Synodality today: The power of God or the wisdom of men?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 17, 2024

It is sad to see the vanguard of German secularist “Catholics” continuing to press for a new “Synodal Council”. If you read our news story and the longer story on The Pillar, you will see that the same old issues underlie this latest effort to wrest the control of the Church from the Divinely-constituted hierarchy. First, we have an insistence on a democratic sharing of authority; and second a rebellion against the Church’s moral teachings. Or perhaps I should have listed those two points in reverse order.

For example, one foundational document (Breaking with taboos and normalization—votes on the situation of non-heterosexual priests) calls on bishops to “advocate that the ban on the training of non-heterosexual men…should be lifted at the level of the universal Church, and that all negative statements regarding their sexual orientation should be deleted from official Church documents.” The text also demands changes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church on “conjugal fecundity” and “regulation of procreation”, insisting that: “the spouses decide responsibly on the time to become parents, on the number of their children as well as on the different methods of family planning”—despite the constant teaching of the Church that all forms of artificial contraception are seriously immoral. Which means that to choose such a method is not responsible at all.

It is true that four diocesan bishops (out of 20 dioceses and seven archdioceses) are boycotting the German synodal committee. But the true silver lining in all this is that synodal committee members have “expressed concern that the synodal way is making little impression at a grassroots level in the German Church.”

Always predictable

The Church in Germany is in notoriously bad shape, but at least it does not seem like Catholics in the pews there are more excited about being told what to do by secularized Catholic activists than by lukewarm bishops. This, of course, is predictable; and indeed, once the Church is transformed into just another secularist think-tank, even the “revolutionaries” who have advocated all the changes will lose interest. A Church leadership with no claim to any objective supernatural authority is only useful as a tool to reduce the effectiveness of the Church herself. Once that has been accomplished, it is no fun “being church” anymore.

Unfortunately, it seems that the German episcopal conference’s president, Bishop George Bätzing, never received that memo.

None of this will come to anything good. Where bishops in Germany are counter-culturally faithful to Christ, the Church in Germany will grow again; and where they are not, it will continue to shrink. There is no reason to be Catholic without Christ and the authority of the Church Christ founded. You can be a moral relativist anywhere. And there is no point in pretending to be Catholic unless we are willing, in imitation of Christ, to take up the cross and suffer the world’s rejection. The giveaway quotation in this news story is the deliberate rejection of objective moral norms in the statement about family planning: Having revised the Catechism so it forbids nothing, the couples will decide how to regulate birth “in mutual respect and personal moral decision-making.”

None of this is new, of course, and it is a testimony to the failure not only of the German bishops but of a great many bishops throughout the West that an overwhelming percentage of those who claim the Catholic name are still using artificial contraception nearly sixty years after this question was settled (not for the first time but for the first time with respect to the “pill”) by Pope St. Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae. (It’s a short document, and very clear; those who have not yet read it can easily do so, and should.)

A false sense of democracy

The severe problem the Church has today in keeping her signals straight is hardly surprising; after all, it is to be expected historically. Christ Himself was not only opposed by outsiders but betrayed from within—certainly by Judas but also by each sin committed by those who claimed to be His followers. The very same thing is true of the Church. But the problem is exacerbated today by the modern worship of democracy, a form of government which is even frequently insisted upon as the “right” or “best” form by Church leaders, as if a widespread ability to vote has had any consistent positive impact over the centuries on the morality of civil government.

I do not consider this a random observation. Over the past century, Church leaders have with ever greater frequency harped on the importance of democracy—an odd and even rather touchy position for an institution with a Divinely-instituted hierarchy. Indeed, one can easily guess that the immense emphasis by Pope Francis on synodality appears to him to be the Church’s best possible substitute for democracy in an in institution which is, by Divine establishment, deliberately and even supernaturally hierarchical in nature. Readers’ experiences may differ, but I have not noticed that many deeply committed faithful Catholics have much interest in synodality.

At some point bad ideas need to be opposed “root and branch”. One cannot at one and the same time maintain that everybody should have a say in the governance of the Church and that authority in the Church is invested by Christ in an ordained hierarchy. Politically speaking, then, from the Church’s point of view, it makes much more sense to consistently advocate the simple principle that the best form of civil government is the form in which good men rule, that is, in which authority and power are exercised by those who are both morally good and politically competent. Apart from that, neither the structure of government nor the method of appointing governors guarantee much of anything.

It seems clear that the constant endorsement of democracy is in many ways detrimental to the Church herself. But even in a so-called democracy, our control over both government and the goodness of our laws is simply a myth. We don’t really get to decide which laws get passed and which laws we obey. The former is nearly always a battle with hostile powers, and the latter both a compulsion and, quite frequently, an inconvenience. The Church’s contemporary knee-jerk advocacy of democracy has few positive elements but, thus committed, she has a much harder time explaining her own Divine Constitution. There have been many good and many bad governments over the centuries. Their particular constitutional arrangements have seldom determined these outcomes, and they are altogether optional. The Church’s “constitutional arrangement” is not.

Mission

The Church today needs to be far less concerned than she currently appears to be about convoluted structures and exploratory methods in a never-ending effort to appear more “consultative” and “open”. People will learn to manipulate the new structures just as they have always manipulated the old. The New Evangelization so optimistically envisioned by Pope St. John Paul II cannot be accomplished through processes and procedures. Instead, the Church must become once again missionary, and probably never more missionary than in the places where she thought she had already established herself.

Perhaps an even better term is “apostolic”. An apostle is a messenger, that is, “one who is sent.” Every Catholic must be apostolic in some sense, for each one is truly commissioned and ordered toward the good of others by Christ from the moment of baptism. The Church’s ministers must especially understand themselves as sent to announce the Gospel, that is, to preach Christ crucified and Christ risen, and so to reveal the power and the wisdom of God.

In other words, it is today just as St. Paul explained to the sophisticated citizens of Corinth:

When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. [1 Cor 2:1-5]

Not only in the German Synodal Way, but in all the many prolongations and distortions of synodality by countless “interested parties”, we must ask how often has the synodal “program” been rooted in the “power of God”—and how often has it relied on the “wisdom of men”.