When I was in Rome for the Synod only one word was on everyone’s lips: Rupnik. Journalists accredited to the Vatican felt frustrated that their questions about the former Jesuit artist were not being heard and how the allegations of sexual abuse were not being dealt with and they were a little afraid.
If you are a Vatican-based journalist you run the risk of being ostracised by the Vatican if you push too hard so many have to walk a thin line, especially in this case as the issue it seemed went right to the door of the Pope and he wasn’t saying anything.
A prominent theologian gave me a friendly warning, ‘Be cautious, there’s a lot we don’t know’. All the more reason for the Pope to speak!
Scandal
The pressure was kept on and journalists, including myself and others not in Rome, pushed and pushed for answers. Just as the Synod was drawing to a close and the growing Rupnik scandal looked as if it might overshadow the Synod report, the dam broke, and the Pope we were told was lifting the statute of limitations on the Rupnik case.
Rupnik will stand trial and his victims will have their day in court. While the Synod assembly was talking about accountability it was happening in real time outside the Hall, and as usual, when it comes to abuse and the Church, it is still down to the media, as flawed as we are, to give voice to victims of alleged abusers like Rupnik.
One of the positive proposals in the Synod is to take bishops, who are not trained for this, out of the position of being judges in the cases of priests or other bishops. The laity have plenty of canon lawyers and secular judges, all who can help the Church. Hopefully the Synod will push this further.
So enough of the sour, let’s talk about the sweet.
Buzzing
The Synod Assembly was buzzing, participants and experts spoke off the record to this paper and the first week was just laity, religious, bishops, archbishops and cardinals all in the same space, getting to know each other. Irish Bishop Brendan Leahy of Limerick was in the same small group as Fr Jim Martin SJ and was the notetaker, and a good one too by all accounts.
Friendships were forming, people recognised people they agreed with and disagreed with. Dr Tomas Söding of Germany, (see interview in this issue) a key theologian involved in the German Synodal Path was standing in the queue for coffee in the Synod Hall beside a bishop who had written a stiff letter of critique to him about the German Synodal Way. The two spoke civilly.
Not all were civil; some women participants complained a couple of high-ranking clerics walked past them daily with their heads in the air. Others found some of the African bishops dismissive of laity. Others weren’t very interested in talking to people who represented areas of change that they were against and a small number clearly just didn’t want to be there.
In short, humanity was represented in the room but what did make a difference was they were all forced to sit in small groups at round tables. There was nowhere to hide.
Future
It was an experience of encounter and it reminded me of those who reluctantly got involved in their local parishes, last year in the listening phase of the Synod, expecting a cabal of doctrine changing liberals and instead were pleasantly surprised that what they met was a normal Catholic community gathering of people concerned for the future of their faith and parish and Church.
When we see the whites of the eyes of the ‘other’ face to face, it’s hard to dismiss them so easily. One stand out picture was Cardinal Mueller (former Prefect of the CDF) and Fr Jim Martin SJ (campaigner for gays in the Church) posing together after discussing their shared interest in the theology of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez OP.
And of course, the Pope was there many days, listening to contributions at a round table like everyone else.
The biggest star and forgive what is not intended to be a facetious remark, were the round tables! Honestly, people waxed lyrical about them, it was like an Amazonian tribe had just discovered the wheel, the Vatican has discovered round tables!
And in a way they had; never before had a synod of bishops, cardinals and Pope sat around facing each other (mixed with religious and laity). Rather they were used to conference seating, with the Pope at the top, cardinals next, archbishops next and so on to the lowliest bishop at the back.
Listening
For those of us ‘in the world’, the Church’s discovery of sitting down and listening to each other, as we laity all have to do in our jobs daily and have done all our working lives is sweet, and a bit funny too.
What was also sweet was how the Pope took the sourness of the Dubia Cardinals who were getting all the publicity before the Synod and doused those flames. They predicted schism, they called the Synod a ‘tower of Babel’ before it even met.
The Pope essentially took blessings of gays couples and women’s ordination off the table, which took some pressure off the Synod in my view. Attendees didn’t experience the Synod Assembly as a Babel moment, it was a Pentecost, the little Church gathered in one room calling on the Spirit upon them.
They too, like the Dubia cardinals, had their fears but unlike the ‘doubting five’, they also had their hopes, hopes that stem from lives lived in pastoral service, or as parents, or in religious communities, that have seen the realities of life and the realities of a Church around the world struggling to find its voice in the world.
Emerging world
Pastoral comes before doctrine in this papacy. Pedro Arrupe, SJ, the superior general of the Society of Jesus from 1965-83, once said: “I don’t fear the emerging world. What I fear instead is that we may have little or nothing to offer this world, little to say or do, that would justify our existence. We have no desire to defend our mistakes, but neither do we want to commit the worst of them: to wait with crossed arms and not do anything for fear of making mistakes”.
The implementation of the Synod proposals will now begin over the next 11 months. It’s a short window and the text is a transition text which means we could have something much more deliberative as the agenda for Synod Assembly 2024. Much will depend on the Pope, the Synod Office, and local churches.
Someone said that the liberals got the process but the conservatives got the outcomes. I don’t agree.
Polarisation
People listened to each other, and when they do that it builds a culture of listening and dialogue, and this culture of synodality offers a path out of the polarisation in the Church.
US Secretary of State James Baker in Madrid in 1991 for a peace conference between the Israelis and the Palestinians said “We have to crawl before we walk, walk before we run and today we all began to crawl”.
Ultimately, we can despair or as Paul Fahey writes in this issue we can be brought “to the place of trust”.
There’s a scene in the book of Exodus, after all of the plagues, when God’s people are trapped between the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army. The people cried out to Moses in fear and despair, and he responded: “The Lord will save you; you only need to be still (cf. Ex 14:14). When they were still, then the Lord parted the sea”.
