Sir, – Jerry O’Hanlon’s article “Catholic church struggling to have a conversation with itself” (Rite and Reason, June 13th) is unconvincing. The current synodal processes occurring in the Catholic Church are in effect experiments, lacking sufficient substantiation.
Fr O’Hanlon represents synodality as a clear concept within Catholicism. Yes, some proponents claim that the listening, such as it is, and the “talking to each other” is unavoidably guided by the Holy Spirit.
And yet Pope Francis has twice proclaimed that “oddly the Holy Spirit is the one who creates disorder … but then the one who creates harmony”.
Secondly, synodality has had at best a mixed history in the history of Christianity. The 2019 the synod on the Amazon involved extensive consultation of the laity. That synod requested married priests and the possibility of women deacons.
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Was Pope Francis’s refusal to agree to this an instance of movement from disorder to harmony?
In the same vein the extensive synodal process in the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of southern India led to local violence (disharmony?) which over a period of 20 years the local synodal process failed to rectify, and the issue had to be resolved in Rome.
Synodal process has historically been a characteristic of the Orthodox Church. But this has correlated with gradual patterns of division. The most recent is the declaration of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate of its “full independence” from the Patriarchate of Moscow. One can also cite instances of patriarchates mutually excommunicating each other. And the 2016 Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, was boycotted by Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia and Antioch.
The Lambeth Conference resembles a process of synodal governance and is an instrument of communion in the Anglican Church. Yet approximately 20 per cent of the Anglican Communion refused to attend the 2008 Conference.
Thirdly, it is strange that in a process where listening is deemed to be a core requirement, Fr O’Hanlon is quite selective about those he is not prepared to listen to – those “minority voices”. He also misrepresents the Catholic notion of the sensus fidei. And the German Synodal Way aims to create the type of changes in church teaching that Fr O’Hanlon has called for in the past.
Finally, Fr O’Hanlon needs to justify his claim that Vatican II stipulated that when we Catholics get things wrong (which we do), we should seek our remedies in the shifting sands of secular tastes.
– Yours, etc,
NEIL BRAY,
Cappamore,
Co Limerick.