No clarity in Cardinal Grech’s view of the Synod [news analysis]

February 09, 2023

Addressing the European assembly of the Synod on Synodality, Cardinal Mario Grech—the secretary-general of the Synod—has given a strong indication of the Vatican’s plans for the worldwide assembly.

In a homily preached during Mass at St. Vitus cathedral in Prague on February 8, Cardinal Grech prayed that “our endeavor not become an exercise in exclusive distinction, between those who are in and those who are out.” Yet he also cautioned against a tendency to “blur the distinction between what is within the Catholic tradition and what is outside.”

Some commentators have read Cardinal Grech’s homily as a rebuke to the German bishops, whose “Synodal Path” calls for dramatic changes in Church teaching and discipline. But the cardinal does not call for rejection of those proposals. On the contrary he welcomes the tension between the radical proposals of liberal bishops and the conservative calls for clarity. He suggests that the tension will remain when the work of the Synod is done.

The German bishops and their liberal colleagues call for the development of an “inclusive” Church, which would downplay (if not eliminate) moral teachings that offend the sensibilities of the secularized Western world. Tradition-minded Catholics respond with a demand to clarify those teachings, to ensure that the Church does not stray from perennial truths. The cardinal, in his homily, nods to both sides of that dispute.

Cardinal Grech sends a reassuring message to conservative Catholics: “The Synod is not there to destroy distinctions, to destroy the Catholic identity.” But he also objects to “an opposite and equally problematic way of reading the Synod”—namely the call for the Synod to “eliminate all distinctions.”

So the Cardinal proposes a sort of compromise between two approaches: the Synod should neither discard Catholic teachings nor reject those who question that teaching. But that proposal does not resolve the problem, because if key moral teachings remain in question, then the Church cannot speak clearly, and cannot bear effective witness to the world. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?” [1 Cor 14:8]

The cardinal’s homily is a remarkable effort, adopting a very unusual approach. He devotes much of his time to an analysis of the role of prepositions in grammar, pointing out that prepositions “always imply a relationship.” Thus prepositions help us to make distinctions, because there can be “no distinction without a relationship.”

The Synod on Synodality, the cardinal continues, should emphasize relationships, and thereby help the faithful to make distinctions. He thereby arrives at the Delphic conclusion that the Synod will be “not necessarily a propositional Synod, but definitely a prepositional Synod.”

The Synod can address tensions within the Church by making distinctions, the cardinal tells us. But as with so much of the rhetoric about the Synod, the cardinal’s homily indulges in abstractions that are at best illusive:

The unity of the Church can only be understood in relation to diversity. Its holiness only in relation to what is unholy. Its universality in relation to what is particular.

As head of the office that has shaped—and will continue to shape—the discussion leading up to the Synod, Cardinal Grech is well placed to explain what Vatican officials hope to achieve. But the point of the Synod is not to carry out orders from the Vatican; the point is to consult with, and profit from the thoughts of, the whole universal Church. So suppose, when the Synod fathers gather, some prudent prelates will suggest that the time for nebulous abstractions has passed, and the time for clarity has come.

There is a clear precedent for that sort of resistance to the “game plan” for a meeting of universal Church. At the Second Vatican Council, a majority of bishops voted to set aside the drafts that had been prepared in advance, and opt for a new approach. When the Synod on Synodality comes to fruition, the world’s bishops might conclude that clear propositions should be approved—that with a synod as with a grammatical sentence, it is bad form to end with a preposition.

Philip F. Lawler

 

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Further information:

• The unity of the Church can only be understood in relation to diversity (Synod of Bishops)