The “Synodal process”, which started in the Catholic Church thanks to pope Francis in 2021 and celebrated the first assembly of the Synod on synodality in October 2023, interacts in various ways with the life of the Church. But interacts also with other social and political aspects of our lives – how we live as individuals and together in the various communities, visible and invisible, formal and informal, to which we belong.
Our human life, in all its basic needs and expressions, is not separated from our life in the Church and they consist of a series of mediations. But it has become more and more arduous to recognize this fact, that we are mediated and mediating beings. This is the age of the crisis of mediations, replaced with a need for immediacy– with all its related traits: the expectation of total transparency from our leaders, the collapse of the separation between private and public thanks to over-sharing on social media, the de-territorialization of power, et cetera.
Economy
As it often happens, it all begins with the economy. The Wikipedia article titled “disintermediation” defines, in the first paragraph, this phenomenon as “the removal of intermediaries in economics from a supply chain, or ‘cutting out the middlemen’ in connection with a transaction or a series of transactions. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediary (such as a distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agent), companies may now deal with customers directly, for example via the Internet” (page consulted on November 14, 2023).
This is of disintermediation is one of the problems that the Catholic Church is trying to address with synodality because the life of the Church and of the members of the Church is not separated by our world dominated by the market system and the market ideology.
Disintermediation has changed the way in which our economy works: it has eliminated the “middlemen” in the distribution and sale of goods and services thanks to the digital structure and the creation of an apparently direct channel between those who sell and those who buy. Online comments and reviews, freely publishable on the site of the producers but also of the sellers, have replaced the reviews and opinions of the experts.
The selection and recommendation process, and therefore the decision-making process, is more and more automated thanks to algorithms which appear deceptively neutral. But disintermediation has also changed our political communication and our politics.
The advent of new media and digital media has revolutionized the relationship between political entrepreneurs and voters. It has deepened the changes brought about by the 20th-century mass media (especially radio and television): politicians now wants to “speak directly” to citizens, bypassing the traditional channels of party structures and bureaucracies.
At the top, the leaders have centralized power and, thanks to the fluidity of the new structures, have gained large margins of freedom for their decisions. There is a direct link between the leader and the people, without or with a minimal role for the mediation of the party structure, also in terms of the selection of its political personnel.
There is a new link between ideological militancy and online behavior, which replaces the old forms of membership and politics of belonging based on class: now it’s about “culture” and identity. This method of using digital media to speak “directly” with his supporters was particularly relevant during Donald Trump’s presidency and during the 2020 elections in the USA – but it’s not only in the USA. Disintermediation is visible also in the crisis of authority of science, knowledge, and the university. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemics in many countries: the “I have done my own research” was seen by some as the motto of a new Enlightenment, a new version of Immanuel Kant’s sapere aude, “have courage to use your own reason”.
Legitimacy
Disintermediation can be seen indeed also in the growing loss of authority and legitimacy especially in the world of knowledge (universities, scientists, experts in general) and the traditional mainstream media. Disintermediation involves the proliferation of information online without a clear quality of content and attribution of authority to the source.
The growing, unmediated flow of information therefore requires new skills and tools to manage data, news and opinions, and risks exacerbating an already existing digital divide in the different social classes. Disintermediation does not stop at the economy, politics, and education.
These problems can become – or are already – the problems of the Church. Disintermediation has also changed our way of being members of the Church and the ways in which church leadership and church government works and/or is expected to work.
In the last two decades at least, the multiple waves of scandals, made more visible by a democratized media in our age of transparency, has made more and more unpopular the idea that in the Church there is an elite of Vatican officials, bishops, and cardinals ready to help the pope or act as a filter in the most challenging situations.
On the one hand, this has boosted a certain Catholic papalism, an idolatry of papal power – a danger from which no bishop of Rome is immune. On the other hand, this has changed the status and the public perception of the legitimacy of all those (except the pope) who in the Church have power that derives from clerical ordination or ecclesiastical/theological formation: the clergy, the bishops, the cardinals, the Roman Curia, and theologians.
Prejudice
One would be tempted to say: anti-clericalism is the last acceptable prejudice. It looks like a prejudice because one of the magic tricks performed by this particular Catholic version of disintermediation is that many others who hold real, but less visible and non-clerical power (economic, political, and cultural) in the Church (or over the Church) are not subject to the same loss of authority and legitimacy.
On the contrary, these less visible power holders feed on this collapse of status of the clerical and intellectual hierarchies. This is a problem for the Church, especially now, because synodality requires participation from all members of the church and a certain kind of trust in what they hear about the Church and in what the Church will do with their input.
In this sense, synodality must respond not just to secularization as loss or invisibility of faith. It also must respond to a more radical secularization – the collapse of basic trust in institutions as mediators of our lives in communities.
In some sense, some degree of disintermediation is inevitable in the digital age. Synodality in the life of the Church means dealing with what Luciano Floridi called, in a neologism coined in 2014, being “onlife”, the merging in one of online and life – “being human in a hyper-connected era”.
Human existence itself has become an “onlife” experience, in which it is no longer possible to establish a clear division between the time we spend in the real world and the time we spend in the virtual one.
Our behaviours in everyday life influence our behaviors in the infosphere, and vice versa. This vast cultural phenomenon boosted by the new information ecosystem has given us, in the Catholic Church, some strange results in the Church.
As US Catholic columnist Michael Sean Winters remarked about the case of bishop Strickland, who in November 2023 was relieved by Pope Francis of his diocese in Tyler (Texas): “The boundaries of a diocese do not exist on X.
X, formerly known as Twitter, has dragged many people away from the norms that govern their guild. People engage social media and it can be addictive. It offers almost immediate gratification in the form of instantaneous replies to whatever one posts […] Still, you would think a Catholic bishop would be leery of any means of communication that lack all mediation: The church exists to mediate the divine revelation. Its ministers need to mediate its doctrines. Its teachers mediate its teaching.
To the disintermediation as a result of technological changes we must add also the effects of the Catholic polycrisis (the scandals of abuse, racism, and sexism) which has deconstructed many Church institution, keeping some structures alive while weakening them.
Roots
This is the particular Catholic moment in which synodality is trying to take roots. Both in our secular politics and in the Church, disintermediation means that people and leaders are encouraged to talk not to each other as members of a community, but are pressured to perform for an audience.
Then there are the problems that arise from an enthusiastic, ideological embrace of disintermediation, also in the Church: the urge of ecclesial populism, the temptation of adopting short-sighted and simplistic solutions, and the politicization of religious backgrounds as non-negotiable “identities”.
Not to talk about the idea that the diverse, multifaceted, and living tradition of the Church, is unnecessary because getting access to the tradition and interpreting it for today is an act of mediation. “La tradition, c’est moi.”
Deep down in the body of the Church, often in unspoken ways, there is a feeling that this phenomenon of disintermediation is damaging the communion in the people of God. Synodality is a response to this: in theological terms, with a new phase in the reception of Vatican II.
Humanistic
But there is also a more “humanistic” level: synodality is a moment of pacification in the Church, as French Jesuit Christoph Theobald, one of the theologians appointed at the Synod on synodality, put it in a recent book.
This is a Church that needs pacification because disintermediation is a form of war on the intermediate bodies which are necessary – not just in our economy and politics, but also in our ecclesial conversation.
Synodality is therefore developing in a typically paradoxical Catholic way: a push from the centre to decentralize the Church. We have seen this paradox before, during and immediately after Vatican II. But this push is more urgent now exactly because of this problem with disintermediation.
The growth in visibility and omnipresence of the papacy in the Catholic Church started centuries ago and accelerated with Vatican I (1869-1870). Vatican II rebalanced that only up to a point. Synodality is now a third phase in this history of Catholicism dealing with social and political modernity. It has a lot to do with the problem of disintermediation and the need of mediation in the Church.
As Francis pointed out in his October 2015 speech, synodality has to have an impact at all levels – universal, intermediate, and local. What is the role of collegial and synodal bodies in a culture (including religious culture) where mediation is seen as oppressive, and the lack of mediation as a value?
It must also address the issue under the issue, that is, ministry in the Church: what is the point of instituted or ordained ministry in a church that according to some it’s entirely ministerial, where all members are ministry? Maybe it would be helpful if we add some reflections on disintermediation. Sacramentality is part of the anthropological and theological view of the Church – because we need mediations that not just our mind, but also our body can perceive.
As the constitution of Vatican II Lumen Gentium (1964) says in its opening paragraph: “the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (emphasis mine). Recovering the idea of mediation in our disintermediated age is key for the synodal Church.
One of the problems of the lack of mediation is the idea that there are easy solutions at hand, if only the mediators would get out of the way. As Christoph Theobald said in an interview published shortly after the Synod: “we need to live with questions that we cannot answer yet”.
I am not sure whether and how synodality, with its recovery of our need for mediation, can change our economy, politics, and education. But surely it can change the Church.
Massimo Faggioli is an Italian academic, Church historian, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, columnist for La Croix International, and contributing writer to Commonweal.
