SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome everyone. This week's chorus, or this week's chorus, is actually about synodality. What's going on with the synod? What's not going on with the synod? What, in fact, does synodality mean? And uh Charlie, one of our panelists, is going to need this conversation because part of it is based on a book I've just written and published called Uh Synod Diary. Okay, Charlie, all yours now.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Thank you very much, Michael. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to yet another exciting special edition of Core Eclasia. As always, I'm joined by Dr. Daniel Rober, who is an associate professor of Catholic Studies and former chair of the department. And I'm joined by Dr. Michael W. Higgins, distinguished author and the distinguished professor of Catholic thought emeritus here at Sacred Heart University. In addition to far more titles than we could list here, I'm Charlie Gillespie. I'm an associate professor in Catholic Studies and the associate dean of our School of Performing Arts. What is synodality and why did I start with so many titles? The most interesting thing about this word is that we're saying it all the time. And unless you have picked up Michael Higgins' new book, A Synod Diary, you might not have a sense of why this word is so important. And that's where I want to start, Michael. Why do we need to know this word synod? And why do we need to think about synodality if it was just 60 days that shook the church? Is it in the past or are we still feeling some aftershocks from this in your pain?

SPEAKER_02 1:19

I would like to think we're going to have a lot of aftershocks, but I'm not absolutely convinced that we're getting them. I think, I think the book's title, of course, is extravagant, and it's based in part upon John Wheat's famous book about the 10 days that shook the world in in 1917. I remember Jim Martin saying to me in Rome, he said, Michael, it's uh 60 days, it's going to be 60 years at best. I said, yes, but it starts with the first 60 days. You start with the tremors and then you get the earthquake. And I said, we're still dealing with the tremors of the Second Vatican Council. And the synod, in many ways, is an expression of that. Um the difficulty uh I had in writing a book with the specific remit that I had for this, which was to give it a um a friendly face and accessibility, allowing um the non-specialists who don't spend their life in a bubble of synodality, um, to actually try and grasp what this word and experience means. And of course, it's uh uh multi-variegated, it's it's not multivalent and multi-everything else that for that matter. It's not a word that is easy to univocally define. And talking to an archbishop recently who said to me, you know, some of us just um tremble at the S-word, and the S word is synodality, and they do, as some others are experiencing synod uh fatigue, they do in part, I think, because we talk about it, we talk about the way we can experience synodality, and we forget that in many ways we live synodally anyway. Um the pastoral council that came out of the Second Vatican Council, that every parish was to erect, you had at least canonically to have a finance committee, but you were supposed to have a parish council. Many of the things that either atrophied or were never fully activated get a kickstart with this synodately project. This is, I think, the most important project of the um Burgodio uh papacy. It's not as most refined in and polished, like some of it is encyclicals, like Flatelli Tuti and whatnot, but they create the theological and philosophical framework that allows this pastoral strategy, synodality, to begin to take shape. So synodality is um is a word, it's a concept, it's an experience, um, it's a challenge because I think many people are trying to figure out how do we institute this, how do we find ways of making it work. And uh we're faced with what often happens when a new concept begins to implant itself in our consciousness and in our structures, we discover inertia. Uh, I yeah, I think that many national episcopal conferences, they're not hostile to the project, they're not indifferent to it, they're just overwhelmed by what they see as the complexities of synodality, and so they just do what, you know, bureaucrats do in every structure, and that is they just quietly resist its implementation. So we're at that phase where people are saying, oh, synodality. Oh, yeah, we well, you know, we did one thing in the parish and we did this and we did that. But the reports have to be submitted. There is a three-year uh implementation phase, and much to the discouragement, I think, of people who thought, okay, this was another trendy Bergoglio notion, Leo will put it in perspective. Leo's actually uh endorsed synodality, and no doubt will give it his own coloration, but he's not departed from this, is committed to the three-year implementation phase and whatnot. So we are stuck with this. So let's let's let's grab it because you know in the end, it's not a scary thing. It's a welcome moment in the history of the church.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

That's so exciting you put it that way, Michael, because one of my favorite things about your book is you identify it as an amoose bouche. It gets the reader so excited to meet the people, the experiences, the restaurants in Italy and the various pronzos and calazones of the day that you're having with all these journalists and prelates from around the church. And my question, Michael, is how was your appetite wet by this experience? Because what is so exciting about your book, I think, for people, is we hear this highfalutin idea of synodality that our panel is going to come back to today as a theological concept, as a mess, to use Pope Francis's phrase. Right. But you give us a sense that synodality is about people walking together, and your book lets us meet those people. Why did you decide to write it that way? And how might that help us think about synodality as a theme and an idea?

SPEAKER_02 6:21

But I think, Charlie, um I realized in Polish Press at the time when we were thinking about this, that there will be many tomes on synodality. There'll be doctoral theses written on it, there'll be studies by church historians, by systematic theologians, historical theologians, whatnot. And that's all fine, and that's all to the good, and we welcome that. But you know, the experience of the synod is primarily a visceral, on-site, personal, relational experience. And the journalists were not allowed into the aula. We couldn't go into the hall, we couldn't hear what they were saying, we were not part of the dynamic. And I found that at the beginning very frustrating because with Francis's emphasis on transparency and Parisia and everything else, it seemed counterproductive to set constraints around it. But then I came to really appreciate what he was doing. And what he was doing was to create a spiritual moment for them. The delegates were going to gather around the roundtables, not the kind of the tiered levels, which was typical of the exclusively Episcopal synods in the past. And so the round table allowed for a level of uh uh equanimity and a level of equity. People were looking at each other, they weren't looking down at each other. And as a consequence, this created a more familial moment. And um, for the delegates themselves, this was not only liberating, it actually uh was energizing for them. You could see them going in at the late hours of the day, and ordinarily they would be tired, but they weren't. They were looking forward to the next phase because they were getting to learn and to know people that they would not have been able to get to know in the ordinary one of the church. So you'd have a you'd have a cardinal sitting beside uh a female theologian of a at a prominent university sitting beside somebody who was involved in some kind of institutional life in a diocese or whatever. And they were all together. They would never have been together in any other way. And so I looked to the press conferences uh, because that was the primary, that was the only avenue outside the less orthodox conventional ones where you're having a coffee in a tetheria or something like that, trying to uh um uh uh get some information out of a reluctant clergyman. But the the majority of cases it would be in the press conference, and they were unlike any press conference I had ever attended in the Stampa della Santa City or the press office of the Holy See. Usually they're very controlled, they're very structured. Uh the your interlocutor uh is is overly cautious, they're boring. This did not happen this time. They came in, they were excited. Every prel, and I mean, every prelate who spoke. Now we were there for a long time. Um, one month, one whole month, press conferences pretty well every day, five days of the week, usually sometimes on Saturday and Sunday, if there was a particular development, so a lot of press conferences, which meant that when you had six or seven people at the front table uh and the dais responding to the queries from the media, you over a period of time you would rotate so many figures from the Senate delegates, you put him up got everyone, certainly the majority. And as a consequence, I was especially interested in how they they've uh factored in their appreciation of the current Sonoto experience with what they had in the past. Now, this would apply only to the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops who had been present at previous synods. Everyone, without exception, said this was a genuine Sonoto experience. They contrasted it with their previous experience, one American, one African cardinal saying, you know, you landed on the tarmac for the first day of the synod in the past, and you knew everything was done, everything was written, the Pope knew exactly what he was going to say. It really didn't matter. This time around, it did matter, and you could feel it. They um some of them were cautious, some of them were skeptical, some of them were cynical. Uh many of them just wanted to see how this worked, but they were uh anxious. They came around, with the exception, I think, of possibly two among the entire uh delegate uh uh uh congregation, they um they they bought in to the to the Francis model. Now, the problem with this, and this this Tom Reese and I were the were talking about it briefly at the end of the uh concluding mass for the first session. And you will remember uh Reese, he had been an editor of America Magazine. Um he had been censured at one point, um, he's resurfaced, he's one of the most knowledgeable commentators on the Catholic scene in Rome. And he um I said, Well, now we've just spent so much time uh watching, observing, tasting the enthusiasm, the fervor, and indeed the intelligence of the synodelegates. Um, and they're having a great time, and there's 365 of them, including the Pope. What about the other 1.4 billion Catholics? How are we going to be able to translate this to the Church Universal? And he said, Michael, in my uh professional life, I'm a political scientist. And if one thing I know is it's this leadership. It will depend on the leadership. And I think that's true, and that's where we are now, Charlie.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

That's such a great way to think about it. And I want to commend one aspect of your book to our listeners and viewers, which is because you've structured it as this diary where you can sort of compare dates between the first and second session and you reflect on your experience of being at the Extraordinary Synod in 1985 as a way to think about the differences, it really opens up the recognition that this event in the history of the church isn't just a blip for its documents, but it might actually be a consequential change to how we think about being church. And that's where I want to bring Dan in, actually, which is to say, Dan, have you seen any ways in which Catholic life has felt some of the aftershocks of the synod in the way that Michael's been describing, both the structure of making room to not know what's going to come next, actually having conversations, but also embracing Catholic life where it's not a person at the dais speaking out, except for at these press conferences where we're rotating people, but the small circles are actually tables in a room. How have you seen this play out in Catholic life around the world in your work, Dan?

SPEAKER_01 12:59

Sure. Well, I think I think it's important to understand, um, just to add something before I get to directly to your question, right? That you know, so much of this is a reception of um Vatican II, um, and really kind of right at the intersection of the letter and spirit of Vatican II, right? In the sense of the council fathers coming out of the council asked for a synod, um, and Paul VI sprung one on them um that was slightly different from what they had in mind, slightly more consultative and less legislative uh than they had in mind. Um, and so Francis bringing forward synodality and the synods in the way he did um was very much a way of revisiting that decision, um, right, somewhat by indirection, but also expanding the scope of it, right? Saying, yes, it's not just the synod of bishops, right, but um it's the the synod bringing synodality out to the rest of the church, right? And that does move the goalposts, right? Because many of the critics of the last synod were focused on, well, it's really supposed to be the synod of bishops, uh, which is still giving the synod of bishops more credence than I think some of them might have given it uh before Francis started bringing synodality forward. So I think really, and again, the the beauty of synodality, right, is it plays out differently in different parts of the world. Yes, right. So in the parts of the world where the church is thriving and growing, they're very much doing a lot of synodality because they don't have the experience of the top-down clerical church of the same kind as we have, because they don't have priests. Uh, right. Because then, you know, this connects it to the synod on the Amazon, which Michael does discuss in his book, also, right? That uh, and which does get cited in uh sneak preview, the document we'll be discussing more next week on uh women in the life of the church, right? Um, but those people have been living a more synodal church because they have to do it themselves. Um, we in the West are really kind of growing into this, whether we like it or not, right? In the sense that in the face of secularization, right, in the face of fewer clergy, um, and certainly fewer clergy in the way that we are kind of accustomed to, right? Um being part of the church means being part of a synodal church. It means being part of a church where you are engaged in discussion and life um of the church with your neighbors because that's who the church is for you. It's not the institution, it's not the hierarchy.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

I mean, Michael, you want to respond to Dan?

SPEAKER_02 15:44

Yes, I think Dan's absolutely right, actually. Um, you know, Francis made it clear again and again in his writings, but particularly also in the context of the synod, that he wanted to talk about the church as an inverted pyramid. And so uh he pope and the hierarchy are not the top of the of the uh of the pyramid there uh any longer, they're at the bottom. And so the bishop of Rome, the supreme pontiff of the universal Roman jurisdiction or whatever, is actually the servant of the servants of God. And this this was a big thing for him. One of the reasons why I think uh Francis achieved um during the course of his pontificate was the wonderful humanizing of the face of the papacy. And uh this was another illustration of his intention of making it, and uh well, I put this in brackets, more democratic in its uh in its living reality. So the the synod itself is uh an effort, an outcropping of many of the things that were released um uh by the capsule that needed articulation. And certainly the global church is more sinned in its very constitution than the European and American churches, which tend to rely on a more 19th-century continental model of deeply embedded hierarchy and control. And Francis wanted to move away from that. Of course, Francis was an Argentine, right? So, I mean, he his experience was a Latin American experience, very much like our current father, who also has 20 years of Latin American experience. It's a very different kind of a church. But I think uh for me, well, uh, because my approach was just to look at the characters, it's like a drama, right? And you understand this, because if you hook your own work in uh in theater and the interrelationship of the aesthetic with the religious sensibility, that a lot of what goes on in Rome is theater. And a lot, and and our liturgy is theater in an important way. So the the theater uh or the drama of the synod is to be found in a strummatus persona. So you look to the characters. What are they like? What were they expecting? Well, how what did they what did they take from this great moment of dialogue and tension? And one of the things you you discovered, and again, when you're covering the synod, you're not actually in it. You're not in the aula, you're outside the aula. That is a disadvantage, but it's also an advantage because when you go to the press conferences, distinguished by the remarkable degree of transparency, by the way, uh, when you go to the press conferences and you talk to them private, you were reliving something of what happened in the original council. I mean, when there were various people, like the greatest of all conciliar journalists, of course, was the American Xavier Ryn, which Mia was a pseudonym for Francis X. Murphy, writing for the New Yorker, it was greatly driven by talking to the people, talking to the people outside the aula, outside the Great Hall. And that's what I think many of us try to do. We try to try to replicate that. Uh, because there have been various apologia, uh, various um arguments, treatises, uh, compilations, anthologies, all about synodality, consultation around synod documents, early synod documents, and whatnot, wanted to try something a little different from that major corpus or canon and look at the characters. Who are the characters? What are they doing? What's some of the excitement that's in Rome? The tension. I mean, the the one that uh scene that I particularly enjoyed um was uh a remarkably clever young woman, um, a journalist, uh, an American, but educated in Switzerland and Germany. And she um would always get up. She'd be the first speaker or the second speaker of the press conference, and she would hammer um the her interlocutor with a tough question, and she she would keep coming back to it until she got an answer, was always respectful. She employed all the honorifics and everything else. She wasn't uh casual or or dismissive, she just didn't believe them. And she kept pushing, she kept pushing, right? So she made a lot of enemies and she didn't care. Well, one day during uh a recess, we were standing on the uh Borgle, and uh she was eating some gelato, and she was by herself. And I felt sorry for her. And so I said to a couple of my colleagues who were with me, I said, I'm going to go over and talk to her. And so they came with me and I went over and I said, I want to congratulate you on the uh thoroughness of your research and the tenacity of uh your opinion and its delivery. She said, Oh, oh, she said, Do you agree with me? I said, No, I never agree with you. I said, I just appreciate the way you're doing it. So she looked at me and she said, You know, if it wasn't for your native Irish charm, I would hit you in the nose right now. So I turned to my colleagues and I said, For God's sake, don't tell her I'm not Irish, but English. But anyway, you know, you know, it's a survival tactic. But I, though, those kind of colorful moments, I think, uh speak to sometimes the intensity of encounters. Uh, and if that was true among the journalists, how much more true must it have been among many of the synodelicates themselves? And yet when they came out and when they were together in communion and they were at liturgy, and sometimes uh liturgical ceremonies outside uh Eucharist proper, um uh uh, you know, um a marvelous ceremony around reparation and sex abuse and everything else, there was a tremendous sense of the integrity and wholeness of the community. And you can't um you you can't misrepresent that or caricature it. You have to feel it. And I I think there was an advantage, Charlie, in the fact that this was not my first in it. Because I'm not caught up in Romanita, the the great excitement you have when you're in Rome the first time. Um, yeah, you go through that. It's like going to New York for the first time. You go through that, and then eventually you move beyond that, right? So um I'm way beyond that. So I I have no interest in writing something that's going to be a yahoy kind of jubilant text of celebration. But at the same time, it was not my intention to write a negative vehicle propagandizing a cynical view that I may hold over church governance. I wanted to taste the experience of the synod. And I did this most effectively for myself at least by contrasting it with previous synod experiences to show what a significant rupture from the past this new Synod is.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

And you certainly achieve that with this book, Michael. It's uh one of the best things about it for me is because you invite us to thinking about this synod conversationally, between what has come before the rupture of this moment? It invites me to think about how it looks to the future. And we should spend a little bit of our remaining time thinking about one of those characters from the synod that was Robert Privost, who's now Pope Leo. And so I want to throw a question to both of you. We'll start with Dan. Does synodality help us think about peace in any way? Are we seeing anything from Pope Leo's response to some of the global conflicts, particularly the war in Iran, right now in his calls for peace? Are there any ways that we see that connected to synodality or this sense of people talking to one another that Michael's opened up for us? Dan, what are some of your thoughts on some of the recent comments from uh Pope Leo around war in the world or even the situation of the world vis-a-vis the Vatican right now?

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Well, I think I think you can see ironically uh the commitment to synodality in um a pretty vicious uh Babylon B headline uh that came out the other day um criticizing Pope Leo, right? Now, um I'll read it verbatim, uh, but you know, and you have to be sort of uh you have to understand the the Babylon B's kind of way of doing things, right? So their supposedly Christian satire website that's gone kind of full MAGA, right? Um so their article is headlined, Pope condemns Allied forces for not just talking it out with Nazis. Um, right. And this, of course, is warmongering um about the US um and Iran, of course, ironically, uh hitting somewhat close to Pius XII's approach to the actual Nazis. But um what it what it's doing is actually criticizing synodality. It's saying, right, how could you encourage the US to talk to the Iranian government, um, which has said all these nasty rhetorical things about the US over the years and all that, instead of just going ahead with war, right? Um, so clearly on that level, right, the way that Leo is approaching this is catching on in terms of negative traction. There's also an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by uh William McGuern, right? Basically accusing uh Pope Leo of not applying just war theory, when in fact he is applying just war theory. Um so I think Leo, right, has been thrown very much into um having to pick up on the world being on fire, right? Which is something that Francis certainly acknowledged, it's something that Leo has been um consistent on, right? Um, but I think the way he's doing it, right, is through precisely the kind of dialogical approach uh that Synodality recommends to us, um, and that I think he's learned as a religious, right? As somebody who's had to live with other people, right? It's somebody who's also been a missionary of in a culture that was foreign to him, right? Someone who had to be on the ground with people and dialogue with them and learn about them, um, right. And then as somebody who's also been involved in appointing bishops for um uh North America, Europe, and Latin America, right? Where again you're looking at quite different cultural contexts and trying to find the right way uh for the church to move forward in those places. So I think on that level, he's kind of living out um versions of synodality, um, even as again, in terms of planning for the kind of broader synodal project that's specifically discussed here, um, I think he's playing a somewhat longer game than Francis was. Francis, to use an American football analogy, was kind of running the two-minute offense uh for much of his pontificate, right? Uh, where you're kind of like trying a lot of things, uh, you know, high risk, high reward things. Um, whereas I think Leo is trying to do a bit longer-term game planning uh in terms of how to make these things part of the life of the church rather than being viewed as some kind of charismatic gimmick, um, which um I think a lot of people who have been negative about the synod um have uh tried to portray it as.

SPEAKER_02 27:05

Michael, same question to you. Uh, I think there was a marvelous example of how synodality can have implications for geopolitical realities, um, ad extra or outside the church, if you like. In a conversation um in one of the press conferences when Cardinal Schoenberg, Christoph Schoenberg, the Dominican Archbishop Emeritus of Vienna, uh commented, and a great supporter of Francis, and a very keen supporter of synodality from the get-go, commented on a um uh kind of a learned, not kind of, but a learned official who said to him, you know, if we did these, if we acted the way you are, with this synodal model of engagement at the UN with which he was attached, uh, we would not have global war. We wouldn't be in the situation we're in right now. And of course, it's easy to say that, and we do realize it's a rather rarefied moment to have all these 364 delegates or whatever gathered in Rome over a period of two years, is a special privileged grace moment, but it is uniquely elitist, if you like, in the in that it is not representative of the uh larger experience of the church, though the individual delegates would be largely representative of their constituencies. The number itself is minuscule by comparison, of course. And um, but how how we translate that experience is going to be the great challenge. I think Dan is right. I think Leo is committed to the long term, right? Um, and the an example of that, I think, and we discussed this uh Charlie fairly recently with regard to uh Leo's creating this extraordinary consistorio meeting in Rome, which he's now established as a template of synodal behavior. So, you know, he's there. He said, Well, what can I do? I mean, how do I implement this model of serious conversation and listening? Well, I can't do it for the whole church, but I can do it with my advisors. I can do it with the people who I invited at the beginning of my pontificate to help me in the governance, right? So this is a way of uh institutionalizing or enacting that Synodal principle at his level. Now, if every bishop did this with their presbyteral councils, if every pastor did this in their uh in their community, then we would have synodality on a row because we know. We know that it's not going to be necessary to recreate the full structure uh with 10 people around the table with a facilitator and a redactor and using the three-point system, going around uh punctuating with silent, reverent listening prayer. It's not going to happen. It can happen and should happen at least once, but it's not going to happen irregularly. We have to find other modalities and ways of carrying synodality forward. But that fundamental experience, if you like, will be uh will be transformative in a way, and people will know what to expect. And that's what I think is really important. So it's a matter, to uh agree with Tom Reese on this, it's a matter now of implementing it uh at the appropriate level of leadership uh to actually implement another great uh doctrinal uh social doctrinal principle, subsidiarity in structural ecclesial terms. How do we allow this to work? Um, it's gonna take time, it'll be driven by personalities. Personalities make up the church. One of the reasons why the diary attempted to identify who some of these characters are, because there are they're, I mean, a church in Chicago or in Peoria or downtown Toronto or whatnot, they're gonna have all their own characters, right? And how do we lead with them? Oh, in this by saying that I truly believe this to be the case, that this is another wonderful instance where the church will rely on the wisdom, the charisms, and the genius of the laity. And it was not a surprise to me that it was during this period of sononal reflection and development that we both canonized and then declared a doctor of the church, the thinker most responsible for the recovery of the lay charism and the importance of consensus uh fidee in the church, John Henry Newman. So Newman, I hope, somewhere a theologian of consequence will, or a doctoral student of consequence, will take on the Newman component of synodality. What how did how did Newman provide uh some background and reflection uh on synodality, especially given his own patristic work and especially given his ressourcement tendency, but also his magnificent um 1859 on consulting the laity and matters of doctrine? I think that's such an important work, and it should be uh a working Bible for Synod uh delegates and those working on synodality in the church now.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

Michael, thank you so much for not only being our regular host for our podcast, but for also offering us such a rich resource to understand how the synod is going to affect the life of the church moving forward. But on that point about John Henry Newman, as we bring ourselves to a close, it's a reminder that here at Coraclesia, what we're trying to do is bring that sense of synodality and ressorts mol, that wonderful Catholic term for recovering the sources for their life today in conversation with others. And we're looking forward to the fact that one of the ways in which lay co-responsibility can cooperate with the Synodal Project is to keep having difficult conversations. Cora Klazen will be back very soon with some special guests to engage in some discussion about an output of the synod, reminding us that the whole point of synodality is to allow us to develop those relationships, those senses of the people that Michael gives us so wonderfully in his Synod Diary, so that we can then engage in some of the most difficult conversations that look to the signs of the times, so that our living tradition can continue to give life in the presence. I'm so honored that I got to host this conversation with you both this morning. And we look forward to this next edition of Core Clasia coming your way sooner than usual. Thanks so much, everyone. See you next week.

SPEAKER_02 33:29

Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Daniel.