Synod Approaching

I’ve been nursing for a week my annoyance at a column by Michael Sean Winters in NCR in which he said:

Miriam Duignan, a member of the leadership team at Women’s Ordination Worldwide, recently told NCR, “the synodal dialogue will be painfully incomplete and dishonest if it does not adequately address the widespread calls to open all ordained ministries to women.” Dishonest? 

How is that any less undermining of the principal need of the synod — to surrender and listen to the Holy Spirit — than the rantings of Bishop Strickland? Clinging to a particular understanding of how the Catholic Church should organize itself to fulfill the mission entrusted to it by its head and founder, Jesus Christ, and insisting all other understanding are wrong or counterfeit, betrays a lack of humility that will kill the synod before it starts.

In case you’re not up on Strickland’s rantings, here’s a link. As the ordinary — I use that intentionally – of the diocese of Tyler, Texas, Bishop Joseph Strickland uses his clerical power to rehash the arguments against the priestly ordination of women and the limits that should be exercised if women get near to the diaconate. 

Any man preaching humility to a woman always sets me on edge. It’s a lesson I want women and all those who hide their gifts under a bushel to unlearn. In fairness, Winters takes on John Wijngaards of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research as well as Duignan; I wrote about both on September 9. Winters more moderately states that “There is a time and a place for religiously motivated activism to be sure, but the synod is not that time and place. The synod requires us Americans to set aside our activist, goal-oriented, project-centered sensibilities.” 

I would argue the opposite, and last week I urged you to activism on October 6 with the WOW Walk for Women. Hiding when the attention of the world is on the church would be a sinful missed opportunity to call for our vision of what the church can be. We must infuse our understanding of what the Spirit is calling the church to become into the Synod process. 

To that end, I call your attention to four of the many articles that are tumbling out. 

An NCR editorial called for Pope Francis to make public the full report of the first commission on the diaconate. “Teach the conflicts” was a useful mantra in approaching academic conflicts during my career. Exposing the differences among the members would provide the rest of us with the considered arguments of those experts. 

Phyllis Zagano is one of the members of the first deacon commission. She has been speaking and publishing everywhere in the lead up to the Synod. In The Tablet (London) this week she calls for discernment, not opinion. What I find especially valuable is that she distills her various arguments into five major points for which she provides both historical and recent evidence:

Women ministered as deacons

Women were ordained to these ministries

The diaconate is not the priesthood

Orthodox Churches are recovering the tradition

The Church needs the diaconal ministry of women

This article seems to be available despite The Tablet’s paywalls, but here is another link in case you need it, courtesy of COR member organization, CORPUS.

Joanna Moorhead, who usually writes for this Tablet, expands the discussion beyond deacons in a long article in The Guardian. Her British and feminist perspectives are always refreshing, and she begins as more articles about the Synod process in European publications do: with the fallout from the sex abuse crisis. She moves quickly to what she calls the “alternative synod,” Spirit Unbounded organized by Root and Branch with many other reform organizations. She quotes several of the British principals in the latter, and reviews the women’s issues at stake in both meetings. Use the link if you want to attend the alternative; this meeting will have more attendees than the Synod itself, and probably the reverse percentages of women to clerics. 

Finally, Mary E. Hunt expands the discussion even further. In her inimitable style, she provides “friendly suggestions” to Pope Francis on how to improve the Synod process in general. Five is the number that appeals to her as well: 

1. Make the synod an annual affair.
2. Livestream the synod sessions from start to finish.
3. Express synodal concepts and ideas in plain language without rhetorical fetishes and flourishes.
4. Include openly queer people, women priests, and a lot of non-Catholics.
5. Finally, the elephant in the synod aula is the matter of papal power, the fact that the pope speaks first, last, and always despite synodal claims to build consensus before doing anything.

You can probably discern from this list that Hunt’s suggestions slide more into critique as they go along, but I am really happy to have laughed out loud a couple of times as well to have had a splash of reality after all this serious reading.