![]() What explains it? For one thing, a rather wooden "hermeneutic of continuity" became predominant in catechesis, apologetics, and large segments of ecclesial life in our national church. Nevertheless, I believe that the confusion, if not the vitriol, one finds in many pews and rectories of the American Church is understandable and should be taken seriously. I think Pope Francis's emphasis on synodality is a positive development, an attempt to recover an ancient ecclesiology with deep biblical and patristic roots. My own outlook about the synod is one of optimism and hope. An extreme but by no means insignificant group of critics think that either the pope himself is a heretic or is at least willfully blind to the widespread advance of heresy. Less measured critics see the Synod on Synodality as the culmination of a deliberate and heretical program of subversion. Some of these skeptics see this month's synod as too self-referential, and gloomily forecast that its outcome will either emerge stillborn or lead to further divisions. From the pages of First Things to numerous YouTube channels to EWTN to the peculiar derangements of Catholic Twitter, hands are thrown up in frustration at the Synod on Synodality. Some express (or feign?) total confusion, claiming they don't even know what the term "synodality" means. Confusion in the pews and rectories of the US ChurchĪmerican Catholics seem particularly prone to sarcasm and bewilderment when discussing Pope Francis's call for synodality. Still, we should face the future equipped with an honest account of how we got where we are. Recovering suppressed memories about our own conciliarist past will not instantly solve these other problems. Of course, amnesia is not the only problem that Catholic discourse on synodality suffers from it is also afflicted by polarization and triumphalism. One important reason Pope Francis's desire to relaunch synodality for the contemporary Church has taken herculean efforts-and been met with such dogged and at times vicious resistance-is that some of this pope's predecessors were so effective in suppressing and defanging it. Our discussions of synodality suffer from historical amnesia. For the Church, as for any family, facing the past honestly often involves dredging up memories that were suppressed. We cannot learn from our past failures-or even our successes-unless we look at the Church's history with both parrhesia and humility. Gleeful progressives can be as guilty of this as the most defensive and narrow traditionalists. Rather than handling our own past with honesty, our institutional memory as Catholics is too often re-tooled to fit ideological goals. This is why Yves Congar rightly called Vatican I's defeated conciliarist minority "the vanguard of Vatican II." Among this wreckage were concepts that Catholics never totally lost sight of and, throughout the twentieth century, brought back to the fore: episcopal collegiality, the baptismal priesthood of the laity, the sensus fidelium, and ecclesial reception. That shipwreck was near-total, but the wreckage of conciliarist thought survived on firmly orthodox shores. ![]() The dramatic ecclesiastical victory of Pius IX, a pope who did not balk at equating himself with the Church and even with Tradition itself, also marked the shipwreck of the once-mighty conciliarist tradition. The First Vatican Council in 1870 punctuated the ascendancy of this new view of the papacy. Indeed, the evolution of the papacy into its modern form-as an infallible teacher of doctrine with direct jurisdictional authority over every other bishop and the entire Church-owes at least as much to internal Catholic ecclesiastical battles at the dawn of modernity as it does to stimuli outside the Church, such as secularization and the growth of nation states. When the conversation turns to history, however, it is rarely acknowledged that the Catholic Church's own tradition of synodal governance endured into the early modern era and functioned as a powerful counter-narrative to the centralized ultramontane model we live with today. But these discussions inevitably appeal to the past: to the testimony of Scripture, the practice of the early Church, medieval triumphs and tragedies, and, most of all, to Vatican II and its contested reception. Discussions of synodality are about the future-about charting a path forward for Catholicism, from the individual Catholic to the parish community to the universal Church.
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