Patience and Prudence in a Changing Church by Gene Ciarlo

It has been said over and over again, down through the ages, but Karl Marx is cited as the notable who said it first because of his name recognition: History repeats itself. It is now cliché. We say it, but do we believe it? Marx went on to say that the societal mode of thinking and believing appears first as tragedy and goes on to farce. Other thinkers have elaborated on the idea with more colorful and specific descriptions.

William Strauss and Neil Howe are writers not educated specifically in sociology nor anthropology. Regardless, they authored a popular work entitled Generations: The History of America’s Future, which deals with generational types and recurring moods in our developing society. From my perspective, although it is not the subject matter for these writers, religious beliefs and practices play a big part in this mode of thinking and analyzing what happens over a generational period, a period which the authors designate as 80 years, a lifetime.

Religious beliefs and practices are going through a period of serious decline in our time. Is this a tragedy, or is it punctuated with hope? The decline is neither theory nor guesswork, but statistically obvious to anyone who has recently attended or is attending worship services on a regular basis. There are occasional signs of life in the Roman Catholic Church, when Pope Francis actually makes the nightly news. When I see this, I am psychologically inclined and conditioned by the times to think, “How quaint.” In our secular society, glued to superficial nightly reportage via the common and popular sources for news, the general response to a pope’s musings must be, “So what?”—if there is any reflective thought about it at all. That’s my discernment, for what it’s worth. Maybe I’m just in a negative mindset about where people are at regarding their beliefs and practices.

For the next several months the Vatican will be buzzing with clerics (more than the usual bustling black and white), priests, deacons, women and men religious from a worldwide assortment of orders and congregations, not to mention the hundreds of laypeople who are gathered for an historic event that will one day be acknowledged as the major accomplishment of Pope Francis’s pontificate. It is the Synod on Synodality, entitled “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation and Mission,” which, in fact, is the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops. An impressive title, to be sure.

What is the grand and pivotal point of this particular assembly of clergy and laypeople that makes it so outstanding and significant? In sum, it is the active presence of laypeople not merely as spectators, watching and affirming what the hierarchy will propose for the vast body of the faithful, but the people themselves are intended to be instrumental in forming the future of the Roman Catholic Church. The Spirit of God is acknowledged as breathing not only upon the professed religious of this Body of Christ; the people of God make up the vine and the branches, the lifestreams of grace that are meant to bring light and life to the whole world for eventual union with God. That, in a large, inclusive mouthful, is the sum and substance of the Synod on Synodality.

It sounds glorious, ambitious, far-reaching, strong, confident, idealistic, and vast. However, truth be told, this period in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, and all Christian bodies that profess Jesus as Lord, is at one of the lowest periods in its over two millennia of belief and practice. What happened? The ebb and flow of history has been at work. The aforementioned generational theory elaborated on by many thinkers, philosophers, and futurists is working its truth in our time. The historical drama characterizing life in the beginning of this 21st century is showing its hand, not only in religion, but also in politics, science, and climatology, as well as in the very life and existence of our planet earth.

The religious mood of this time, the zeitgeist or general character that permeates everything in matters of the Spirit, is negative relative to organized religion. The thrust of popular thinking is secular and earthbound. For the many, many billions of people who overpopulate our world, religion is quaint, a “has-been,” good and necessary for a particular period in our history that has now ceded to the practical, the tangible, and the reasonable. It is a new Age of Reason and Enlightenment, all over again, but with a new twist and in an advanced setting. Yes, history repeats itself.

Is this present Synod on Synodality just the beginning, the earliest, shell-cracking event, a squeak of new life emerging from a shell of secularism that was and is obviously not the answer to the world’s, the entire universe’s, malaise? Or have we not yet reached the historical, generational, archetypal point at which the earth’s entire populace has silently and surreptitiously said, “Enough. Life is not in the mundane and earthbound, the worldly and the transient”? Do we hope beyond hope? Are we being Pollyannaish, jumping the gun with false enthusiasm and unfounded hope?  

Caution seems to be in play, not only in this session of the Synod, but starting from the October 2023 gathering, which sidelined women’s roles in the more clerical aspects of the church’s ministry, such as preaching the Word and diaconal ministries in general. Is it wisdom not to move too fast? Is it fear of schism in the church, an awareness on the part of Pope Francis and the Roman Curia that there are already extremes in both the conservative and progressive elements of the movers and shakers among the world’s hierarchy?

I think Pope Francis—who perhaps would like to walk the streets of Trastevere near the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the Cathedral of Rome, in black clerical clothes as an ordinary priest—is weighing the consequences of being too aggressive in following the dictates of Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento. The time is simply not right yet; the Rubicon has not yet been crossed. The zeitgeist says, “Wait!” The time will come, but it is not yet.

Meanwhile the 2024 sessions of the Synod conclude, and there will be much frustration on the part of those who want to see, perhaps unwisely, Father Leroy’s “Church of What’s Happening Now” at a very serious moment in our history. Let Wisdom be our guide. We must wait for the right Sitz im Leben. Stop and smell the incense. ♦

Gene Ciarlo is a priest no longer active in the ministry. Ordained from the American College, University of Louvain, Belgium, he spent most of his ministry in parish life. After receiving a master’s degree in liturgical studies from Notre Dame University he returned to his alma mater in Louvain as director of liturgy and homiletics. Gene lives in Vermont, where everything is gracefully green when it is not solemnly white.  

Image: Scene from Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica with Synod delegates, October 21, 2024. ©synod.va/Lagarica

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