The Synod on Synod, a three-year trial of listening and dialogue that will reach its peak in Rome next October, will be fruitful only if it will also prove to be a time when to die a little. After the conclusion of the first assembly of the Synod, last October, protests were raised that not much had been achieved. After all the great outcry, the final document, the Summary Report, stated that the issue of women deacons had to be “studied” — for the third time! The document also seemed to back down from the preparatory document on the opening to LGBT people. The word is not even mentioned there. Many considered this as a failure.
The Synod anticipated this misunderstanding. When the seeds fall into the soil, not much seems to happen. They germinate quietly until spring. Pope Francis has insisted over and over 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 acting. When Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected on Easter Sunday, the world seemed to go 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 sort 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 of the synodal journey, whether in Rome or in a local parish, consists in being 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 ravenous. Jesus ate and drank with prostitutes, with tax collectors, corrupted and despised. This was sharing in the life of God, which Thomas Aquinas believed to be the eternal and equal friendship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
During the first session of the Synod, the Holy Spirit worked through the encounter with others. Barriers fell and friendships were born. Times ago I participated in three Synods. They were characterized by what I call the “ecclesiology of hats”: in the center was a white hat; then a pair of circles of red hats; then many purple hats; and at the ends those without hats, like me. At the time, each of us was called to deliver an eight-minute speech prepared at home and then we had to leave. Overall, rather 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 came 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 could interrupt. Then, after a brief moment of silence, a round of reactions and, finally, an evaluation on where it was agreed, disagreed or could converge. Each table had a facilitator, often a woman, who stopped anyone — including cardinals — spoke too long. An archbishop of the Vatican said to 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, you can not only approach the others, but you yourself are transformed. You have to die a little bit, let go of the person you are. Every deep friendship takes you out of you. You become a new person, even just for your small appearance. I recently had a serious cancer problem for the second time. As I came to terms with my mortal essence, I began to write notes about my life, realizing that I am the fruit of all the friendships and loves I have created, and sometimes even my failure to love.
Who we are, as citizens of the Kingdom, must still be fully revealed. St. John, in his first letter, writes: “...what we will be has not yet been revealed. But we know that when he is manifested, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2). Our identity is hidden in Christ. Being open to friendship requires that you don’t take too much of your identity. As Iris Murdoch said, “The main requirement for a good life is to live without an image of oneself.”
Thus, the challenge for the Church is to become the community of God’s friends. And this is incompatible with “clericalism,” the elevation of the ordained in a caste superior above the baptized. It is not surprising that some priests and bishops were the most resistant, among the groups within the Church, to the synodal path. It may seem like a rejection of their priestly identity. But without the support of the clergy the synodal process will not be able to take off. It is urgent that we develop an affirmative vision of the priestly identity that safeguards one’s vocation as a magnificent call to the heart of the Church. How this new priestly identity should be is still unclear to me, although it certainly implies being ordained, ordered in every single fiber of one’s being, in friendship, as Our Lord was. On a visit to a gathering of tribal peoples in northern Pakistan, I spotted their priest, an American Dominican, who sat on the ground among the people, and wore his clothes and no doubt had the “smell of his sheep”, as Pope Francis likes to say. And I thought: yes, so must the priesthood be.
We are all invited to a kind of Good Friday to die to the narrow and defensive identities that we build to consolidate the sense of who we are. Our society is obsessed with identity. Gender, ethnic, or class identity (especially for the British), sexual, political. Identity must be chosen and built. On a trip to Australia, I had the chance to see the movie Barbie, and I found it surprisingly deep. Barbieland, the world of Barbie, embraces the American dream, and that is that you can be anything you choose to be. Absurd. I could never be a mathematician or run a mile in four minutes. For Christians, identity is not chosen or constructed. It is discovered or even abandoned as we say, Jesus is the Lord.
In Barbieland, death doesn't even have to be named. 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 take a step beyond the narrow identities of the left and right, north and south and also, I hope, young and old to become one in the Lord, as one is the Son and the Father. It is a sign of hope in a world increasingly divided by war and violence.
And this leads me to the second way in which I think the Spirit is at work in the Synod. The Holy Spirit invites us to abandon our comfort zones as a Western person. At Pentecost the Spirit descended on the community gathered in Jerusalem, then sending everyone to the ends of the earth. But the apostles did not want to go. They wished to remain in the Holy City, enjoying each other’s friendship, a small Jewish community. It was persecution that pushed them out of the nest to embrace all of us Gentiles. If that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here today.
That's what the Spirit does. It leads people out of their comfort zone into the vast world of God’s friends. When I lived in Rome, some falchetti made their nest above the windows of my office. Every year the drama of the parents who pushed their little ones out of the nest was repeated. They soared in front of my window, desperately trying to fly. The Holy Spirit is like a great mother-hawk who throws us out of our comfort zone.
Something similar began to happen to many of us Westerners at the Synod. We arrived on our Western agenda. We had our own burning themes. We saw the world through Western eyes. But we were in a shock. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many claimed that we had entered a new era, the triumph of Western liberal democracy. Each nation was meant to “evolve” to our way of life. If some countries, especially in the South of the world, did not agree with us, for example, on the reception of gay people, sooner or later they should have adapted.
- We were wrong. We are entering a multipolar world. The West is no longer the automatic benchmark for much of the world’s population. I’m not sure we’ve even begun to imagine what it means to be in Christ with our brothers and sisters from Africa, Asia and Latin America. During the First Iraq War, the Dominican family organized a month-month peace fast at Union Square in New York. We had created stickers to put on the bumpers of cars: “We have family in Iraq”. Can we imagine the consequences of being truly 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. Brothers and all of them! But Pope Francis also asks us to open the Church to everyone, whoever they are. Todos, todos, todos (All, everyone): the divorced and remarried, gays, transgender people. But in some parts of the world, the reception of gays is seen as scandalous. Many Catholic bishops in Africa see it as an attempt to impose a decadent Western ideology on the rest of the world. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo of Kinshasa, president of the organization representing all Catholic bishops in Africa, sees it as a symptom of a decadent Western culture. A few weeks ago he said: “Culdually, they [the Westerners] will disappear. We wish them a good disappearance.”
How can we reconcile the two imperatives of the papacy of Francis: to be turned outward to bring the Gospel to the ends of the world, to all cultures, and be open to all human beings, whatever their condition and whoever they are? The dilemma has exploded with Trust supplicans, the declaration of the Dicastery for the doctrine of the faith that grants priests permission, especially in very specific situations, to bless couples in “irregular” relationships, including same-sex couples. Cardinal Ambongo went to Rome to present the firm rejection of the proposal by the bishops of Africa. Never before had all the bishops of a continent repudiated a Vatican document. Every attempt was made to appease 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 this. True, the Gospel is always inculturated in different cultures, but it also challenges every culture. Jesus was Jewish, and 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 the rejection by another person of the nonconformist Gospel. Another fear aroused by the supplicans Trust is that there does not seem to have been any consultation — even with the bishops or other offices of the Vatican — before its exit; not just, perhaps, a good example of synodality. The African bishops are under heavy pressure from the evangelicals, with American money; of the Russian Orthodox, with Russian money; and of Muslims, with money from the rich Gulf countries. There should have been a discussion with them before, and not after, the publication of the declaration. Whatever we think about the statement, when we face tensions, and to overcome them, we must all think and engage with each other on a deep level.
The third way in which I see the Spirit at work in the Synod is his lead to the fullness of truth. This is a further sort of Good Friday. From time to time in the life of the Church we experience painful moments in which we die to a certain understanding of our faith and of Christian life, so as to push ourselves more deeply into the mystery of God. It's like kissing a person. You see someone at the other end of a room. You see it in its entirety. He comes up to you and you hug him. And he disappears, except for his face. You kiss it and it becomes invisible, not because it is gone, but because a new intimacy has been created. That's what happens with God. From time to time we feel like we are losing God, entering a dark night, but only because we can get closer.
It happened in the whole history of the Church. It happened in the 13th century, when the West rediscovered the lost works of Aristotle. This has 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 Vatican Council ii. Each of these moments was a death and resurrected.
This alarms many people. Some of my friends say they became Catholic because they had a desire for certainty, for clarity. The certainty remains: God became man, died and rose again, and gave himself to us in the Eucharist. All doctrines expressed by the Creed remain unshakable. But our quest to understand more deeply what these doctrines sometimes mean leads us to perplexity. In the 13th century Aquinas commented that “Blessed are those who are weeping” 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 in our old way of thinking to delve deeper into the mystery. And it can be arduous.
Not the whole search for truth can be carried out by the Synod alone. Pope Francis has set up various commissions to reflect on urgent issues, from the role of bishops to the different forms of ministry and the role of women. This is part of our testimony of a world that has disliked the truth, lost in the waves of fake news and crazy conspiracy theories, where there is the “you” truth and “my” truth, instead of the truth. As Pope Benedict xvi loved to say, we have lost the sense of the greatness of reason.
Good Friday is the right day to think of the Synod. It reminds us of different ways of dying because 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 a choice or constructed, divine friendship invites us to let go of self-image and to discover who we are in the mystery of Christ. And there is also a dying to our West-centric identity, in our try 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 deeper into the mystery of God. This will be the task in the months to come. In the fifteenth century, Gregory of Nyssa said that we will always be at the beginning of the understanding of God, but Jesus “is the same, yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).
by Timothy Radcliffe