

A headshrinker could have a field day with the interview Pope Francis gave to the Associated Press last week.
There was plenty of grist for the mill, and news nonetheless buried between the argle and the bargle of the pope’s responses.
For example, there was the explication he gave of what has been an implicit – not to say “surreptitious” – presupposition regarding “synodality” and its place in the life of the Church. “The Eastern Church is used to it,” Pope Francis said. “It” is synodality, which the Churches of the East have kept precisely as their system of government and mode of governance. “[T]hey have preserved it,” he said. “Orthodox Catholics have kept it and they have the Roman Synod. We don’t have it. We are learning.”
It could be, therefore, that the whole business of the “synodal journey” on which Pope Francis has embarked the Church may find itself dead in the water before it really gets underway, or in any case never really come to port. It wouldn’t be the first time a papal reform initiative came to naught. What is certain, is that anyone saying with any degree of confidence what synodality demands of Catholics is at this point speaking prematurely.
There are myriad reasons why a synodal system or mode, such as lived and practiced in the Churches of the Christian East, cannot simply be grafted or otherwise imposed on Western ecclesiastical polity and set to run. Orientalizing the West is sure to prove as disastrous a project as the worst attempts to occidentalize the East. So, whatever Francis has in mind, it isn’t that. It can’t be that.
In order to make appropriate use of Eastern modes and orders, Western Christians will need to learn them from the inside, out, and that will require development of proper heuristics, hermeneutics, and a host of other tools for interpretation and calibration with hifalutin’ names.
The draftsmen of Francis’s working document for next phase in his own synod on synodality – the three-year worldwide consultative process that is already underway – evidence and at least tacitly recognize this ineluctable fact.
The Germans have taken such a technocratic tack in their Synodal Way. That’s one reason why his criticism of the German bishops’ oft-controverted synodal side project – that it is the work of technocratic “élites” rather than the work of the Holy Spirit through the whole People of God – is rather puzzling.
“The German experience does not help, “Pope Francis told the AP, “because it is not a Synod, a serious synodal journey, it is a so-called synodal journey, but not of the totality of the people of God, but made by élites.”
How the Germans’ Synodale Weg differs from Pope Francis’s synodal project in these specific regards is not at all apparent, protestations of broad “listening” to the faithful worldwide notwithstanding.
Synodality may turn out to be something for everyone, somehow and in some way a catalyst for needed reform and a contributor to the organic development of structures more apt to affect the safety and happiness of Christians. Synodality may prove to be Pope Francis’s white whale, his attempt to extract blood from a turnip – or milk and eggs from a rooster, as the Romans used to say – or a wild goose chase, or a snipe-hunt, or … some other hackneyed metaphor. Which it will be remains to be seen.
The business will be messy, expensive, and dangerous.
“You’re going to need a bigger boat,” says Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody to Robert Shaw’s Quint in Jaws. Or, perhaps Tom Hanks’s Walter Fielding on the phone in The Money Pit telling the plumber he went to Yale while Joe Mantegna’s just-arrived dirtbag carpenter gets fresh with Shelley Long’s Anna Crowley is a better cinematic fit.
The kind of work the Church’s house needs, well, it requires lots of experts. Their interests will never perfectly align with those of the principal stakeholders. The homeowners – not really owners at all, in the case of the Church – meanwhile have serious problems of their own that they need to sort out in order to have half a chance at happiness. Also, there’s no question of selling the house when the work is done, which complicates matters.
There’s grim fun to be had with the extension of the money pit (The Money Pit?) metaphor, but save it.
At the bottom of the interview, Pope Francis answered a question about his overall emotional and physical health. “Emotionally, I’m half-crazy,” Pope Francis told the AP. “De emotiva, soy medio loco,” in the Spanish original. The drop of a statement like that might have made a bigger splash than it appears to have made, even though Francis spoke the words in jest.
“World’s Most Significant Religious Leader Admits Emotional Instability” is the stuff of three-inch headlines these days, not only in the tabloids. Perhaps it is reassuring to know that editors and sub-editors around the world are beginning to recognize a joke when they see one, or that Francis’s “crazy” quip is really a sign that a little sanity has crept back in through the cracks. It made this old hand chuckle, anyways.
Church-watchers with an interest in all the synodal business, meanwhile, may be forgiven if they begin to feel like the wild-eyed fellow standing before a cluttered corkboard, squeezing a cigarette and gesturing maniacally. If they read to the end of the AP interview, they’ll find they’d be in pretty good company, too.
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