Pope Francis prays while holding a crosier during Mass in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican Oct. 29, 2023, marking the conclusion of the first session of the Synod of Bishops on synodality. CNS photo/Vatican Media
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Participants in the Synod on Synodality spent two days before the start of its final session in a closed retreat that ended with a "penitential liturgy." The synod office also provided the participants with a list of seven "sins" for which forgiveness would be sought. It did not say who would do the forgiving.
To put it bluntly, all this struck me as a rather odd way to launch a meeting. Consider a couple of the sins on that list.
"Sin against peace"
"Sin against creation, against indigenous populations, against migrants"
"Sin against poverty"
It is easy to declare opposition to big, impersonal abstractions, but I don't know anybody who would admit to personal responsibility for anything on that list. And although the synod office said the individuals reading out the sins would request forgiveness "in the name of all the baptized" -- and I admit guilt for lots of stuff -- I respectfully decline to participate in taking the rap for misdeeds I didn't commit.
But I'm more than willing to propose another question that somehow didn't make it onto the list.
"Sin against preserving good elements of the Catholic tradition, including seemingly callous abandonment of liturgical use of Latin, and failure to stem the frightening decline in individual confession -- private sacramental confession, that is, with forgiveness of personal sins, not a non-sacramental penitential liturgy."
Let us hope that the Synod's final session will move on quickly from this unfortunate start. It opened Oct. 2 and will close Oct. 27, and it is entirely safe to predict that it will conclude with what Pope Francis convened it to deliver -- a resounding endorsement of synods and synodality that the pope will happily endorse.
And right now? Now we run into a gag rule imposed on the synod participants by its managers "in order to guarantee freedom of expression." No, I'm not making that up -- here's what the synod rules say:
"In order to guarantee freedom of expression . . . Each of the participants is bound to confidentiality and discretion with regard to both their own interventions and the interventions of other participants. . . This obligation remains in force even after the synodal assembly has ended."
In what was no doubt considered a generous gesture, the rules add that participants are welcome to share the synod office's press releases and "official images" with media back home "in order to promote the circulation of information." The document neglects to note -- perhaps because its writer or writers don't realize -- that the response from serious journalists will be, "No thanks."
All this takes me back to 1962 and the first session of the Second Vatican Council. Then, too, the Vatican incomprehensibly sought to keep what was happening at the council a secret. Predictably, of course, it didn't work. Thanks to the pseudonymous Xavier Rynne and others, copious leaks were soon pouring out. And, the Vatican bureaucracy having learned its lesson, from that point on the council adopted a sensible information policy that reflected credit on Vatican II, the Holy See, and the Church.
Will the same thing happen this time? I can't predict. But I do expect that there will be people in the synod assembly who won't take kindly to being gagged and that experienced journalists, supposing they judge the Synod on Synodality a story worth covering, will get that story and share it with anybody who might be interested.
And if that happens, I hope today's would-be news managers will learn a lesson from it, just as their predecessors did in 1962.
- Russell Shaw is the author of more than twenty books. He is a consultor of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications and served as communications director for the U.S. Bishops.