The Spirit of the Synod

By TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE

This article was first published by Observatore Romano in Italian and was translated by the Synodal Times. (Ed: It has been brought to my attention that the English version provided by Synodal Times previously posted here omitted a section. Pádraig McCarthy has kindly provided a translation of the full document, now reproduced below.)

As Jesus’ passion drew near, John tells us that he said: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:23-24). The Synod on Synodality, a three-year process of listening and dialogue that will reach its climax in Rome next October, will be fruitful only if it also turns out to be a time to die a little. After the first assembly of the Synod concluded last October, protests arose that not much had been accomplished. After all the fuss, the final document, the Synthesis Report, declared that the issue of women deacons needed to be “studied”—for the third time! The document also seemed to backtrack on the preparatory document on openness to LGBT people. The word is not even mentioned. Many saw this as a failure.

The Synod anticipated this misunderstanding. When seeds fall into the ground, not much seems to happen. They germinate quietly until spring. Pope Francis has insisted time and again that the Synod is not a parliamentary body, gathered to make quick decisions. The protagonist of the Synod is the Holy Spirit. Every change is profound, organic, and barely perceptible. It is God’s way of working. When Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected on Easter Sunday, the world seemed to be going on as usual. The Empire seemed unchanged. But the Kingdom had arrived.

I see the Spirit at work in the Synod in at least three ways, and each of these invites us to a kind of death so that we can live. The first way is by learning to share in divine friendship. It may seem strange to say that the first step on the synodal journey, whether in Rome or in a local parish, is to be open to new and unexpected friendships. But the Kingdom of God broke into the world two thousand years ago when Jesus began to offer his friendship to every kind of sinner, even the most marginalized or foolish. Jesus ate and drank with prostitutes, with tax collectors, with the corrupt and despised. This was sharing in the life of God, which Thomas Aquinas understood to be the eternal and equal friendship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

During the first session of the Synod, the Holy Spirit worked through encounters with others. Barriers fell and friendships were born. I have attended three Synods in the past. They were characterized by what I call the “ecclesiology of hats”: in the center was a white hat; then a couple of circles of red hats; then many purple hats; and at the ends were those without hats, like me. Back then, each of us was called to give an eight-minute speech prepared at home and then we had to leave. Overall, pretty boring. But this time we were all sitting around round tables. Cardinals and bishops sat next to young people, women from Latin America, men and women religious. The youngest person was 19 and from Wyoming.

All the members of the Synod were involved in “conversations in the spirit.” Everyone at the table was asked to speak for four minutes. No one was allowed to interrupt. Then, after a short moment of silence, a round of reactions and, finally, an evaluation of where there was agreement, disagreement or where there could be convergence. Each table had a facilitator, often a woman, who stopped anyone — including cardinals — who spoke too long. A Vatican archbishop told me: “Look at those Roman cardinals. They are forced to listen to the baptized in respectful silence. They will never be the same again.”

In friendship, not only can you become closer to others, but you yourself are transformed. You have to die a little, let go of the person you are. Every deep friendship takes you out of yourself. You become a new person, even if only in a small way. I recently had a serious bout with cancer, for the second time. As I came to terms with my mortality, I began to write down my life, realizing that I am the fruit of all the friendships and loves I have created, and sometimes even of my failure to love.

Who we are, as citizens of the Kingdom, has yet to be fully revealed. St. John, in his first letter, writes: “…it does not yet appear what we will be; but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Our identity is hidden in Christ. Being open to friendship requires that we not be too concerned with our own identity. As Iris Murdoch said: “The main requirement for a good life is to live without a self-image.”

So the challenge for the Church is to become the community of God’s friends. And that is incompatible with “clericalism,” the elevation of the ordained to a higher caste above the baptized. It is not surprising that some priests and bishops have been the most resistant, among groups within the Church, to the synodal journey. It may seem like a rejection of their priestly identity. But without the support of the clergy the synodal process will not get off the ground. It is urgent that we develop an affirmative vision of priestly identity that guards its vocation as a magnificent calling to the heart of the Church. What this new priestly identity should look like is not yet clear to me, although it certainly involves being ordained, ordained in every fiber of one’s being, in friendship, as Our Lord was. Visiting a gathering of tribal peoples in northern Pakistan, I spotted their priest, an American Dominican, sitting on the ground among the people, wearing his clothes and no doubt smelling of “his sheep,” as Pope Francis likes to say. And I thought: yes, this is what priesthood must be like.

We are all invited to a kind of Good Friday to die to the narrow, defensive identities we construct to solidify our sense of who we are. Our society is obsessed with identity. Gender, ethnic, or class (especially for the British), sexual, political. Identity has to be chosen and constructed. On a trip to Australia, I had the opportunity to see the movie Barbie, and found it surprisingly profound. Barbieland, Barbie’s world, embraces the American dream, which is that you can be anything you choose to be. Absurd. I could never be a mathematician or run a four-minute mile. For Christians, identity is not chosen or constructed. It is discovered or even abandoned as we say, Jesus is Lord.

In Barbieland, death is not even to be mentioned. But Christians embrace Good Friday, when the solitary seed falls into the ground and dies so that it can multiply. This began to happen at the Synod when the barriers began to fall and we were invited to step beyond the narrow identities of left and right, north and south and also, I hope, young and old to become one in the Lord, as the Son and the Father are one. It is a sign of hope in a world increasingly divided by war and violence.

And this brings me to the second way I think the Spirit is at work in the Synod. The Holy Spirit invites us to leave our comfort zones as Westerners. At Pentecost the Spirit descended on the community gathered in Jerusalem, then sent everyone to the ends of the earth. But the apostles did not want to go. They wanted to stay in the Holy City, enjoying each other’s friendship, a small Jewish community. It was persecution that drove them out of the nest to embrace all of us Gentiles. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be here today.

This is what the Spirit does. He leads people out of their comfort zone into the vast world of God’s friends. When I lived in Rome, some falcons built their nests above the windows of my office. Every year the drama of the parents pushing their young out of the nest was repeated. They hovered in front of my window, desperately trying to fly. The Holy Spirit is like a great mother falcon that pushes us out of our comfort zone.

Something similar began to happen to many of us Westerners at the Synod. We came with our Western agenda. We had our burning issues. We saw the world through Western eyes. But we had a shock. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many said we had entered a new era, the triumph of Western liberal democracy. Every nation was destined to “evolve” towards our way of life. If some countries, especially in the South of the world, did not agree with us, for example, on welcoming gay people, sooner or later they would have had to adapt.

We were wrong. We are entering a multipolar world. The West is no longer the automatic point of reference for a large part of the world’s population. I am not sure that we have even begun to imagine what it means to be one in Christ with our brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia and Latin America. During the first Iraq war, the Dominican family organized a month-long fast for peace in Union Square in New York. We had created bumper stickers: “We have family in Iraq.” Can we imagine the consequences of truly being their brothers and sisters? We are called primarily to be citizens of the Kingdom of God, before any national identity.

And here we are at the crucial point for the synodal process. It is necessary to open up to other cultures, other sisters and other brothers of the Kingdom. Fratelli tutti! But Pope Francis also asks us to open the Church to all, whoever they may be. Tutti, tutti, tutti: the divorced and the remarried, gays, transgender. But in some parts of the world welcoming gays is seen as scandalous. Many catholic bishops in Africa see it as an attempt to impose on the rest of the world a western decadent ideology. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo of Kinshasa, president of the organisation which represents all the catholic bishops of Africa, see is as a symptom of a western decadent culture. A few weeks ago he declared: “Little by little, those [the westerners] disappeared. We wish them a happy disappearance.”

How can we reconcile the two essentials of the papacy of Francis: To turn to the external in order to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth, to all cultures, and to be open to all human beings, whatever their condition and whoever they may be? The dilemma exploded with Fiducia supplicans, the declaration of the Dicastery for the doctrine of the faith which granted to priest permission, in very specific situations, to bless couples in “irregular” relationships, including couples of the same sex. Cardinal Ambongo went to Rome to present a firm rejection of the proposal on the part of the bishops of Africa. Never before now had all the bishops of a continent rejected a document of the Vatican. Every effort as made to resolve the crisis.

The pope had approved the statement. Cardinal Ambongo confirmed that African exceptionalism is an example of synodality. And he pointed out that unity does not mean uniformity. The Gospel is inculturated differently in different parts of the world.

But this raises more complex questions than that. True, the Gospel is always inculturated in different cultures, but it also challenges every culture. Jesus was Jewish, yet he challenged the religion of his ancestors. Is the refusal to bless gays in Africa an example of inculturation or a refusal to be a nonconformist? Inculturation for one person is another person’s rejection of the nonconformist Gospel. Another concern raised by Fiducia supplicans is that there appears to have been no consultation—even with bishops or other Vatican offices—before its release; not exactly, perhaps, a good example of synodality. African bishops are under strong pressure from Evangelicals, with American money; Russian Orthodox, with Russian money; and Muslims, with money from the rich Gulf countries. There should have been a discussion with them before, not after, the statement was released. Whatever we think about the statement, when we face tensions, and to overcome them, we all need to think and engage with each other on a deep level.

The third way I see the Spirit working in the Synod is in his leading us into the fullness of truth. This is another kind of Good Friday. From time to time in the life of the Church we experience painful moments when we die to a certain understanding of our faith and Christian life, so that we can move more deeply into the mystery of God. It is like when you kiss a person. You see someone across a room. You see them in their entirety. They come to you and you embrace them. And they disappear, except for their face. You kiss them and they become invisible, not because they are gone, but because a new intimacy has been created. So it is with God. Occasionally we seem to lose God, to enter a dark night, but only so that we can draw near.

It has happened throughout the history of the Church. It happened in the 13th century, when the West rediscovered the lost works of Aristotle. This led to a theological transformation, largely through the teaching of Aquinas. It happened again during the Renaissance, often through Jesuit theologians. The Synod is continuing the seismic movement that began with the Second Vatican Council. Each of these moments was a dying and rising again.

This alarms many people. Some of my friends say they became Catholic because they wanted certainty, clarity. The certainty remains: God became man, died and rose again, and gave himself to us in the Eucharist. All the doctrines expressed in the Creed remain unshakeable. But our search to understand more deeply what those doctrines mean sometimes leads us to perplexity. In the 13th century, Aquinas commented that “Blessed are those who mourn” was the beatitude especially of those who seek knowledge and understanding: “We are united to God as to the unknown,” he said. We must die to our old ways of thinking to delve deeper into the mystery. And that can be hard.

Not all the search for truth can be done by the Synod alone. Pope Francis has established various commissions to reflect on pressing issues, from the role of bishops to different forms of ministry and the role of women. This is part of our testimony to a world that has fallen out of love with truth, lost in the waves of fake news and crazy conspiracy theories, where there is “your” truth and “my” truth, rather than the truth. As Pope Benedict XVI liked to say, we have lost our sense of the greatness of reason.

Good Friday is the right day to think about the Synod. It reminds us of the different ways of dying so that we can live. The seed must fall into the ground and die if it is to bear fruit. In a world that sees identity as chosen or constructed, divine friendship invites us to let go of our self-image and discover who we are in the mystery of Christ. And there is also a dying to our Western-centric identity as we seek to understand what it means to live as citizens of the Kingdom. And finally, the Spirit invites us to die to our old ways of thinking so that we can enter more deeply into the mystery of God. This will be the task in the months ahead. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa said that we will always be at the beginning of our understanding of God, but Jesus “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).

This article was first published by Observatore Romano in Italian and was translated by the Synodal Times.