What Are Synods Good For?

The Catholic Thing

By Msgr. Hans Feichtinger
It may seem more difficult to answer the above question than it actually is. The Fathers of the Church who, as opposed to us, had deep synodal experience, have provided quite a clear answer: Synods are good for keeping the Church unified in the one faith in the one Saviour. They are good for defining and clarifying this faith. This goal they achieve by well-formulated, concise definitions, by careful anathemas, and by opening wide the gates of reconciliation to those who have betrayed this faith, even if gravely so. The Fathers of the Church were in favor of synodality and mercy before it was cool. And it was a very Biblical, doctrinal, and juridical synodality - and mercy.
The secretary general of the current Synod on Synodality recently declared that the Holy See wants to find out how it can be more useful to the local churches. Again, the question sounds more complicated than it is. In order to be useful for local dioceses, even for parishes, the Holy See simply has to do what it alone can do.
The Vatican does not need to run agencies that are, at best, only distantly related to the essential aspects of the papacy, the primacy of teaching and jurisdiction, which are also what the offices of the Vatican, serving the pope's mission and task, need to focus on. The papal curia does not have to be a pastoral super-agent. It serves the Church by doing its doctrinal and jurisdictional work well, transparently, and efficiently.
Yes, that means a number of Roman dicasteries should be closed or transformed into something else. Maybe a pontifical university can take over their functions; maybe they become a small office of a real dicastery, one with actual jurisdiction and thus worthy of the name. This will also help the Holy See confront its unbearable budget situation. The real reform of the curia has yet to occur.
For the Holy See, right now, being more useful to the local churches would also mean running a better synod. We do not benefit from a synod debating issues that are not up to us, and not up to any synod, council, or pope. Unity in doctrine is quite obviously one of the things not up to us. Without this unity of doctrine, words like Catholic, Church, and faith lose their meaning.
Faith is not the only thing, but the first thing that holds the Church together with God and with itself, in time and through the centuries. Constant hypothesizing about changing the Church's doctrine on marriage, celibacy, or the nature of ordained ministry as no longer including governance, are other issues, but all related to the underlying question of unity in doctrine.
I recommend making Eastern Catholic - or better yet Anglican and Orthodox - friends, to learn from them what not to do, and to see more clearly how synodality is not the miracle cure for prevalent ecclesial diseases, and may in fact often be one of the causes of them.
The very idea that evangelization needs more synodality is, in fact, questionable. Evangelization needs witness, prophecy, holiness. For synods to have a place in the work of evangelization, they need to stay away from political ways of thinking.
When people engage in a lot of Church sociology, it's a sure sign of being stuck in a confused nostalgia about Christendom, and in approaches that have been failing for some decades: pace Cardinal Radcliffe, but the reasons why bishops, clergy and laity in Africa (and not only there) reject Fiducia supplicans are deeply biblical and doctrinal, not "pressure" they feel from Orthodox, Protestant or Muslim groups in their countries, bolstered by Russian, American, or Arab money.
Such a statement is theologically shallow, and Marxist in its reductionism of all things to power and money. On closer inspection, it's even a kind of a conspiracy theory and/or a projection. The pressure from people with power, influence and money, endlessly pushing an LGBT agenda, is much stronger in North America and Europe. This ideological colonization is by now exha...