“Zero is the number of parishioners who have come up to me in the last four years praising synodality.” Fr. Gerald Murray has been a parish priest in New York for decades. He is also a canonist, and he does not think synodality is a movement of the Spirit — he thinks it is a bureaucratic maneuver wearing spiritual language.
In Part 1 of this conversation, Fr. Murray takes apart the vocabulary: Sr. Nathalie Becquart calling synodality “a social prophecy” and “a grammar of peace”; the Synod Secretariat classifying Catholics who disagree not as people with differing views but as “resistance”; and the question nobody in Rome has answered — where in the world do we find a Catholic mandate to invent a church in a different way?
“Synodality no longer exists, because it’s a made-up concept.”
Fr. Gerald Murray does not think the synodal process is irreversible. He thinks it can be stopped, and in Part 2 of this conversation he lays out exactly how: suspend the process now, restore the office to what it was, rename it the Synod of Bishops, and send it back to what Pope St. Paul VI actually built – periodic meetings of bishops on real pastoral questions. His argument is that undoing it is not radical, because there was nothing there before to undo. “If we shut it down, that’s just returning to what happened before.”
Then Germany. On 17 June 2026 the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments refused the German bishops’ request for lay preaching in place of the homily. The president of their conference answered that he has “a lot of respect for the tradition we have here in Germany.” Fr. Murray’s read is blunt: “It’s a direct act of rebellion, and it should be suppressed.”
And at the end, the moment that stops the conversation cold – priests being sent to give last rites to people who intend to take their own lives. “The world is laughing. The devil’s laughing at that.”