St. Ignatius of Loyola’s first rule for thinking with the Church is: “We must put aside all judgement of our own, and keep the mind every ready and prompt to obey in all things, the true spouse of Christ our Lord, our holy mother, the hierarchical Church.” This loving obedience can be difficult; it requires discernment and a readiness to conform one’s thinking to the mind of Christ and his immaculate bride – sentire cum ecclesia. One of the difficulties today concerns the idea of “synodality” as concretized in the current multi-year synodal process. Many Catholics who want to think with the Church are both embarrassed by and deeply apprehensive of the steady stream of images and documents generated by the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops. We are embarrassed by the ugliness and ideological character of the images, by the low intellectual level of the documents, and by the displacement of a genuine sense of the Catholicity of the Church rooted in mystery of Jesus Christ by slogans about “acceptance”, “equality”, and the need to “embrace diversity”.1
In trying to understand the requirements of sentire cum ecclesia in this situation, it is helpful to recall the discernment undertaken by Henri de Lubac in the confusing period immediately following the Second Vatican Council. In particular, de Lubac criticized his confreres for adopting:
a false idea of openness to the world, shameless preached as if it were the thought of the Council, which takes away from the mass of the faithful that which was always the strength of Christians no matter how immersed they were in the world; that is: the awareness of their obligation to be the world’s vivifying soul. Instead, it leaves them as poor creatures without an identity, trailing along in tow.2
These words about “trailing along in tow” – desperately trying to be fashionable and accepted by the world – are an apt description of many of the phrases scattered throughout the working documents of the synodal process. And it does not inspire confidence when ideological slogans about “embracing diversity” and the need to provide “a more welcoming space” for LGBTQ individuals are presented as the voice of the Holy Spirit. For example, the drafters of the recent “Working Document for the Continental Stage” of the synod exhort us to “enter these pages as on ‘holy ground.’” No and no thank you.
How did this situation come about? What exactly is meant by “synodality” or “synodal ecclesiology”? What are the specific proposals for implementing synodality at every level of the Church? Finally, what are some of the limitations of this new synodal ecclesiology? My aim in what follows is to explore these questions in two steps. The first part of my paper will trace the recent history of the concept of “synodality” and the ecclesiology undergirding recent proposals to build or construct a synodal Church. Part Two will raise some critical questions in light of the sacramental nature of ecclesial authority and the specific vocation of the laity.
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