October 12: Resting in the Question
Yesterday was the feast of St. John XXIII, the pope who famously convened the Second Vatican Council to “throw open the windows” of the Catholic Church in 1962. His munificence let in light and air that is still being directed, shaded, tinted, and recirculated 60 years after the council. I saw it in the work of the Cardijn family of lay apostolate groups on Thursday, as I listened to representatives trace their heritage through the conciliar documents and the ways in which their work is bringing about the full reception of those documents today.
The theme of throwing open windows and doors was present, too, in the remarks of some of the participants in yesterday’s press briefing. Sheila Pires, the Secretary of the Information Commission for the Synod, spoke to it in her summary of Father—and now Cardinal designate—Timothy Radcliffe’s reflection on the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15.
Radcliffe’s reflection came on Thursday afternoon, just before Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, General Realtor of the Synod, presented the third module for discussion. Pires shared that Radcliffe characterized Jesus’s response to the woman (“Be it unto thee even as though wilt”) as a sign of “openness and inclusion” that demonstrates “a divine creativity in overcoming barriers and welcoming the identity and the gaze of those who are different.”
A closer look at Radcliffe’s text bears this out. He explains how Matthew took his parable from the gospel of Mark, where the woman is a Syrophoenician. Scholarship has shown that dogs were highly valued in that community—hence Jesus’s answer (“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”), which first sounds like a rebuke, is actually an example of “reach[ing] out to her experience and language” and “transcend[ing] the cultural limitations of his people.” He opens the door, so to speak, to a new language of conversion.
Giuseppina De Simone, a professor of theology and philosophy at the San Luigi Papal Theological Seminary of Southern Italy and a Synod delegate, probed even more deeply into the experience of “the method that is marking this Synod,” which she called “truly significant and even revolutionary” and described as “a great sigh of hope.”
De Simone said that the spirit of Vatican II teaches the church to look to the world and to history “with trust, confidence, leaving behind apocalyptic visions.” The church is not a self-referential “enclosed circle,” she said, but is “for the entire world” and wishes to bring a word of “hope and meaningfulness” to the present moment.
“It is a word that is for everybody,” she said.
De Simone also stressed that “silence is essential in the method we are following.” She added that this silence “is not emptiness,” but rather the ability to “inhabit, to live within the question” without “looking immediately for an answer.”
“We must not be afraid of questions and what life and the world is telling us,” she continued. This may include “that cry that comes from a humanity which is wounded, a humanity that expresses its suffering,” but that brings in its heart “a great need for hope” and expresses “a sense of life that maybe we also need to learn to listen to.”
De Simone concluded by looking at the significance of theological reflection at the Synod. While we do need technical theological knowledge to help guide the synodal process, she said, such knowledge must not lose its “bond with life” or become elitist. It should instead “be a part of the living fabric of our relationships.”
There are theologians with specialized knowledge at the synodal tables, she said, but affirmed that they do not share their knowledge as an “external contribution.” Rather, it is part of an “exchange that takes part on an equal basis.”
Later on Friday, after relocating from the east to the west side of the Tiber for my final weekend in Rome, I walked in the Parco della Mole Adriana beneath Castel Sant’Angelo. This site was originally the tomb of the second-century Emperor Hadrian, and at various points in its long life has been a fortress, prison, papal residence, and military barracks. In 1527, Pope Clement VII hid out here as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked the city.
Today the park is a warren of lush green spaces, with umbrella pines shading the beaten paths. I walked along one that ran across the top of an old brick wall—some relic of a line of fortification—and noted the grasses sprouting over the masonry. New life bursting through a former papal enclosure: it seemed a fitting image for the feast of the day. ♦
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic
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