Disappointment in all directions: Is anyone actually happy with the outcome of the Synod on Synodality?

Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego, a key papal ally, spoke last February at the Religious Education Congress in Los Angeles, the largest annual gathering of Catholics in North America. Among other things, Cardinal McElroy extolled Pope Francis’s push for synodality – roughly meaning dialogue, participation and shared governance – in the Church.

When he was finished, one member of the audience asked a perceptive question: “Will Francis’s emphasis on synodality outlive him?”

McElroy’s answer was telling: “I hope so, I think so…I’m not sure.”

That anxiety among the Pontiff ’s most ardent supporters about whether synodality will outlive Francis may explain why finding ways to write synodality into the Code of Canon Law – effectively, to “institutionalise” synodal structures and practices – has emerged as possibly the most consequential aspect of the concluding act of the three-year synodal process.

Heading into last month’s Synod of Bishops in Rome, the second such assembly after the initial gathering in October 2023, it was clear that many of the most contested issues from the first go-around had been taken off the table by papal fiat.

On women deacons, for instance, the Pope had already said “no” in an interview with CBS in May, and then assigned any further discussion not to the Synod but to one of ten study groups due to report to him in June 2025. On the blessing of persons in same-sex unions, Francis and his top doctrinal adviser, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, pre-empted that discussion by issuing Fiducia Supplicans in December.

With those matters effectively squelched, this gathering of the Synod was compelled to seek another raison d’être. It seemed to find an outlet in pressure to make synodality permanent by codifying it in ecclesiastical law. The most controversial form of that effort came in regard to national and regional bishops’ conferences, and whether such bodies should possess some authority over Catholic teaching.

Exponents argued that conferences are the modern versions of regional synods in the early Church, such as the Synod of Hippo in 393 which brought together leaders of the Church in Africa and which helped to solidify the Catholic canon of scripture. Allowing the bishops of a particular territory to have a say on matters of dogma, they argued, is not only traditional but a healthy way of promoting the development of doctrine.

Critics, on the other hand, argued that assigning bishops’ conferences authority over Church teaching would be a prescription for chaos and division – with the Church potentially professing one doctrine of marriage, for instance, in Germany, and another in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Such confusion is especially dangerous in the post-modern era, these critics contended, in which national boundaries are increasingly irrelevant.

The matter of teaching authority aside, there was general agreement in the Synod that bishops’ conferences are important expressions of communion and shared responsibility which should be encouraged.

In other areas, the search for legal translations of synodality seemed less problematic. No one really objected, for instance, to the idea of making the creation of parish-level pastoral councils obligatory, rather than leaving the decision as to whether to have them up to the discretion of local bishops. Many other such small amendments to canon law were floated, including opening offices such as the “Moderator of the Curia” in a diocese, currently restricted to clergy, to laity as well.

Though it may take time for all these proposed modifications to be drafted and decreed, it would seem that what one might call the “synodalisation” of Church law is likely to be this synod’s legacy.

In that light, two questions seem to present themselves. First, will such relatively innocuous tweaks to canon law be enough to satisfy the expectations this synodal process raised, especially among the Pope’s usual base of support in more progressive Catholic circles? Or, will the outcome be seen as a disappointment, with an aging Pope increasingly surrounded by discontent on all sides?

Secondly, can amendments to Church law actually foster a lasting spirit of synodality that’s not dependent on the personality of a given pope?

This question poses the time-honoured matter of law vs culture – and whether merely changing laws is sufficient to create a new culture.

On the first point, early signs are that the Synod may leave Francis’s erstwhile supporters fairly disgruntled.

Alberto Melloni, for instance, is a progressive Italian church historian who’s been generally favourable to Francis over the years, but published a stinging assessment in the Synod’s closing days in a piece for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s newspaper of record.

“The glossed-over points entered in fits and starts in a tense and miserable final debate, after days of ‘listening in the Spirit’, which is too similar to a relaxing and boring calm, like a graduate seminar…which is disappointing,” he wrote of the Synod, saying its labours have been “without trauma and without fruits”.

Melloni predicted the Synod’s final document will leave “everyone unhappy”, and predicted the failure to resolve core issues sets the stage for one of two possible outcomes, under Francis or a future pope: Either a “difficult Council” that will have to take up the unfinished business, or an institutional crisis with “unpredictably tragic consequences”.

As for Francis, Meloni predicts he will exit the synodal process isolated. “Between erroneous convictions, intellectual weaknesses and confidence in confusion as a virtue of government, a lonely Bergoglio leaves the Synod more alone than ever,” Melloni wrote.

If that’s what Francis’s friends are saying, one can only imagine the verdicts of his enemies. As for whether the effort to institutionalise synodality will work, it’s worth taking a brief stroll down memory lane vis-à-vis the clerical sexual-abuse crisis.

When the scandals first broke, there was a frenzy of calls to amend Church law to make the penalties for abusers more draconian and more absolute. A lack of clear legislation, many critics asserted, had allowed the scandals to fester and to multiply.

Veteran canon lawyers, however, were sceptical of such claims. Well before the scandals exploded, they observed, the code contained provisions for sanctioning clerics who violated their vows or abused their authority. Bishops and superiors had all the tools they needed to impose punishment, the canonists argued – what they lacked was the will to use them.

In other words, these canonists warned that recovery from the abuse crisis wouldn’t be simply, or primarily, a matter of promulgating new laws. The core task was reforming a widespread culture that had promoted coverup and indifference.

Change in the Church is not as simple as flipping a switch in Rome. Hearts and minds have to be changed, and while laws may help, they’re insufficient by themselves.

Thus, at the end of this enormous three-year synodal enterprise, Pope Francis faces two mammoth challenges: convincing his base the whole thing wasn’t just a disappointing waste of time, and promoting a cultural revolution in Catholicism to convert “synodality” from a buzzword into a legacy.

How well Francis now navigates that Scylla and Charybdis will no doubt shape the drama of the rest of his papacy, however long or short it may turn out to be.

Photo: Cardinals arrive at St Peter’s Square for Mass on the opening day of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, Vatican City State, 4 October 2023. (Photo by ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images.)

This article appears in the November 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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