The Catholic Church is indeed in serious need of renewal.
But when has the Church not been?
The task for each generation is one of discernment. Discernment is both a facet of common sense, but like so many aspects of the life of faith, it has a spiritual or supernatural dimension too.
St Paul reminds us that discernment is also a gift of the Holy Spirit. We need to see in two dimensions, both the material but also the spiritual.
The immediate impression that “Instrumentum Laboris” gives is that it is primarily a political document, dealing in therapeutic and progressive dynamics; insensitive (at best) to the dimension of the soul and the spirit, preferring instead the ego and social reformation.
Synodality is in fact an ongoing process that takes place quite naturally outside any bureaucratic planning. Catholics talk and consult among themselves. They look, perceive, assess, complain and congratulate. It has never been obvious that a formal managerial synodal process was required. But that is what we have been given.
What are the areas of reform that the informal synodal process of ongoing informal conversation throws up for our concerns?
They span large and serious areas of corruption: clerical sexual abuse, the cover up and protection of the abusers, institutional financial corruption, the affirmation of disordered sexuality outside marriage, a certain degree of unyielding authoritarian clericalism in some quarters, and passivity and laxity in observance and under-enthusiasm for evangelisation among too many of the laity.
So why have we been given the synodal path? A dreadful suspicion is emerging that it is acting as an interim means to change the nature of faith itself. In a recent Catholic Herald podcast ‘Merely Catholic’, the experienced Rome correspondent Edward Pentin traced this strategy back to the Synod on the Family. And nothing has happened since to disabuse those who have a concern that bureaucratic synodality is no more than a stalking horse for a progressive revision of Catholic ethics and faith.
A synodal process which examined our flaws and failures is to be welcomed.
But much like the children in the parable who looked up and asked for spiritual bread, in Instrumentum Laboris the authors have given the hungry a spiritual stone. The bread is what we might call psycho-therapeutic in its constituency, not of the Spirit.
Instrumentum Laboris chooses different areas of our common life as the major causes for our concern to those of our informal synodal concerns.
Too much war, too much climate change, unjust economics and existential alienation of those who identify themselves and their worth by the sexual appetites. These are of course, the fingerprints of progressive leftism whether you meet them in political, LGBTQ+ or climate change circles.
“By their fruits” but also their language “shall ye know them.”
There is of course too much war. But there is no recognition in Instrumentum Laboris that original sin is at the root of this; that repentance, conversion and salvation are the remedies. The proposed remedies are instead that the resources of “listening, inclusion and affirmation”- the constant reiteration of “walking together” will provide the remedy. This is of course profoundly sub-Christian, and perhaps worse.
Indeed, the language and terminology of the document prescribe its conclusions in advance.
It deals primarily with listening and alienation. That means its prescriptions will be expressed in the categories of therapy and political and psycho-sexual justice. More than that. The alienation is specifically that of those who self-identify by means of their erotic appetites, known by some picturesquely as the ‘alphabet people,’ LGBTQIA++ etc.
Even if this had little to do with the faith, the theory it employs is therapeutically inept.
“For many, the great surprise was the experience of being listened to by the community, in some cases for the first time, thus receiving a recognition of their unique human worth that testifies to the Father’s love for each of his sons and daughters. The experience of listening and being listened to in this way serves not only a practical function but also has a theological and ecclesial depth because it follows the example of how Jesus listened to the people he met.”
But psychotherapeutic professionals know very well that the act of listening by itself cannot be expected to achieve much. Different schools of therapy argue at length about what kind of listening and what kind of response might be hoped to make effective changes. And even there, fashions and remedies are ever-changing.
The idea that listening per se will achieve anything is facile and perhaps even professionally fatuous. St Paul directs the Church along a different path of perception and engagement, and advises us that our experience of human worth is the gift of the Holy Spirit forging a relationship with the Creator as Abba, intimate Father. It is this which provides the recognition and existential depth the human heart was conditioned to long for. St Augustine most famously expressed this in his brief but potent aphorism
“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Instrumentum Laboris replaces this with “we experience alienation and lack of self-worth and we only discover our human worth when someone listens to us, includes us and accompanies us in a walking together”.
This is neither Catholic or Christian. And the authors appear to mistake Jesus the Messiah in the Gospels for a “Jesus the non-directive therapist, disciple of Karl Rogers and Gustaf Jung” of their imaginations.
The Jesus we find in this document is not the Jesus of the Gospels.
“There is a profound need to imitate the Lord and Master in the ability to live out a seeming paradox: boldly proclaiming its authentic teaching while at the same time offering a witness of radical inclusion and acceptance” (DCS 30).”
Radical conversion and repentance of the Gospels have been replaced by “radical inclusion and acceptance” in the Instrumentum Laboris text.
It is of course true that inclusion and acceptance play a significant role in the Gospels if you carefully define them and place them in their proper context. But move them out of the specific context into a generalised rule, and you have altered their significance and meaning. Nowhere does Jesus offer the therapeutic acceptance and inclusion without accompanying it with the invitation to a change of heart, priority or action within the most demanding of ethical framework.
At times the text descends into psychobabble as if the authors are trying to reassure themselves and buttress up their pseudo-therapeutic convictions:
“Authentic listening and the ability to find ways to continue walking together beyond fragmentation and polarisation are indispensable for the Church to remain alive and vital and to be a powerful sign for the cultures of our time.”
The moment we try to define what authentic means here, we discover the words bear very little weight. And the constant reference to “walking together” becomes increasingly vacuous and unhelpful. Walking where? Together in what sense? As so often in this progressive culture process takes precedence over substance; appearance over reality, euphemism over analysis.
Fragmentation and polarisation (however you measure them) have long been understood as symptoms of being distanced from God, unconfessed and unabsolved. They can also be symptoms of the turbulence of being troubled by unrestrained psychic and spiritual energies. In what world view is it that that one can “walk beyond them” simply by travelling, included and accompanied?
It would be interesting to know what skill and therapeutic modelling the authors were relying on and if they were able to define what “authentic” listening consisted of. Is it inconceivable that it constitutes the low grade and occasional unboundaried amateur group therapy with a disturbed group of non-observant Catholic progressives, meeting as part of the synodal process?
Emboldened by their own enthusiasms the text continues:-
“As we listen attentively to each other’s lived experiences, we grow in mutual respect and begin to discern the movements of God’s Spirit in the lives of others and in our own.”
Conversation in the Spirit is part of a long tradition of ecclesial discernment.”
That of course is partially true. But to those whose lives have indeed been surrendered to prayer, discipline and mortification, to be told that the authors know that chatting non-judgmentally effects a powerful evocation of the Holy Spirit, would appear to be superficially nonsensical.
Is that all it takes? If that were true, the renewal of the Church would be a far swifter and less costly exercise than it has proved to be over the centuries. But of course, it is not true.
For the record, it should be noted that the text offers to focus on the three important areas of “communion, mission and participation”.
But each of these important theological tasks are coloured and distorted by the endlessly repeated aphorisms of subjective relativism immersed in constant therapeutic truisms. And in consequence they begin to take on a different meaning and purpose.
You might have thought that mission had something to do with introducing people to Jesus, offering baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and a life of growing sanctification in the Church. Not according to the authors of this text.
“A missionary synodal Church has a duty to ask itself how it can recognise and value the contribution that each baptised person can offer in mission, going out of himself/herself and participating together with others in something greater.”
Much depends on what this “something greater” is. Apparently, it is more process than substance, more journeying than arriving:
“All points of view have something to contribute to this discernment, starting with that of the poor and excluded: walking together with them does not only mean responding to and taking on their needs and sufferings, but also respecting their protagonism and learning from them.”
So for the authors of Instrumentum Laboris it doesn’t matter what value system this “protagonist” believes in, or practices, just that you respect them and learn from them. This is relativistic superficiality of the most developed kind.
In case you thought this was all dislocated utopian verbiage, the authors have greater ambitions. In their minds, they think that they are forming something so radically different from Catholic practice that it has a name and an aspiration. The name is Synodal Catholicism and the aspiration is the takeover of the seminaries and the clergy.
“Candidates for ordained Ministry must be trained in a synodal style and mentality. The promotion of a culture of synodality implies the renewal of the current seminary curriculum and the formation of teachers and professors of theology, so that there is a clearer and more decisive orientation towards formation for a life of communion, mission and participation. Formation for a more genuinely synodal spirituality is at the heart of the renewal of the Church.”
For those with sensitive ears, “synodal spirituality” begins to suggest overtones of an Orwellian approach to Catholicism, which would in fact be in keeping with the secular inclusive Orwellianism which excludes all conservatives and traditionalists. The Synodal process has serious ambitions for itself it appears.
The questions offered for consideration in the group work bring their own theological assumptions. Whereas Jesus talks about a dichotomy of struggle between the Church or the Kingdom and the world, Synodal Christianity sees no such bifurcation. Only the untroubled “unity of all humanity”.
“How can we be more fully a sign and instrument of union with God and of the unity of all humanity?”
There are ways in which one call talk about the unity of humanity. Biologically certainly. But theologically only so far. The Father makes a clear distinction between all of humanity being made in the image of God; but the likeness of God is something that develops as part of the process of conversion and sanctification. The lazy claim to universal value is one that can only be made in a particular context.
It is important that Catholics read “Instrumentum Laboris” and ask themselves to what extent the therapeutic rehabilitation without ethical critique of those afflicted by disordered sexuality, constitutes a renewal of the spiritual life of the whole Church (the other 98 per cent for example). And to what extent a greater awareness of climate change and the justice or otherwise of economic structures and geo-political conflict will renew the Church?
Are “inclusion, talking and listening, accompaniment through walking together” tried and tested resources recognised as being resourced by the Holy Spirit across different cultures, times and places?
Do they perhaps constitute a temporary aberration of the occasional surrender to a passing secular fad that we find often enough in the history of the Church?
Or does it constitute more worryingly a plan for a different kind of Catholicism, “Synodal Catholicism” that is in fact neither genuinely synodal nor Catholic, but a means to the end of changing Catholic understanding of sexuality, spirituality and ethics?