![]() ![]() Their interests will never perfectly align with those of the principal stakeholders. The kind of work the Church’s house needs, well, it requires lots of experts. Or, perhaps Tom Hanks’s Walter Fielding on the phone in The Money Pit telling the plumber he went to Yale while Joe Mantegna’s just-arrived dirtbag carpenter gets fresh with Shelley Long’s Anna Crowley is a better cinematic fit. “ You’re going to need a bigger boat,” says Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody to Robert Shaw’s Quint in Jaws. The business will be messy, expensive, and dangerous. Synodality may prove to be Pope Francis’s white whale, his attempt to extract blood from a turnip – or milk and eggs from a rooster, as the Romans used to say – or a wild goose chase, or a snipe-hunt, or … some other hackneyed metaphor. Synodality may turn out to be something for everyone, somehow and in some way a catalyst for needed reform and a contributor to the organic development of structures more apt to affect the safety and happiness of Christians. How the Germans’ Synodale Weg differs from Pope Francis’s synodal project in these specific regards is not at all apparent, protestations of broad “listening” to the faithful worldwide notwithstanding. “ The German experience does not help, “Pope Francis told the AP, “because it is not a Synod, a serious synodal journey, it is a so-called synodal journey, but not of the totality of the people of God, but made by élites.” That’s one reason why his criticism of the German bishops’ oft-controverted synodal side project – that it is the work of technocratic “élites” rather than the work of the Holy Spirit through the whole People of God – is rather puzzling. The Germans have taken such a technocratic tack in their Synodal Way. The draftsmen of Francis’s working document for next phase in his own synod on synodality – the three-year worldwide consultative process that is already underway – evidence and at least tacitly recognize this ineluctable fact. In order to make appropriate use of Eastern modes and orders, Western Christians will need to learn them from the inside, out, and that will require development of proper heuristics, hermeneutics, and a host of other tools for interpretation and calibration with hifalutin’ names. ![]() So, whatever Francis has in mind, it isn’t that. Orientalizing the West is sure to prove as disastrous a project as the worst attempts to occidentalize the East. There are myriad reasons why a synodal system or mode, such as lived and practiced in the Churches of the Christian East, cannot simply be grafted or otherwise imposed on Western ecclesiastical polity and set to run. What is certain, is that anyone saying with any degree of confidence what synodality demands of Catholics is at this point speaking prematurely. It wouldn’t be the first time a papal reform initiative came to naught. It could be, therefore, that the whole business of the “synodal journey” on which Pope Francis has embarked the Church may find itself dead in the water before it really gets underway, or in any case never really come to port. “Orthodox Catholics have kept it and they have the Roman Synod. “It” is synodality, which the Churches of the East have kept precisely as their system of government and mode of governance. “The Eastern Church is used to it,” Pope Francis said. ![]() There was plenty of grist for the mill, and news nonetheless buried between the argle and the bargle of the pope’s responses.įor example, there was the explication he gave of what has been an implicit – not to say “surreptitious” – presupposition regarding “synodality” and its place in the life of the Church. A headshrinker could have a field day with the interview Pope Francis gave to the Associated Press last week. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |