instrumentum Laboris (IL) released by the Vatican on July 9 is the working document that sets the agenda for the upcoming second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024. The document focuses on one specific question: ‘How to be a synodal church in mission?’ In preparation for the Synod, responses to that question came from 108 of the 114 bishops’ conferences around the world, from international meetings of bishops’ conferences, from the Oriental Catholic Churches and from other conferences of laity and religious.
The IL is a sober document. It is about process rather than substantive issues. The substantive issues – women’s ordination to the diaconate, the Church’s teaching on LGBITQA+ relationships, on the divorced and remarried, on priestly formation and celibacy, on inclusive language in the liturgy, on Church governance, on clericalism, on reaching out to the marginalized and disenfranchised, etc. – all these issues were consigned earlier this year to ten specialist theological groups for review and deliberation. While these ten groups will give progress reports to the second session in October, their final reports and recommendations are not expected until June 2025.
So, the second session will be primarily about process: ‘How to be a synodal church in mission?’ Words like ‘consultation’, ‘discernment’, ‘decision-making’, ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ and ‘evaluation’ bulk large in the document. Compared to its counterpart IL for the first session, this second session IL is inevitably a less exciting and inspiring document, even, one might be tempted to say, disappointing. Sheared as it is of the substantive issues, it is a more corporate, rather than visionary, document.
There are, however, a couple of interesting excursions from the process. The first of these is the recognition in a number of places that the Church must respond positively to repeated calls from the bishops’ conferences to enable greater participation for women in positions of governance and responsibility in the Church. While the document sedulously refrains from addressing the specific substantive issue of women’s ordination even to the diaconate, it does recognize that the relegation of women exclusively to subordinate ministries in the Church is no longer acceptable.
The other interesting excursion is the explicit invocation of the authority of the Pope and bishops: ‘In a synodal church the responsibility of the bishop, the college of bishops and the Roman Pontiff to make decisions is inalienable since it is rooted in the hierarchical structure of the Church established by Christ’. In the consultative and discernment processes that precede the deliberative, decision-making phase, input from the ‘lower’ orders in the Church is not only welcome but even prescribed. But the ultimate decision must rest exclusively in the hands of the bishop or Pope. This authority relies on what is known as the ‘apostolic tradition’, that is, the doctrine that, just as the Pope is the successor of St. Peter, so the local bishop, each in his own diocese. Is the successor of the other apostles. In this role he has both teaching authority in his own diocese and overarching governance and pastoral status and responsibility.
Here the shadow of the German Synodal Way is patently affecting the authors of the IL. The German conference in the latter stages of its deliberations recommended the institution of a ‘Synodal Council’, composed of equal numbers of bishops and laity, who would be the ultimate authority, if not of doctrine, at least in all aspects of Church life, policy and governance. The experience and expertise of such a council was seen as a bulwark against the possibility of a future disaster equal in magnitude to that of the clerical sexual abuse of minors. The German bishops and religious superiors (confession: I was a religious superior 1991 – 1996), as in most other parts of the world, failed miserably in handling this scandal, and this failure led directly to the formation of the German Synodal Way in the first instance and ultimately to the institution of the Synodal Council.
The Vatican, however, has constantly and even vehemently opposed the authority of such a council as diluting episcopal authority and the ‘apostolic tradition’. So, this excursion in the IL from its main theme cannot but be construed as a warning to the members of the second session of the Synod on Synodality not to pursue the path of the German conference. Synodality must not dilute the ‘apostolic tradition’. Engagement with lay and even secular expertise in the consultative and discernment phases of the synodal process must leave intact the episcopal authority in the deliberative, decision-making phase.
One of the aspects of the Synod that the IL does not address except in passing is what the Church will do with the final reports and recommendations of the ten specialist groups when they are due in June 2025. Ideally one might have hoped that they might have been the subject of a third session of the current Synod or the agenda items of a newly convoked and even more representative synod of bishops and laity in the future. (Just think : a synod on ‘Women in the Church’!) Currently it would seem, however, that these final reports on the ‘hot button’ substantive issues will be submitted to, and considered by, the executive of the Synod on Synodality and the relevant Vatican Dicasteries.
'While the document sedulously refrains from addressing the specific substantive issue of women’s ordination even to the diaconate, it does recognize that the relegation of women exclusively to subordinate ministries in the Church is no longer acceptable.'
This, to say the least, does not inspire confidence. The precedents are not encouraging. Neither report of the two commissions charged with investigating the history and the theology of women’s ordination to the diaconate has been made public. Nor has the report that at the Synod on the Amazon over 130 of the 180 bishops supported the ongoing investigation of the women’s diaconate result in any substantial official Church response. The recent IL merely states that there were some bishops’ conferences in favour, and some against, the institution of such an Order in the Church, without any indication of the degree of support or opposition. And the Pope’s blunt unadorned negative in a recent American CBS television interview to the possibility of instituting such an Order of women’s diaconate hardly savours of synodality decision-making. Will this be the nature of the responses to the reports on the other substantive issues that have exercised the widespread consultations and bishops’ conferences prior to the first session of the current Synod? Examining and refining the process of synodality is important, and the focus of the second session on this process is to be commended, especially in a Church that is relatively inexperienced in this methodology. But what is the point of synodality if it does not proceed beyond process and continues to remit the hard substantive questions to the exclusive adjudication of the Vatican dicasteries, the universal more-than-a-little authoritarian universal jurisdiction of the Holy See writ large? When, if at all, will the rubber of synodality hit the rough road of the substantive issues?
Bill Uren, SJ, AO, is a Scholar-in-residence at Newman College at the University of Melbourne. A former Provincial Superior of the Australian and New Zealand Jesuits, he has lectured in moral philosophy and bioethics in universities in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth and has served on the Australian Health Ethics Committee and many clinical and human research ethics committees in universities, hospitals and research centres.