Synodality and the continued and deceptive use of “People of God”

Johathan Liedl, a reporter with The National Catholic Register, has written a very important article on one of the more influential theologians of the upcoming Synod on synodality in October. The article got some traction on social media early on but deserves heightened attention, which is why I wanted to comment on here.

The theologian in question is Rafael Luciani, a lay Venezuelan theologian who has been an advisor to the organizers of the Synod. Liedl gets right to the point and highlights the following:

The key, says Venezuelan lay theologian Rafael Luciani, is for the synod’s outcome to affirm a contested interpretation of Vatican II’s teaching on the “People of God” that has already been embraced in places like Germany, clearing the way for a more decentralized, less hierarchical approach to Church authority.

Luciani, a key theological adviser to the Vatican office organizing the synod and leading proponent of “synodality” more broadly, said in a July 23 interview with Katholisch, the German bishops’ news service, that although controversial topics like women deacons were no longer on the October assembly’s agenda after Pope Francis shifted them to separate study groups, the synod could still open the door to big changes.

In the interview, Luciani goes on to elucidate his interpretation of Vatican II’s teaching on the Church as the People of God, voicing high praise for the German “synodal way” and many criticisms directed at just about every other sector of the Church. He wants the Synod on synodality to adopt the German model and to export it to the universal Church. He also has sharp criticism of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI for having thwarted all attempts at implementing this ecclesiological vision.

In a nutshell, this is the same warmed-over progressive distortion of Lumen Gentium’s use of the People of God metaphor that gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of the Council. In this approach the Church is deconstructed as a supernatural sacramental reality grounded in Christ and oriented toward an eschatological fulfilment in a “Kingdom not of this world”, and then reconstructed as a purely democratic sociological reality grounded in accommodation to modern liberalism, oriented toward purely horizontalist and globalist endeavors in a humanistic register.

From Hans Küng’s reconfiguration of Catholicism as just one religion among many other equally valid ones, through Rahner’s exaggerated engracing of the world as always already saved and standing only in need of having this reality “thematized” for it, and finally on to the Luciani’s and Bishop Bätzing’s of the modern Church, we see this revisionist theology of proletarian privilege run like an Ariadne’s thread through it all.

The very concept of a Church grounded in a hierarchy with apostolic authority as the sacramental making present of Christ for the sake of the world’s salvation is problematized to the point that the entire edifice is called into question.

Is it any wonder then that, in those European countries where this theology was the strongest, the Church has essentially collapsed? Luciani never mentions the Church in Germany is dying and that, in 2023, over 400,000 Germans disaffiliated from the Church (after over 500,000 had left in 2022). The lesson Luciani and Bishop Bätzing have drawn from this is that the German Church has just not been progressive enough–thwarted by JPII and Benedict and all that nonsense–and therefore it not only needs to double down on a bad hand, but should also now export the same bad hand to the rest of the Church.

In the name of “the people” Luciani wants the Church to impose the progressive Catholic misinterpretation of the People of God motif on all of those ecclesial backwaters (he mentions Africa, North America, and Asia as bad agents of counterrevolution) that do not share the superior and enlightened Teutonic theology of decline as veiled progress. One hesitates to see Marxist influences everywhere (a much overused category, in my view) but one cannot avoid the obvious. The elitist elevation of a largely European ideology of “the people” is to be imposed on less enlightened “people” who are not really counted as among “the people”, and this imposition will come from above via the path of progressive “reeducation” of the benighted masses–with or without their consent.

This has absolutely no connection to Vatican II, which in no way promoted a theology of the People of God standing in opposition to “the hierarchical principle” in the Church. I have written before on this topic so there is no need to revisit it again, but suffice it to say this reading of the Council is wrong and contrary to what it actually taught. One has to see in it a deliberate choice to engage in a kind of transposition of conciliar words and theology into the conceptual framework and dogmas of a globalist chic aesthetic of a world brought into solidarity, not by Christ, but by a counter gospel of the cult of secular liberalism.

This is salvation via bureaucratic structures—the exact opposite of a true synodality and its inherent Christological personalism. It seems to have escaped the notice of many that the predominant reality of this entire synodal “process” is the emphasis precisely on “process”. And that the “process” is dominated by the presence of endless committees operating, as all bureaucracies do, with the layered anonymity of faceless apparatchiks who were not voted on by “the people” but appointed by other faceless apparatchiks sitting behind some epicene desk in Rome.

Liedl’s valuable article brings to an English-speaking audience the fact that Luciani does us the favor of saying the quiet part out loud. He says:

If, at the end of the synod, we have a document that makes this ecclesiological leap and establishes the understanding of the Church as the People of God, there will be further developments in the areas of ministries and doctrine.

And he makes it clear later in his interview (again, as reported by Liedl) that this means the ordination of women. And since he has high praise for the Germans and their synodal proposals, one can also legitimately assume that the changes in “doctrine” to which he is referring have to do with the Church’s moral theology, especially in matters of sex and gender–the latter being the bête noire of all progressive theologies these days.

Why is all of this important? It could just be dismissed as the errant thinking of one theologian were it not for the fact the Vatican is currently littered with people who think like him. Furthermore, the new Instrumentum Laboris (or Working Document) for the Synod is riddled with vague references to “The People of God” which, although not as blunt and overt as Luciani’s misinterpretations, evinces an overall trajectory in a similar sociological direction.

There is little to no emphasis in the Instrumentum on eschatology, soteriology, and the absolute necessity of following the path of repentance from sin and sanctification. Instead, we are given endless descriptions of synodality with vague descriptors circling around the topic without ever getting to any level of clarity. Apparently, synodality means listening, dialogue, and an endless openness to pluralism. The People of God motif is then employed as the apparent subject of all of this pluralistic listening. But the text is short on analysis of how to read all of this pluralism. I am reminded of the comment from Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue that true pluralism is an integrated dialogue of intersecting viewpoints—not a mere assemblage of random opinions amounting to an unharmonious mélange of ill-assorted fragments.

I was initially happy with the Instrumentum Laboris since it lacked all references to the various hot-button issues that dominated the vibe around the last Synod. But, since then, we have come to learn that the Vatican has established a series of yet more committees to look into these issues in more depth. And that is a red flag. One does not establish committees to look into matters once and truly settled. For example, there is no committee looking into whether Christ really was divine or if God really is a Trinity or if racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and xenophobia have their merits after all.

One only engages in endless chatter about matters that are held to be in dispute. So Pope Francis can say in various interviews all the right “orthodox” things concerning these issues, but insofar as he constantly forms these kinds of commissions in the name of “listening to the People of God” one is justified in seeing a certain “process” at work, which has the net effect of empowering the forces of radical change. One never sees, for example, a Vatican commission which seeks the proper synodal understanding of how faithful Catholic families can negotiate the jagged shoals of our pornified and sex-saturated culture in order to protect their children. Or how pastors can find the proper synodal understanding of how to promote greater liturgical participation in an era given over to the death of the sacred.

What we have in this synodal process, is a curated form of listening. Luciani confirms this when he points out there are vast swaths of the Church that not only should not be listened to, but who need to be forced to toe the line of the new ecclesiology of inclusion by way of exclusion. Apparently, some voices are more equal than others—and it is not just Luciani who thinks this way. The entire bureaucracy of the synodal apparatus is just so oriented to a curated form of listening where voices from the conservative wing of the Church are treated as dangerous “indietrist” and reactionary ones.

For example, recently there was a large gathering of “LGBTQ Catholics” at Georgetown University sponsored by the Fr. James Martin’s Outreach ministry. Pope Francis sent a warm letter of support for the event, and Cardinal Wilton Gregory presided at the Mass. Here is a quote from his homily:

In many respects you are engaging in an act of synodality – the vision and invitation proposed by Pope Francis that sincerely and openly speaking and listening to one another under the light and guidance of the Holy Spirit is the way that the Church grows in perfection.

What if, instead of Outreach, we were looking at a gathering sponsored by Courage? Or a gathering of (gasp!) traditionalists? Or a gathering of my clan, Catholic Workers who seek to restore the movement to the Catholic orthodoxy of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin? Or a meeting of Communio theologians devoted to the theology of John Paul II and Benedict XVI? Would those meetings count as an act of synodality and listening? Would the Pope send a warm letter of support? Would Cardinal Gregory “accompany” them on their synodal journey?

Perhaps they would. But I highly doubt it. In all of this there is simply the stench of power and its grasping ideological acolytes. As Liedl notes in his article, Joseph Ratzinger viewed such misconstruals of the theology of the People of God in just this light:

Joseph Ratzinger, the then head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, expressed this concern in a 2001 article in L’Osservatore Romano.

‘The crisis of the Church, as it is reflected in the concept of People of God, is a ‘crisis’ of God,’ the future Pope wrote. ‘It is a crisis of abandoning the essential. What remains is merely a struggle for power.’

Finally, it is my turn to say the quiet part out loud. These misuses of the People of God theology are so contrary to the actual teaching of Lumen Gentium and so manifestly incorrect as assessments of conciliar theology in general, that one cannot but conclude that the very intelligent people who surely know this and who are pushing this agenda are being deceptive to the point of mendacity.

There is an air of play-acting at real theology here and of a cynical insouciance toward the actual truth of the Council. It is a mendaciousness that is the product of a set of foreordained conclusions in search of an argument. Conclusions drawn from the dominant ethos of secular modernity and not the Gospel.

It is also a mendacity that seems to extend all the way up the ecclesial food chain.

• Dr. Larry Chapp and Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, discuss the Working Document for the October 2024 Synod on synodality gathering in Rome:

Catholic World Report