The Irish Catholic editorial: The Synod that forgot to save the Church – The Irish Synodal Pathway process is a serious undertaking by serious people. But who is it for?

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There is something very admirable about the Irish Synodal Pathway. The people involved — and this newspaper has spent considerable time examining who they are and what they do — are genuine in their commitment to the Church and to the reform they believe it needs. They are not cynics. They are not time-servers. Many have given decades of their working lives to Catholic institutions at considerable personal cost. We are grateful to them, because too often that service goes without acknowledgement when it deserves much better.

A process without a map

To understand what the synodal process is doing, it is worth examining what it has chosen to discuss. Surveying the seven working groups — Belonging, Co-responsibility and lay ministry, Faith formation and catechesis, Family, Healing, Women, and Young people — now quietly meeting to shape the future of Irish Catholicism, one is struck by a persistent and troubling question: who exactly is this process for?

The disengagement of Irish priests is one of the least-discussed but most significant facts about this process”

It is not, it seems, for most Irish Catholics. Readers of this newspaper — committed, practising Catholics, not disengaged critics — have written to tell us they had no knowledge the process was underway at all. Not that they disagreed with it. Simply that they did not know it existed. That is a remarkable admission about a process that carries the word synodal — from the Greek for walking together — in its very name. It is an admission that synod organisers know is true.

It is not, in any evident way, for the clergy. The disengagement of Irish priests is one of the least-discussed but most significant facts about this process. The men who open churches, celebrate Mass, bury the dead and counsel the bereaved — the operational workforce of Irish Catholicism — are largely absent, and many have indicated, in this paper and elsewhere, that the process has little to do with their daily reality.

And it is not for those whose lives are shaped by institutional decisions already being taken outside the synodal room entirely. The Dublin Archdiocese is invoking canon law to begin formal parish modification — the most significant structural reorganisation of Catholic life in the capital in living memory. Decisions on merging ancient dioceses are being taken in the Nunciature and the Vatican. There is no working group addressing any of it. Nor is there one for Catholic education, which affects every family in the country — teachers, board members, volunteers, tens of thousands of people — while the Department of Education consults nationwide and anti-Catholic voices attack a world-class system without effective institutional response.

There is no group examining the vocations crisis — the single most consequential structural fact about the Church’s future. Ireland is ordaining a fraction of the priests it needs. Within fifteen years, the operational capacity of the Church in many dioceses will be not strained but broken. This is not speculation. It is arithmetic. The synod discusses co-responsibility in the abstract while the Archbishop’s office issues canonical modification notices in the concrete. And if the Taoiseach and the Pope are discussing the unresolved legacy of some religious orders at the highest political level, one might reasonably ask: shouldn’t the Synod?

The current working groups are framed almost without exception around questions of identity, inclusion, and pastoral feeling. That is not nothing. But in the context of an institution facing an existential structural emergency, it looks less like a programme for renewal and more like a programme for managing the feelings of those already engaged. If that seems unfair, tell us where the much-vaunted peripheries are in this process? The answer is: where they always were.

The transparency deficit

This newspaper sought information about the professional backgrounds of those appointed to the working groups — not to make a point, but because transparency is surely the mother of synodality. No information, we were told, would be forthcoming.

Through our own reporting we established those backgrounds, and they tell a story. The working groups draw heavily from a recognisable ecosystem: the Dublin Archdiocese, social apostolates, and advocacy organisations with well-established positions on the questions under examination. There are seven bishops, seven Synodal Committee members, eight priests, one deacon, five religious, at least six associated with the Dublin Archdiocese and approximately four from Armagh. Bishops’ agencies Accord and Trocaire have a combined four. We Are Church has at least one representative.  There’s a strong Northern presence while the rural south of Ireland seems thin.

This does not mean those appointed are unqualified or acting in bad faith. But it does mean the process is not as representative as the word synodal implies. The range of opinion represented is largely (though not all) the range held within a particular reform-sympathetic network. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But that network is not the whole Irish Church. And the secrecy feeds precisely the suspicion that synodality, in practice, means a small insider cohort walking together while everyone else watches from outside — or more likely, doesn’t watch at all.

The harder questions

The place of women in the Church, faith formation in a secular age, ministry to families under pressure — these are real questions that deserve serious attention. But they cannot substitute for the questions not being asked. What does belonging mean when your parish ceases to exist as a legal entity? What does faith formation mean when there are no priests to celebrate the sacraments it leads toward?

That is not cynicism. It is realism about how the institutional Church operates”

The National Synodal Assembly meets in Meath this October. Its conclusions may shape the direction of the Irish Church in the years ahead — or they may not. The history of Church committees, reports, and consultative processes in Ireland is not a history of institutional transformation. The real decisions — on parishes, on dioceses, on the deployment of a diminishing clergy — will in all likelihood be made as they have always been made: by bishops consulting with their priests under canonical rules, in the Nunciature, in Rome, in the quiet closed door conversations that precede formal announcements.

That is not cynicism. It is realism about how the institutional Church operates and, in many respects, must operate. But it does raise the question of what the synodal process is ultimately for, and whether the energy and goodwill invested in it might have been better directed toward the emergency that is already unfolding — visibly, structurally, arithmetically — outside the meeting rooms where the working groups gather.  Ultimately, all roads lead to one over-arching question – how do you make Sunday better?  How do you ensure that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life as decreed by Vatican II and how do you future proof that?

Those are not comfortable questions. But a genuine synodal process — one that walks with all the faithful, not only those already in the room — cannot afford to leave them unasked.

The Irish Catholic has been reporting on the Synodal Pathway since its inception. Responses from working group members and the synodal office and readers are welcome.