Co-responsibility
“One of the aspects of the schematism to which we have entrusted our hope is that the adults do everything” (Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education as the Creation of Personality and History).
These words of Father Giussani to high school students have struck me in the last few weeks as I have been thinking about the Church’s call to synodality. I still laugh that the term “synodality” gets underlined as a typo every time I write it. Spell-check needs to get with the modern Church!
And I guess syndoality is on my mind because of the work I have been doing with Bishop’s Business Advisory Council (BAC) here in the Diocese of Phoenix. The Cathedral is the first in a series of parishes that will receive help from various Catholic business and community leaders. I understand it as an effort to get eyes that are outside “church world” to look at the issues facing parishes. I welcome their work and their suggestions, and am excited to be the guinea pig of this project of our bishop.
One of the subcommittees established by the BAC was a committee on synodality, seeing that synodality was a priority of the bishop and the bishop wants us to reflect on how to be more synodal at the parish level. I laughed when this got brought up because none of the people on the BAC understood what the word synodality meant, other than that it is a word the Church is using a lot lately.
For many of us, or maybe the few of us who pay attention to Church debates online, synodality means something very vague or even something pernicious. As regards the latter, synodality has come to represent those forces in the Church that want to change everything. And so, for example, synodality means “everything is up for grabs”: maybe we believe in the Incarnation, maybe not; maybe we believe in the uniqueness of Christ’s revelation, maybe not; maybe we believe in the Church’s moral teachings, maybe not; maybe we believe in the reservation of ordination to men, maybe not.
The BAC was hesitant to make synodality a priority if we did not know how to define it. So I stepped in and did a little teaching. I too find the word slippery and a bit tainted by the cardinals and those in the Church who would use synodality to say that everything is up for grabs. But I also understand that it is not the only way to understand synodality, and that the term can still bear fruit.
I explained to the BAC that a synodal approach would try to foster "co-responsibility” in the members of a parish, a diocese, or the whole Church. Co-responsibility: that the Church and her work, that the proclamation of the faith and the living of the Gospel, that reflection and discernment, are not just the job of those in charge but of every member of the Church. In any other organization, we would prefer a culture in which the members of the organization “bought in” to the vision and the mission of the organization and did not just do “whatever” those in charge told them to do. A good leader of an organization would not just want people to follow unthinkingly, without taking responsibility on themselves for the carrying out of the mission.
And so, maybe one way of thinking about synodality is “a culture of co-responsibility”. This brings me back to the quote from Giussani with which I started this post:
“One of the aspects of the schematism to which we have entrusted our hope is that the adults do everything.”
The opposite of “synodality” would be “schematism”: the faith as a scheme dreamed up by others which has only to be implemented and obeyed by the faithful. But the opposite of schematism, and therefore true synodality, is not to dream up our own version of the faith, to make up some sort of syncretic amalgam of a “personal” faith. A synodality that is not schematic is personal if there is true belonging. Do I belong? And if I belong, that means that I take initiative, that I am mature in my belonging and in my following. “The adults do everything” could mean in a parish “the pastor does everything”; “the priests do everything”; “the parish staff does everything”. And then the faithful would just “pay, pray, and obey” as I heard a bishop put it once.
If we had to wait for the priest or the parish staff to evangelize the world in which we live in, we would be waiting a long, long time before we even scratched the surface. What if everyone that came to Mass on Sunday took responsibility for the evangelization of the neighborhood? What if every baptized Catholic felt responsible for sharing his or her faith? What if every man or woman of faith discerned where God might be calling them to serve in the vineyard? How would that transform the Church?
I do not think that Pope Francis wants us to invent a new Church. I think he wants us to take responsibility for the mission of the Church and stop waiting for someone else to do it. That might mean we “make a mess” (one of Pope Francis’s favorite sayings), but the Holy Father has given us direction in this, telling us that it is better to make a mess than to do nothing.
And so, back to the BAC. We decided to call the subcommittee “Parish Culture and Synodality” because we desired to create a culture of co-responsibility here at the Cathedral. I want the mission of Christ and the Church to take flesh and to live in me and in everyone who is Catholic. Let’s pray for an overcoming of schematism and a flourishing of co-responsibility in our Catholic Church…Amen.