In March 2013, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio gave a short speech to the assembled Cardinals before the conclave wherein he described his vision for a Church that was far less “self-referential”. He instead sought a Church serious about reading the signs of the times and responding to them with pastoral creativity and fervor.
But what has become of this vision over eleven years later?
The Synod on Synodality, one of the capstone projects of this papacy, is a very self-referential set of processes now three years in the making. Furthermore, this exercise is not only an exercise in self-referentiality, but it is also a distraction from the true pastoral needs of our time. It is a wasted moment when there are so few moments that can afford to be so wasted in the current cultural crisis.
And what is that crisis? In a word, it is the crisis of unbelief, which is the proprietary watermark of all modern, Western cultures.
One of the most obvious aspects of modern disbelief is that it is, shockingly, real disbelief. In other words, we need to take seriously the reason why more and more of our contemporaries in Western culture do not accept the Christian Gospel is because they do not intellectually agree with its fundamental narrative about reality. Which is really important because it should be the most obvious of facts—that disbelief is actually disbelief—but apparently isn’t.
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