‘Synodality’ – Poisonous Corruption or Catholic Renewal? Pope Leo’s Next Decision.

One of the things I happen to know about is Synodality.

I spent twenty years as a member of the Anglican Church’s “General Synod

General Synod is a giant committee with about 650 members. Essentially, it mimics the House of Commons. A kind of ecclesiastical parliament. Clergy, careers, are made and broken with some of the speeches. So the clergy tend to get a bit overwrought and stage struck when they perform there. Some people deeply impress. Others make fools of themselves. But it functions as a kind of political gladiatorial amphitheatre, in which church politics is done.

I was astonished when I encountered it for the first time. There is of course, the pretence or presentation of spirituality, but the formal and brief prayers soon evaporate and give way to expose the real purpose and focus of the place, which is a struggle for power.

The problem with church politics is that there’s almost nothing as likely to quench the Holy Spirit, to drive away kingdom of heaven as the lust for power. Because politics is essentially the practice of power. And power and love are as we know form the incarnation, inimical to one another.

Any religious body that has ambitions to foster holiness needs to know how to tame and contain our natural lust for power, and its practice, which is politics. And when we consider the future of synodality in the Catholic Church, we will need to return to that question.

The problem for the Church of England is that it was born out of a political crisis and defined by political criteria. It is a coalition of different theological power blocks.

The three major theological tribes that constitute the Church of England are set in permanent deadlock against each other. Political argument and struggle in the synod is the way in which they try and overcome each other in order to gain control of the Church of England. This is a problem which is particular to the Church England, and perhaps more pronounced in it than in any other church, since it is made up of a coalition of different colleges and ecclesiologies. The three coalitions are the Zwinglian Evangelicals, Erastian Establishment, and the Sacramental Nostalgics (so called Anglo-Catholics.) Synods are indeed large committees in which legal decisions have to be made. But there are also places where politics and the quest for dominance crushes spirituality,

Partly because it was born out of a political crisis, one in which a Protestant coalition was created to keep Catholics at bay without slipping into a civil war, the Church of England excels at Synod and Synodality. It has a ladder of synods. Parish Councils which are little synods, then deanery Synod’s, and then a national Synod called General Synod. This has become a body of about six hundred people who meet for three or four days three times a year to talk, argue, pass church legislation and fight to impose their vision of the faith on the rest of the Church.

It has certain groups from which electors are chosen. One is university theologians. I was a member sent as a university theologian for four periods of 5 years, 20 years in all.

Occasionally, but not very often, the university theologians were consulted. But not very often. Without meaning to be rude, the Anglicans hardly ever resort to theology in their deliberations.

It will come as a great shock to Catholics, but the Anglican synod is divided into a further three constituencies, bishops clergy and laity. In order to make a significant change to the law or character of the church you have to have a 2/3 majority in the vote. And voting can take place in houses. Any Catholic is, of course, astonished and horrified, that clergy, and laity together could outvote the bishops to change the nature of church teaching.

After all, for a Catholic, what are bishops for if not to have the authority to defend and articulate the faith? But in Anglicanism, they have only administrative competence, not doctrine authority. Are they then bishops in any sense? You might well ask.

The reality of what takes place in the synod is even worse. Such conservative tendencies as there are, and very few remain, are embodied by the lay people who constantly try to resist the revision of the theologically educated clergy and bishops.

But in the history of the synodal process of the church of England, since I first encountered it, has been to use the political process of synodality to introduce all the progressive shibboleths of secular culture and replace biblical and traditional ethics and practices.

Feminism, the tyranny of relativism, the celebration and promotion of disordered sexuality, the abandonment of Christian ethics, the politicisation of spirituality have all been promoted and embedded into the Church of England through synodality.

The Church of England fondly claims that it’s own epistemological understanding, as being founded on a tripod relationship between the Bible, tradition and reason.

An intelligent, 12-year-old would have no difficulty in demolishing this as a serious claim.

Firstly, Protestants are notoriously divergent in the way they read the Bible. There is no agreed reading.

Secondly, exactly what tradition does an anti-Catholic state church lay claim to as a way of expressing apostolic faith? Unless it is the tradition of political pragmatism dominating the occasional break out of spirituality. As in the crushing of the Wesleyan and Oxford Movement attempted revivals.

And thirdly, reason turns out to be wholly captive to the sophistication of political intrigue, and will. Politically might is right. Reason becomes the capacity to defeat your opponent by rhetoric and argument.

It was something of a shock then when the late Pope Francis introduced synodality and the Synodal process to the Catholic Church in 2021.

How was synodality compatible with the Magisterium and the authority of both the papal office and the episcopate?

The language that justified it was benign. It spoke of “deepening collegiality, discernment and co-responsibility.” Who could be against that.

However, if we have learnt anything from the culture wars, it ought to be that, whenever we find ourselves using the phrase “who could be against that” we ought to suspect a ‘progressive plot’.