THE JARGON-FILLED SYNODAL TRAJECTORY

 The Jargon-Filled Synodal Trajectory

Fr. Gerald E. Murray

Friday, July 18, 2025

When Pope Leo XIV spoke from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on the day of his election he said: “we want to be a synodal Church.” The significance of this depends, of course, on how Pope Leo understands synodality. The notion of a Church that is One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic – and now Synodal – isn’t clear to most, because synodality is a largely unknown concept. Its meaning will emerge as Pope Leo guides the “synodal path” with the help of the General Secretariat of the Synod. That secretariat’s latest contribution to the ongoing definitional saga is not encouraging.

If you’re wondering about the purpose of the Synod on Synodality, the General Secretariat, in Pathways for the Implementation Phase of the Synod 2025-2028, has provided this answer: “to build a synodal Church.”

If you are also wondering what synodality is, Sr. Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ, Undersecretary of the Synod Secretariat, answered in a recent interview:

I often quote an Australian theologian who was at our Synod, Ormond Rush, who states “Synodality is the Second Vatican Council in a nutshell.” And all our documents, and still in these pathways, in the Final Document, highlight that what we are doing is really referred to the vision of the Second Vatican Council. We can say synodality is the way to understand the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council in this stage of the reception of the Council. So, it’s nothing else but just continuing the reception of the Second Vatican Council. Because the council is not yet implemented everywhere, in a way.

Nowhere in the Council documents, however, is such an idea put forth.

Sr. Becquart continues:

So it’s a way to be Church. That was a way, from the early Church, that we retrieve from the Second Vatican Council as a fruit highlighting that, first of all, we are all baptized; and as baptized together as people of God, we are called to carry on the mission together. So, it’s calling every baptized person to be a protagonist of the mission, to help us understand that we are called to work together, exercising co-responsibility for the mission – of course, a differentiated co-responsibility because we don’t all have the same vocations. There is a diversity of vocation, of charisms, of ministries. But we are people of God, journeying with the other people.

 

How will this “way to be Church” come about? The Synod Secretariat, referring to the Final Document [FD] of the 2024 Synodal Assembly, offers this wearisome, jargon-filled justification of a revolutionary program [jargon emphasized]:

the dynamism that animates the FD, and which the implementation phase is called to take on, derives from the continuous articulation of certain polarities and tensions that structure the life of the Church and the way in which ecclesiological categories express it. Here are some of these polarities: the whole Church and the local Church; the Church as the People of God, as the Body of Christ and as the Temple of the Spirit; the participation of all and the authority of some; synodality, collegiality and primacy; the common priesthood and the ministerial priesthood; ministry (ordained and instituted ministries) and participation in the mission by virtue of baptismal vocation without a ministerial form. Implementation of the FD requires addressing and discerning these tensions as they arise in the circumstances in which each local Church exists. The path to advance is not to seek an impossible arrangement that eliminates tension in favour of one of the sides. Rather, in the here and now of each local Church, it will be necessary to discern which of the possible balances allows for a more dynamic service of the mission. It is likely that different decisions will be reached in different places.

 

 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger, 1825 [National Gallery of Berlin, Germany]

 

The Council of Nicaea would not pass the test of synodality as it in fact accomplished the “impossible arrangement” of “eliminating tensions” by deciding “in favour of one of the sides,” that is, orthodoxy was affirmed and heresy was anathematized.

When has the Church ever taught that Catholic doctrines are “polarities” that reveal “tensions” needing to be overcome by arriving at a “balance”? This is pure Hegelianism. Step one: thesis meets antithesis, resulting in a synthesis; step two: repeat step one, ad infinitum. The Church in this scheme does not teach dogmatic truth, but rather ponders different approaches that need to be balanced one against the other.

Both sides in a “situation of polarity” need to be happy with some sort of “reconciled diversity.” Permanency of the truth is gone, “dynamism” reshaping “ecclesiological categories” is in. By the way, is Catholic doctrine now a mere “ecclesiological category” that can be altered at will? It seems so.

The teaching of Vatican II stands on its own. The “nutshell” of synodality as the essence of the Council’s message is nowhere found in the documents of the Council. The Synod of Bishops, created by the Council, is an advisory body of bishops convened by the pope to offer counsel at periodic meetings on topics of particular relevance to the life of the Church. It’s not the fons et origo for building a new synodal Church in which all the baptized have a share in governing the Church.

The Church does not need to be reconfigured into a perpetual synodal discussion group led by Vatican officials, involving selected bishops and non-bishops, in which the tensions (naturally produced when heretical ideas are put forward as new and improved versions of the Catholic Faith) must be smoothed over because synodality demands the false notion of “reconciled diversity.”

The argument that the concept of synodality as set forth by the Synod Secretariat is simply the final realization of the unfulfilled promise of Vatican II may be convincing to its proponents, but it does not correspond to what actually happened at Vatican II.

If one looks for historical precedents, the study of Anglicanism will yield insights into the swamps and shoals where things are headed in the current trajectory.

 

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2025/07/18/the-jargon-filled-synodal-trajectory/