Some assume that I am one of those academic types that enjoy asking irrelevant questions; others simply say that they haven't got a clue about what I am talking about.

We had better face an awkward truth: while theologians and clergy are agog about synodality - some eager, some disdainful - for a very large proportion of the People of God, it is just some complicated new idea that makes little sense.

I had better clarify what I mean by ordinary Catholics.

By ordinary Catholics, I mean someone who

• is not a cleric
• nor a member of some special group within the Church (such as a prayer group, or the choir, or the parish council), and
• who probably does not subscribe to any special religious news service whether it is CathNews or The Tablet -
• and who probably just passes by the various leaflets, magazines, and diocesan papers that are at the back of church buildings.

So, the question arises: what will reach this large group of sisters and brothers? How will their experience of being disciples be touched and enhanced by our turn towards synodality?

Experiencing synodality

If this whole movement is to be more than just words, it must give disciples a richer liturgical experience. This is because it is at the liturgy that most ordinary Catholics have their experience of what it means to be Church.

That experience must, somehow, to do three things:

• It must engage them as individuals within a community.
• It must, to be true to the fundamental insight of synodality, involve a deeper listening to the word of God and to one another.
• It must lead to a greater sense of their own dignity as brothers and sisters in baptism who are called as a people to offer praise and thanksgiving to the Father.

If synodality is about renewal in the Spirit, a renewal of liturgy is one of the forms it must take.

What will it look like?

In this arrangement, the Word of God is being shared among the gathering in the University Parish in Leuven, Belgium.

The assembly is arranged so that it is a community-event of listening. They are not consuming a message being dispensed from the front of a lecture hall.

We are the people of memory. Only when we recall "the mighty acts of God" can we recognize our identity as disciples of the Christ.

Listening is not just hearing words; it is giving the words a chance to seep into us. Yet most ordinary Catholics are arranged in row after row like children in an old-fashioned classroom.

We now know that the lecture hall only works as a communication venue for those already highly involved, but (60 years after the liturgy reform) this much better format is strange to most Catholics.

It is worth noting that in this church-building they did no elaborate re-building work - they just put the chairs in a rough circle because this allows people to feel they are a community and it helps focus people in their listening.

We are all celebrants

The great shift in liturgy at Vatican II was a move from the notion of a presbyter who celebrates on behalf of the baptized to the recognition that we, as God's sons and daughters, are all celebrating God's goodness. We are all celebrants.

But how does the ordinary Catholic get an experience of this?

We are not consumers at the Eucharist. We are guests.

This photograph allows us to recall the words of the First Eucharistic Prayer:

Remember, Lord, your men-servants (famuli) and your women-servants (famulae), indeed all who are standing around (omnes circumstantes) …

We are a celebrating community.

If synodality is to take root, it will require an experience of solidarity in discipleship.

In an arrangement like this, that solidarity can become a weekly experience.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.

The five priests seated with him laughed at this.

But, as the conversation turned to the realities of our failing diocesan infrastructures, the tone became more serious.

Two priests were managing three separate, cooperating parishes, three priests were managing two amalgamated parishes and the Vicar General had one parish.

The six priests around the table were managing thirteen parishes with a total of thirty distinct communities between them, doing the work of ten previous parish priests.

Amalgamation

Amalgamation looks like the solution until you ask what problem it is trying to solve.

The amalgamation of parishes is an attempt to solve the problem of institutional collapse in dioceses in three ways.

• amalgamation solves the problem of too few priests being available to provide sacramental ministry.
• amalgamation presumes that the parish structures are integral to pastoral life.
• amalgamation keeps the civil and canonical framework of parishes as a managerial structure that provides a living for a priest and income for a diocese.

As a diocese's infrastructure of pastoral and sacramental life becomes untenable, the notion takes hold that the problem lies with the parishes when the problem lies in the episcopal mindset.

Having solved the structural problem through amalgamation the newly blended parishes should function happily in this new future designed by others.

However, the gloss of efficient pastoral functioning covers a multitude of unresolved issues, like

• the independence of established communities,
• the lines of communication between previous separate parish groups, and
• the stretch of the clergy who are expected to respond.

The amalgamation of parishes does not ultimately solve the larger organisational and theological questions amongst which are:

• who can preside at the Eucharist?;
• are the laity part of the fabric of parish leadership, discernment and management?;
• are the liturgy, sacraments and priestly ministry just functional elements of diocesan structures?

Social and Cultural Elements of Change

Often the social and cultural dimensions implicit in ecclesial change are forgotten.

Solving the structural problem using clerical and lay workarounds takes little or no regard for the anthropological (human) and social (cultural) dimensions of worship and community.

They often ask fewer people to do more to keep the boat afloat.

Keeping former parishes going with liturgies of Word and Communion on Sundays as a stop-gap for Mass seems a nice alternative. However, it reframes our understanding of the Church by undermining the centrality of the Eucharist.

Eventually, the diocese reframes itself according to what it cannot provide.

Looking for answers among the dead

Many argue the real change will come with lay-parish leadership, lay-led liturgy, replacing the parish with the schools as the "new parish", importing clergy and seminarians, ordaining married men, ordaining women, geriatric men and similar solutions.

The answer might be found in some, or all, of these, but I am reminded of Christ's response in Luke 9:56-62, "leave the dead to bury the dead".

All these suggestions are deeply inauthentic because they do not address the substantive issue; the death of the local churches.

Churches do die; historically, we have only to look at North Africa.

The death of a local church—diocese or parish—is not a comforting experience.

There is a deep sense of loss.

Coming to the end of the present ‘organisational road' begs the question of a new ecclesiology and a new form of ecclesial leadership that isn't restorationist but more deeply missionary.

Pope Francis has offered a missiological vision similar to St Pope Paul IV's in Evangelii Nunciandi: "The conditions of the society in which we live oblige all of us therefore to revise methods, to seek by every means to study how we can bring the Christian message to modern man."

He acknowledged "the split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time" and that the ‘Gospel must be proclaimed by witness'.

Function and structure play a role in this, but they shouldn't drive the change because we are a theological community and theology immersed in life must lead us in the work of evangelisation and mission.

Downsizing and right-sizing

When people speak of downsizing, often they mean "right-sizing" the house and garden for their current and future needs.

Finding the right size for today's local church means relearning what it means to be a Missionary Church.

The experience of change and diminution will continue; nothing can stop it at this point because the cultural changes influencing contemporary Catholicism are very strong.

The Second Vatican Council sought to provide us with the tools we require to engage with the enormity of the change and reengage with the world as it has become.

What does a diocese or parish look like in the 21 century in a small, secular country like ours struggling to articulate its cultural self-understanding and not possessing a millennial-long shared language of religious institutionalisation?

Integral to this consideration is the emerging new church that is already replacing the church of my consciousness.

It will be different because it already is.

As the Church of my generation and older dies out a new Church may emerge and it will be different.

Then again, without a suitably led ongoing discussion about what it means to be Church and what evangelisation and mission look like today, the church may indeed look very different.=

• Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).

Yet few organizations have such hierarchically clear levels.

The clue is in the name: the Church claims to be hierarchical (in the original sense of its having a divinely-appointed government and in the popular sense of ranks in a pyramid); other power pyramids are only "hierarchical" by analogy.

Vatican II used the image of the Church as the People of God to emphasize that it is all the baptized, as one community, that witnesses, preaches, works, suffers, and prays.

Put another way, the basis of the Church would be centred around baptism, not ordination.

A pilgrim Church

A Vatican II Church would also be a pilgrim Church; it has not yet reached its goal, so it cannot think of itself as a societas perfecta.

In the older church understanding, the Church was the perfect beacon that not only other religious organisations, but all other societies, should imitate.

Vatican II saw the community of the baptized as serving the larger human family, growing, learning, and humbly aware of its incompleteness.

But after several centuries of triumphalism, taking the pilgrim image on board has been just too much for many of us.

Many of the divisions within contemporary Catholicism can be seen in terms of a willingness, on the one hand, and a reluctance, on the other, to take this image of the Church as a "pilgrim people" to heart.

This is the background to Pope Francis' repeated calls for a "synodal Church".

His hope is that synodality will give flesh to Vatican II's vision.

When we are faced with new images of the Church, our instinct is to look backwards to "the early Church", to see if we can draw lessons or inspiration from there.

This longing to recover the golden age of the first Christians is not new.

Already in the early second century, when writing the Acts of the Apostles, Luke presents us with this vision of unity, harmony, and dedication:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved (Acts 2:42-7).

Luke raises some important questions.

How accurate is his picture of the first Christian communities?

Does looking backwards reflect a Christian vision? And while it is rhetorically powerful, is it pastorally effective?

The goal of the pilgrimage of faith lies ahead, not behind us (Photo by Thomas O'Loughlin).

However, if it were not for the conflicts in the Aegean churches, at least a generation before Luke's time, we might never have had the letters of Paul.

There were disputes over religious practices and an unwillingness to welcome one another as equals (1 Corinthians) and about what was to be believed and expected (1 Thessalonians).

We know of arguments between followers of Jesus who were Jews and those who were Gentiles, over circumcision and the sharing of resources.

Abuses over hospitality and support for the "apostles and prophets" generated the first internal Church regulations, and it wasn't long before the term "christmonger" was coined for ministers greedy for money.

There were "clergy on the make" within a few decades of the crucifixion and several centuries before "clergy" formally emerged.

Also, far from holding all in common, the wealthy kept their slaves. And most did not like practices that challenged the social status quo, such as sharing at the Eucharistic table.

It was not all 'sweetness and light' in the early churches

In other words, the first Christians were as challenged by the Word as we are today.

Far from being plaster-cast saints, it was their willingness to keep trying to live the Gospel in a culture which saw them as fools and odd-balls that was their claim to being "among the saints" (Eph 5:3).

Graeco-Roman civilization looked back to "a golden age" since when things had been going downhill. Christians were different.

They looked to the future: to the coming of the Son of Man.

At the heavenly banquet - to which they looked forward ­- people would be gathered from north, south, east and west (Lk 13:29). They were on a journey.

This colours our thinking about the Church, and about synodality.

We do not imagine that there was a perfect time which we are seeking to re-create, but we, confident in God's help, ask what we should become. The Gospel of Matthew puts it this way:

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me (Mt 25:34-6).

We are not engaged in a restoration project.

We have to restore our church buildings periodically, but living the life of faith must not be confused with a restoration project. (Photo by Thomas O'Loughlin).

Nostalgia is not a Christian virtue

Luke's device of imagining a perfect past as a blueprint - a technique he borrowed from Greek history writing - engages the human propensity for nostalgia: "We shall not see their like again!"

But the sense that it was somehow easier for the first Christians — that they belonged to the "age of the saints", to "the springtime" — disempowers us.

Inherent in this is a lack of faith that our moment is as beloved of the Creator who holds it in being as that of those called to witness in the first days.

The times have changed, but the call to follow and witness - amid the particular difficulties of our age - is always the same.

Those early Aegean churches and our churches today are one in hearing: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe" (Jn 20:29).

Nostalgia is, in many ways, the antithesis of the courage of faith.

This was the point Pope Francis wanted make last June when he lampooned seminarians who love wearing lace.

The past always seems to be a safe place to run to and take refuge, but faith requires that we push out into the future, trusting in God's grace being with us.

We are, as we claim to believe, more valuable than many sparrows! (Lk 12:7).

Diagnosing deeper problems in the Catholic Church

That said, we should not just criticize the seminarians who want to wear lace surplices and whose nostalgia is for an imaginary past where they were not seen as odd-balls but as "valuable people".

We should study in detail - a task that will need sociologists and psychologists - what it is that makes presbyteral ministry (as currently configured) so attractive to these young men so intent on the past rather than the present.

Such a study might reveal important illnesses besetting the Catholic Church today.

We should look on this nostalgia as the presenting-problem that might reveal some of the problems the up-coming synod needs to address.

If we are attracting un-suitable candidates for ministry, perhaps the problem lies in our forms of ministry. Perhaps, we need to change the ecclesial structures of that ministry.

Discipleship

Something else distinguishes the pilgrim people from the societas perfecta: discipleship.

Until the 1930s most mainstream Churches were united in thinking of belonging in terms of identification and the acceptance of specific beliefs.

The matter of identification was seen in their desire to be recognized within legal frameworks: ideally, establishment, but at least giving their leaders a say in education or social policy.

Likewise, individual belonging was presented as assent to certain propositions. Churches and denominations had their "truths to be accepted" (the credenda).

There was a list of boxes to be ticked.

Then came movements such as Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Identification and assent to propositions were no longer enough to "belong" - as was recognized by theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

One had to become a disciple.

The disciple - more an "apprentice" than a "student" - knows that one does not just talk the talk. but must also walk the walk.

And this is the walk of the pilgrim.

Discipleship costs. Or as our formal memory (Mark 10:38) presents the desire of disciples looking towards their destination: "You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

The "synodal Church" is not an exercise in nostalgia, an attempt to recreate an illusory early Church without disagreement or dissent.

Pope Francis' dream seems to be that synodality will bring about Vatican II's vision of a pilgrim Church of disciples "among the saints" — not because they are perfect, but because they are humble witnesses to the Gospel of mercy.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

One of the dominant models of perceiving the Church is the model of institution.

This model's decision-making structure is more oligarchical than collegial, and its approach to contemporary questions is preservationist rather than integrationist.

Whether we like it or not, the Western Church's operating model as a hierarchical edifice is challenged by the forces of institutional collapse.

Its failure is seen in the continual struggle to manage the collapse of our diocesan and parish infrastructure through "pastoral" workarounds.

However, the clarion call to change is the scandal of abuse by clerics because this, more than anything, exposed the institutional decision-making processes that enabled this institutionalised behaviour.

Secular states, victims' groups and lay Catholic groups are leading the hierarchy by the nose through the humiliating process of change as they challenge the substance and value of hierarchy and magisterium.

In many Western societies, "Rainbow Rights" evangelize the Church by calling for significant theological change to the anthropological underpinnings of the institutional model's understanding of humanity, sexuality, gender, morality, ethics, salvation, sacramental mediation, and more.

We are hearing the call for a new ethos or worldview because the Church's institutional place in life or in the world has radically changed.

In these instances, the Church's self-understanding as God's institution is being questioned even by loyal Catholics.

These are forces of theological and anthropological renewal.

We are now at a crossroads: do we continue to feed the dinosaur of the current institutional model or do we change? And if we change, which elements of the current model do we retain?

Identifying crisis experiences and managed workarounds

Across the Western Church, the institutional model is breaking down because our organisational infrastructure is collapsing; for most people in the pews, the absence of a priest in the sanctuary is the most obvious example of this collapse.

This experience is called an "identifying crisis experience".

While the impact might be seen in 2022, the roots of the crisis are much older.

An identifying crisis experience is a "slow burn" event whereby individuals and communities slowly realise that they are living in an ongoing experience of crisis.

The most profound and interlinked "slow burn" experiences have been the continual loss of practicing Catholics since the 1970s and the lack of vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

For local Churches—as in New Zealand—that were founded during the 19th century by European clergy and migrants and are now being re-missioned by clergy and migrants from South-eastern Asia and India, the collapse of institutional infrastructure at diocesan and parish levels is a genuine concern.

Faced with identifying crisis experiences, we have initiated "managed workarounds" to slow the structural collapse.

While each workaround maintains the façade of institutional stability, in a perverse sense, it actually contributes to the infrastructure's collapse because it functions like scaffolding around a crumbling stone building.

As in restorationist architecture, the scaffold holds up the roof and stops the walls from falling in. The scaffold gives the preservationist time to figure out how to blend new grout with old grout and keep the wall standing for another few years.

When the builder finds the stone has lost its substantive strength, the restorationist must decide whether to rebuild the wall to look as if it is original, introduce new materials that show change, or demolish the wall.

The agendas of the restorationists and preservationists conflict because the preservationist approach expresses a dysfunctional sense of obligation, while the restorationist approach is a deep, melancholy romanticism.

Trigger events: the abuse scandal

Trigger events are abrupt, earth-shattering events that breach an institution's walls and expose the institutionalised thinking and decision-making processes that created, enabled, and maintained the infrastructure's deceit. Like an earthquake, a trigger event moves the organisation's tectonic plates, creating rift valleys where once there was the sea.

The abuse of minors acts like an "event" insofar that it exposes the organisational mindset that placed the institution before everything and everyone else.

In the Church, "child abuse thinking" is an example of a deep-seated preference for the institution over people, which has spawned a host of dysfunctional organisational workarounds.

Because trigger events lay bare the organisational thinking underpinning institutional structural systems, they put the institution at risk and lead to a dramatic decline in public confidence and heightened negative public scrutiny.

These events require serious and strategic mitigation because they can alienate previously loyal parishioners and members of the public.

Once people see the darker side of an organisation's thinking and how it is used in managing the institution, they also see the institutional incapacity to change.

Regarding the Church, both the baptised and society onlookers question everything the Church teaches.

They challenge the Church's right to represent the divine authoritatively.

The abuse scandal, acting as a trigger event, has exposed a deep-seated preservationist mindset that drives our response to the institutional crisis.

I suggest that the same mindset is operative in managing our collapsing institutional infrastructure.

In this context, the abuse crisis is not a moral problem to be solved or a sin to be forgiven but a critical indicator of a more profound structural crisis for all Catholics.

Changing people: the way to a new institutional infrastructure

The collapse of any institution's organisational infrastructure impacts everyone associated with it.

Those impacted respond in various ways, from hurt and resignation to joy and excitement, depending on what they stand to lose or gain.

Generally, organisational structures and infrastructure reflect the needs of the members of the organisation who are its beneficiaries.

Members design organisational structures to deliver the organisational outputs they have previously decided.

In charitable organisations, the challenge is to give the person receiving help what they want and need rather than what the organisation wants to give them.

How change happens is complex.

Vested interests show themselves under different guises.

In terms of the Church, those who have benefitted from a preservationist mindset because it maintained their desired status quo have the most to lose and are generally the loudest critics of the change. Those who seek change also do this for their advantage; concupiscence is always a factor.

The different approaches depend on personalities and their understanding of the depth of change necessary and the best way to achieve it.

Where there are still change agents in the Church—and this is not to be presumed—some will seek to change the mindset from within the organisation and others from outside.

The distinction between these two approaches is evident in the synodal process and the difference in the approach of episcopal and lay groups.

Challenging the institutional model of Church

Before the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the institutional model offered a reliable, robust ecclesial identity.

Its hierarchically structured visible society was the means of salvation that offered a respected and dominant magisterium and an ordered sacramental mediation and preaching system.

It was an unassailable organisational structure where everyone had their place in the hierarchy, and it worked as long as everyone kept the adage "keep the rule, and the rule will keep you".

No one looking at the present state of affairs can avoid questioning the institutional thinking that has contributed to the current situation.

Neither can they propose an enduring solution without addressing the "institution" and its need for reform.

The current situation begs the question: "how did we think ourselves into this mess?"

Part of the answer lies in accepting that, in both instances (abuse and crisis), the hierarchy placed the institution before anyone else.

We did this because we believe more strongly in the Church as a hierarchical reality that provides spiritual services to people than in the Church as the People of God, in a communion of faith.

Consequently, our crisis identifies us as a group that accepts an exaggerated understanding of Holy Orders and for which ordination justifies incompetence.

Society evangelizes the Church

Covid has recently taught us four things about organizations, infrastructure, workarounds and people.

• First, organizations must communicate with people through various media and channels. Those who run organizations must use a post-Covid paradigm.
• Second, infrastructure needs to be mobile, adaptable and accessible because these are the foundations of contemporary, globalized, technological existence.
• Third, workarounds have a limited value. They do not work as an ersatz for human community, touch and physical proximity.
• Fourth, people need to be given agency in their ecclesial life.

We need to change our operating model of the Church.

The ethical, anthropological and sociological values of contemporary people (secular and religious alike) are being forged in a context of religious irrelevancy.

The irrelevancy of magisterial teaching for Catholics and the irrelevancy of God for a large and growing number of people are driving the change in our operational model from institution to some blend of institution, communion and servant.

The pressure for change from society groups, the media, royal commissions, and court cases is not going away soon because these are the only tools capable of breaking through the fossilized institutionalist mindset that created this problem.

While we don't like them now, in years to come, Roman decrees will begin: "from the earliest times, and in keeping with the Church's oldest tradition, the Church is a communion of people sharing hierarchical unity."

• Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).

Theology is the possession of a Christian skill which can enhance life for the individual and the communion of which that person is a member. It has a vital role to play in a synodal church.

I have tried to look at this in various ways in previous articles; now I want to conclude these meditations by looking at how it can change the way we see ourselves and our discipleship.

Repetition

Repeat anything often enough and not only will people believe it - hence the constant repetition of adverts and why so much energy goes into 'building brands' - but, eventually, people will forget that there are completely different ways of thinking about a problem.

One of the duties of theology is to stop us in our tracks when those tracks have become ruts. It should get us to look afresh at reality, our place in it, and what it is all about.

Here I want to consider just two situations where this applies.

Situation 1: Living in a post-religious world; are people really not "religious"?

One of the most significant cultural developments of recent decades across the developed world is the number of people who reject any recognized form of religion, who say they do not believe in God or a god, or who ignore organized religion in their lives with the simple statement: "I'm not religious!"

Christians respond to this situation in a variety of ways.

One obvious reply is to try to "convert" them to accept the traditional language, vision and practices of Christianity.

After all, this is the basis of all missionary plans when missions were sent out in areas that had never heard of Christ and there they "won" many new people for the faith.

So why should they not view the society around them as "a new pagan land" and preach to such people?

While it is true that Christians must always proclaim Jesus as the Lord's Christ, addressing fellow citizens does not seem to have the same impact as missionaries had in parts of Africa in the last two centuries. Part of the reason for this is that the languages and practices of Christianity appear to many post-Christian societies as simply an appeal to go backwards.

This is a point that was made in a different way recently in La Croix by John Alonso Dick when he wrote about "changing the conversation" and quoted T.S. Elliot's poem "Little Gidding":

For last year's words belong to last year's language.
And next year's words await another voice.

Christianity - at least in its traditional language and practice - is explicitly that from which many are running away (and often for very good reasons), and they cannot abide the notion of returning.

Inviting people to "come home" to Christianity is equivalent to saying they should love the technology of the early twentieth century, outmoded social views such as the restrictions on women of the nineteenth century, or the religious clashes and bitterness of even earlier.

The situation is that they have tried Christianity and found it wanting.

Moreover, the history of clerical abuse has destroyed the credibility of the Catholic Church as a witness to anything noble in the eyes of many.

Clerical pomposity and attempts to influence public policy make Catholicism something that people reject with disgust.

It is so easy to imagine that this post-Christian situation is the equivalent to being a-religious, as so many claim. But this, for those who believe in God the creator, would be a great mistake.

Post-Christian does not equate to being without religious longings.

Are they godless?

But does that mean that they are godless, that the great questions do not trouble them, or that for this generation Augustine's claim that every heart is restless until it rests in God (Confessions 1,1,1,) is no longer true?

If it is true that they are truly godless, then it must be a case that now, for the first time in history, there are hearts and minds in which the Holy Spirit is no longer speaking.

To say they are godless is tantamount to saying that God has gone away.

But part of the good news of the creation is that God never goes away, and in every heart, his Spirit is somehow active.

It means that the quest for God is taking new forms, finding different expressions, and the challenge facing Christians is twofold.

First, for themselves to recognize these new expressions of God's presence in human life and work - and not assume that God only speaks in the older language with which they are familiar.

Second, to help their fellow citizens recognize for themselves these divine stirrings, the deep human need for the Infinite, and to forge with them a new language - a language and religious culture and practice - that belongs to today and tomorrow (rather than being that of yesterday spruced up for today).

This view of the situation of modern women and men was elegantly summed up in this way at the Second Vatican Council nearly sixty years ago:

For since Christ died for all, and since the ultimate destiny of all humanity is the same, namely divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers all of us the possibility, in a way known to God, of being made partners in the Paschal Mystery (Gaudium et spes 22.5).

But finding this new "language" is very difficult - it is even more difficult than learning a foreign language because we do not know its grammar - and then we have to translate our older "language" into it.

In this task of translating the Christian past into the human situation of today and tomorrow, theology plays a crucial role.

So every study of theology is intrinsically an act of mission - and no explicit missionary act can take place without theological reflection. Put bluntly; the more people say, "I'm not religious," the more those who profess faith need the skills of theology.

Situation 2: Making God in our own image - what are the limits of tolerance and mercy?

One of the depressing aspects of being a Christian is that whenever one hears of narrow-minded intolerance, one often finds that this intolerance is backed up by people who are loud in their professions of their Christian faith.

I met a gentleman recently who was not only homophobic but who also saw all contemporary tolerance of homosexuality as misguided and inviting divine wrath to come upon society for "putting up with it".

He summed up his basic view with this phrase: "It's against the law of God!"

And in the conversation, I could hear two other hidden assumptions: laws need a penalty if they are to have any bite; and just as human legal systems punish "accomplices", so God must punish those who "connive" with those who break his law.

Around the same time, Pope Francis was reported as "changing Church teaching" by saying that the death penalty was incompatible with Christian teaching.

In response, a news program interviewed a US-based Catholic who said that this was all part of the slippery slope of the "Church losing its way and going soft on sin". For this person, God was the final policeman and creation was a kind of police state with God watching everything and biding his time before releasing his vengeance.

When we see a crucifix, we might ask a theological question: do we think of God as power or as love?

As I watched that interview - and I have heard the same sentiments often over the years — I wondered just where the message of love fitted with this answer.

Perhaps love is not what it's about, but power? Certainly, both the man I met and the other I heard on TV would have seen divine power as more "real" than divine love.

But while we can argue about whether or not "the bible" is for or against homosexuality, or whether or not the death penalty is needed and permitted, in both cases such arguments are only addressing the presenting level of the problem.

I suspect that there is a deeper problem. We think about the world around us, we have views on "justice", law and order, and the role of power in human relationships. And then we build a god in our own image, a god who ought to work as we would work ourselves (if only we had a chance).

Here is a basic question each of us as Christians must answer: is the fundamental aspect of God towards the creation one of power or love?

This is one of the hardest questions in all of theology.

It is also where the whole three thousand-year history of our theology intersects with one's personal outlook on life.

If we think of God as love, we might better appreciate the prayer for homosexual couples recently published by some Dutch bishops, and why a Jesuit theologian, Jos Moons, called having such a prayer "actually quite Catholic".

Faber's answer

The nineteenth-century hymn writer Frederick Faber (1814-63) proposed this very different vision to that of God-as-power, which seems to come to the very heart of the issue:

There is a wideness in God's mercy
like the wideness of the sea.
There's a kindness in God's justice,
which is more than liberty.
There is no place where earth's sorrows
are more felt than up in heaven.
There's no place where earth's failings
have such kindly judgment given.

For the love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind.
And the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful,
we would gladly trust God's Word,
and our lives reflect thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord.

What a wonderful piece of theology, though — alas — it is a hymn we hardly ever sing!

God's love is broader than the measures of our human minds, and so we must be wary of ever presenting anything but mercy and gentleness lest we betray the God we claim to serve.

But this level of mercifulness is not just a human trait nor a psychological or social disposition: it is the very challenge of discipleship. Such a level of forgiveness and tolerance, the level the world needs if there is to be peace, can be seen on reflection to be itself a gift, a grace, and so something for which we must be eucharistic.

In formal theological jargon what those two men who wanted a god of vengeance had done was to assume that justice was a univocal concept in the human and divine spheres, and so drew god down to their own level.

What Faber did was to say that if you can imagine the widest reality you can - for him it was the sea and for us is might be the light-years that separate the galaxies - then that is less than the "wideness" of God's affection for us.

Theology is not a body of ideas, nor the ability to provide the exegesis of doctrine, nor knock-down arguments to those who challenge Christian beliefs.

It is an invitation to imagine beyond our imaginations' bounds. I have responded to those too-human-bound images of the divine with a piece of poetry because theology is, in the final analysis, more like poetry than prose.

Theology and theologies

Theology is not just about knowing "what you are about".

It's more a matter of having the skills to think about what you know and do, to clarify what is obscure and confused, and to then help others in their quest.

God's infinity, Deus semper maior, is most truly recognized in God's mercy; but appreciating the range of that mercy and seeing what response it calls forth from human beings is a most complex challenge - and skill in theology is one great facilitator in this task.

In these five articles on the study of theology as a help towards a synodal Church, I have worked outward in a series of circles:

• religious questions that concern me as an individual;
• religious questions that concern me as a member of the Catholic Church;
• religious questions that concern the Catholic Church in relation to other Christians;
• religious questions that concern Christians in relation to other religions;
• religious questions that concern 'religious people' - those who believe in the Transcendent with other human beings.
• religious questions that concern every human being - though many would not see themselves as asking religious questions.

We all inhabit each of these circles simultaneously because each of us is the centre of a world whose outer reaches (and they might be just next door or even among our closest friends) interact with the whole of humanity.

Being a believer in this world - exploring my own doubts and questions, working with other Catholics and other Christians, encountering others every day of every religion and none - calls on us to think through our choices, what it means to follow Jesus's Way of Life and to reject the Way of Death, and to bear witness to hope and love.

This vocation is neither easy nor straightforward.

We both follow a well-mapped route which our sisters and brothers have travelled before us, and have to explore new routes and carve out new paths.

On this journey, being well-skilled in theology is like having a compass as well as a map.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

However, if we do not keep in mind that we share this planet with many faiths, then we might just become a little sect rather than be witnesses to the Good News.

Here is where the study of theology can help us clarify who we are - and how we relate to others. Theology is a door to a greater level of human understanding.

An ever more complex world

Just a generation ago, many Christians lived in societies where everyone they met was either a Christian or someone who rejected Christianity.

Today most Christians live side-by-side with people from a variety of religions.

Indeed, I can keep track of the variety of religions! Where I live, I can watch the way that the local supermarkets try to cash-in on festivals.

There is Christmas and Easter for Christians; Passover and Hanukkah for Jews; Eid for Moslems, Diwali for Hindus; and - in the last few years - Halloween (originally an Irish Christian festival) for anyone else!

We live in a multi-faith world, and there is little chance that anyone believes there is only one way of thinking about the Big Questions of life, death, love, meaning, and purpose.

But there lies the heart of it; we all are concerned with these questions - and humans have been concerned about them and consequently engaged in ritual and religion since our very earliest evidence for humans on this earth.

What does this fact - that all human societies and cultures ask great religious questions - mean for us as Christians?

A marketplace logic and its pitfalls

It is very easy to take the logic of the marketplace and transfer it to questions of religions (the proof of this is how endemic is the notion among Christians that we can buy our way into heaven), but it can confuse us at a very deep level.

If I need to change a punctured tire, I need either to have a jack or buy one.

If I get a jack and use it, then the wheel gets changed.

The opposite is also true: no jack, the wheel cannot be changed!

This is a good piece of clear, logical thinking.

Alas, I might try to use this same thinking in matters of religion.

The starting point seems clear enough: if I follow Christ, the way, truth and life, I can look forward to new life with him in the presence of God the Father.

This is a true and simple statement of Christian hope.

But what if I tried to expand on it?

I might try to reverse it, and then I would say, "If I do not follow Christ, then I cannot look forward to new life."

This, too, can be true because following Christ as a disciple is a costly business, and I could reject God's love.

But what if I tried to make it more abstract: "Disciples of Jesus can look forward to new life."

Again this is a very blunt, but still true statement.

But can it be reversed?

Then it would become "no new life unless you follow Jesus" or "only followers of Jesus can get to new life".

Both these statements have often been made - and many have tried to present Christianity in terms of "faith" on one side and hell and annihilation on the other.

Mercy limited!

But these statements are false.

In fact, we cannot try to limit God's love and mercy; we cannot be true to a God who is love and then preach this sort of either/or vision of rewards and punishments.

The fundamental problem is that we have transferred what is the efficient thinking of the finite world into the realm of mystery and the Infinite.

That is not only sloppy, but it also leads to falsehoods.

Those various celebrations advertised in the supermarket are all a response to the mystery of God who created the entire universe and who loves each of us.

We may have insights into the nature of the divine that we want to share with all, we may want to build the great family of the People of God in peace, but we do not "bring God" to people.

God is already present in every human heart.

Every word of prayer in every religion is a praise of God, and we must respect each searching after the divine as part of the precious treasure of humanity and as something sacred.

Religion is viewed by many today as the great distraction and the great sower of discord.

Part of the Christian message is that God is present to each and so, by respecting God's presence in every religion, we can build discourse.

We all think about the questions of religion.

But we usually do so in a very confused manner.

Theology can help us do it better.

And the more ably we think about religion, the more we can replace discord with discourse.

Religions can, indeed, learn how to respect one another, speak to one another, and learn from one another - all to the glory of God.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.

Here I want to give a more concrete form to the argument by looking at a basic problem of Christian theology and a current problem in Catholic practice.

We all ask theological questions and we cannot avoid them! Sometimes we realize this and we carry on the questioning with skill and a cupboard full of resources, sometimes we do it badly, with a limited range of ideas, and make a mess of it.

The poor cook has only a handful of recipes, relies on tins of sardines, and cannot cook a piece of meat without burning it; the good one has enough training and built-in resourcefulness that with the same ingredients we get an interesting meal!

So it is with the study of theology: the same questions that lead the untrained person to throw it all up and say that the world is mad and a mess, can, with some theological training, be seen to refer to basic human issues and it can be seen that there are ways out of our problems. Discourse can then replace discord, and enlightenment can take the place of bigotry and ignorance.

I want to develop this by looking at a couple of situations where there is "a commonsense answer" and another, more theologically informed answer. Then I will leave it up to you to choose.

Situation 1: Living as an individual disciple: What is 'God'?

Everyone I meet appears to know what the word G-O-D means. For a great many people I meet the answer is simple: there is no god - it is an illusion and the universe does not need a god and there is no evidence in human life for god: just look at suffering!

For others, there is a god and there are ways of describing god. There are "Acts of God", which are always nasty like fires or floods or earthquakes. There's also "the Man Upstairs" and it's a good idea to "keep in with him".

This Man Upstairs is very much like a lord of the manor whom you do not really like, indeed resent, but you know that you have to be "nice" to him, as you do not want the consequences of making him angry.

I know other people who cannot utter a sentence without mentioning god and god seems to be the actual motive force of everything - except for some reason he keeps hiding.

So it is "Thank God for a lovely day" - but what about the storms that kill people? Or "God is above us all" - so no need to worry! - So why bother doing anything? Or "do not be sad, God loves us" - but I am sad and I want to shout out in anger as the agony of death, decay and destruction I see around me.

By contrast, most other words need very careful definition. I have to learn how to use language precisely and if I were a car mechanic and referred to a "rocker arm" as a "yoke" you would probably (wisely) not trust me to service your vehicle.

Much of education is trying to explain how to use language so that it illuminates rather than obscures. But "god" is such a simple a word and we all seem to know all about it.

The atheist knows there is no god, while some religious people know more about god than they do about the physics of their refrigerator.

So why have theologians asserted over and over again: we do not know what we mean by the word G-O-D and that the whole task of theology is to ask the real question (it is not a learning game): what is God?

Late medieval attempt to picture in statues the whole mystery of God - Father, Son, and Spirit - in human images. While such a desire to see God may answer both a human and a catechetical demand, it not only fails, but betrays the deeper reality that the Divine is greater than all we can imagine.

Could it be that we confuse the question "what is god?" with the question "how many gods are there?"

To the latter question the atheist will answer that there is no god. The official answer of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and members of many other religions will be there is one god.

Others, including those who refer to the Man Upstairs and who thinks of God as the super-boss among a class of bosses, will say there is more than one god.

By contrast, "what is God?" is an attempt to put words on mystery. It is a mystery that is glimpsed here and there for a moment, felt intensely and then felt as absent, a vision which is more akin to poetry than to prose, a sense rather than a cold-blooded deduction from evidence.

"What is God?" is a question that is the pursuit of a lifetime and, while we may pray and worship and work, we must always resist the falsehood of thinking we have an answer.

If you think you have captured God in a sentence or a single idea or "have it worked out", then that is your projection, your idol, rather than the Reality which is beyond the universe but which beckons us.

It takes a lot of training in theology to appreciate this fundamental maxim: Deus semper maior - "whatever G-O-D is, is always greater than what we think God is".

An early modern attempt to imagine that which is beyond imagination. Mystery cannot be fitted within the categories of our empirical experience, nor depicted in this material way.

So let us use the G-O-D with reverence and be sensitive to how we can be spreading confusion by overuse.

Situation 2: Living in a community of Catholic disciples: Are we short of presbyters?

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Catholic Church today knows that there are not enough priests to staff the parishes; that communities are losing their churches due to this shortage because the remaining priests are usually greying and often exhausted through trying to cover too much territory.

And while priests from Africa and India may bring welcome help, this is far from ideal: they are needed in their own cultures and often have difficulty adjusting to a western European religious environment.

The answer to the priest shortage is so obvious to many people as to need no reflection: ordain married men, abolish compulsory celibacy, or even consider ordaining women - as other Churches have done.

But as soon as these possibilities are suggested a series of counter-arguments, usually designated as "from tradition", are advanced so as to make any change appear impossible or so far in the future as to be beyond any visible horizon.

Faced with this impasse, most arguments seem to revert to the history of practices: could what happened in the past, tell us something about the future?

But once we turn to the past we find that cases are put forward from each side as to what happened or did not happen, the significance of Jesus doing or not doing something, whether or not "apostles" equal "bishops" and whether or not those around Jesus were "ordained" or simply picked - or maybe there is no difference?

Then, even when answers to these questions emerge, another problem pops up: can the Church do something that appears never to have been done before? Or if something has always been done in one way can it now be done in another way?

So faced with a crisis in the present and the future, we seem to pore over the details of the 16th century (Trent's rejection of those who challenged the notion of celibacy as a more perfect form of discipleship) or the 12th century (first imposition by the Western Church of celibacy as a pre-requisite of ordination), or even (to the dismay of biblical scholars) the exact details of Jesus' meal on the night before his crucifixion (asking, for example, were women present).

Can theology throw light on this question?

A sign in a German town - when the sign was made there were three celebrations of the Eucharist each weekend, not there is just one. This change is not the result of a major demographic shift in the area, but doe to the fact of ever fewer presbyters. The model of the presbyterate still demanded by Roman Catholic Church practice no longer fits the pastoral reality of this local church. The sign is an analogue of the absurdity of theory confronting reality and reality being found wanting.

The first point to note is the style of the argument: it looks backwards to the past while imagining the past as a (1) complete, (2) clear and (3) adequate statement of all that we need to know about the structure of the Church.

The past, it seems, sets the parameters of discussion and contains the precedents for what can and cannot happen now.

So we might start by noting that the notion that ever closer scrutiny of the past (as containing the answers to any possible question now or in the future) is very similar to the way as some in the Reformed churches relate to "the bible" as having within it a clear answer to every possible question.

So asking whether the "tradition allows" women to be priests is like asking whether "the bible allows slavery or capital punishment". The assumption is that there is an answer in the book and if it countenances the practice, then it is allowed, while if it criticizes it, then it is forbidden.

But the bible has no criticism of slavery or capital punishment and does not condemn those who would stone a woman who committed adultery. Likewise, until the later 19th century the tradition had little problem with slavery.

I knew a priest who had been a prison chaplain and was with many men before they were hanged. He could not understand why people now thought it immoral. I have also met Christians from cultures where stoning women still occurs - and they say they can "understand" the practice!

But asking these questions of the past misses a more basic fact of life: cultures change and sometimes their insights amount to an enrichment of human life and sometimes to its diminution.

But a culture's past is as different from its present as that culture is from a foreign culture, and the future will be different again.

So maybe we need to refine our questions. Perhaps we should ask what can we do now that would help us pursue the goal of building the kingdom of God, affirming the dignity of each person, recognizing the presence of the Spirit in every one of the baptized.

We thus shift the focus from where we have come from (because we are no longer there) to where we are going (because that is where we soon will be).

This question allows us to assess what we value and value what we possess. It asks what it means to say "thy will be done" today.

We are only asking these questions - about celibacy, the form of ministry, and about who can be ordained - because we are no longer in the older situation. So we look forward and know that we may make mistakes - we have made many in the past.

But if we focus on purpose and what we are called to become, we will at least be honest. And, moreover, we will break out of the circle of endless details about what some verse in some first-century text means or what happened in the fourth or fifth centuries.

These questions may be great historical questions (and, as such, respond to our needs as history-producing beings), but they are not questions about what is demanded of us on the path of discipleship moving into the future.

Clearer questions

One thing that the study of theology should do is to help us clarify our questioning.

The past - and all its texts such as those that are in the bible - is our memory, an important key to our identity, and one of the deep common bonds between us.

But the past is not "the universal religious encyclopedia" in which are all the answers just waiting for one of us to go and "look them up".

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.

I have argued that it can foster a more conscious discipleship and help us see new ways through our difficulties.

But can it bring us, with the Holy Spirit's help, light for our path?

Theology is not a download

Theology is not just a body of information that one downloads.

In the past it was often confused with "the information needed by a priest" or some set of codes that could be used to explain everything, as if "theology" were the religious equivalent of basic geometry.

Theology does involve knowledge about how Christians live, how they worship, how they have presented their faith in doctrine, about how they read the texts they cherish, and what it is that makes them the community of followers of Jesus.

But most of this is already known to some degree to most Christians who take their discipleship seriously.

So what is special about theology? It is having a developed, trained skill in thinking about the Christian life, reflecting on what we are doing, why we are doing it this way, and asking if the great purposes of God could be better served by acting differently.

Let's see this by looking at an old problem and some fresh answers.

Living with other Christians: Can we share a table?

Meet any group of Christians and the likelihood is that there will be individuals from more than one tradition: a few Catholics, a few Anglicans, maybe a Methodist or Baptist, and one or two others.

All claim to be followers of Jesus, all pray to the Father, all acknowledge the Spirit within them. All have been baptized and have set out of the Way of Life which makes them fellow disciples.

So far, so good - and we rejoice that we no longer call each other nasty names (or worse) and appreciate that God, and the divine love and mercy, is unlimited.

But then, someone notes that the community of disciples never becomes more visible than when we gather in the Christ to share the meal of the Christian blessing and thanking the Father; when we break and eat the common loaf and drink from the common cup.

This sharing of the loaf and cup, the Eucharist, is the center and summit of the whole Christian life - and we echo St. Paul when we say, "Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf" (1 Cor 10:17).

The Eucharist has - too often and for too many - been an experience of exclusion and rejection. The sign pinned over this church door in Sterzing / Vipiteno (Italy) reads: "Here Jesus invites sinners and welcomes them to his table."

We are a divided body

But we are also divided: we worship apart, we have different structures and customs, and we have different ways of expressing belief and different ways of explaining what we do believe (and a history of saying that anyone who is "not with us" is both wrong and needs corrective punishment).

So many Churches have rules which say that "if you are not completely united with us, you cannot share the Christian meal with us". This causes bitterness, hurt, rejection.

It has also caused untold suffering when, for example, two Christians from different Churches marry and cannot share that which both may proclaim as most precious to them.

Faced with this problem it seems the only answer is to argue that the Eucharist is a manifestation of the union the Church in Christ (which it is), so if you are not in visible union with the Church it would be wrong to participate in that visible manifestation.

This logic is tight, and has been proclaimed by bishop after bishop, canonist after canonist, and so it would seem that it is as much a fact as "caution: hot surface" written on many machines. The rejection of "intercommunion" is hard, even sad, but there is nothing that can be done!

But one amazing difference between theology and engineering is that while the latter uses language factually - the bridge can either bear the weight or not -, theology uses language analogically.

It is aware that language is an approximation and that what appears a clear answer from one string of reasoning, emerges as a faulty answer from a different starting point, and both strings of argument can be true.

The pope in 2015

When Pope Francis visited a Lutheran church in Rome in November 2015, the wife of a Roman Catholic expressed her sorrow that they were "not being able to partake together in the Lord's Supper".

"What more can we do to reach communion on this point?" she asked the pope. His reply was very interesting. Here's what he said.

Thank you, Ma'am. Regarding the question on sharing the Lord's Supper. … I think the Lord gave us [the answer] when he gave us this command: "Do this in memory of me".

And when we share in, remember and emulate the Lord's Supper, we do the same thing that the Lord Jesus did. And the Lord's Supper will be, the final banquet will there be in the New Jerusalem, but this will be the last.

Instead on the journey, I wonder - and I don't know how to answer, but I am making your question my own - I ask myself: "Is sharing the Lord's Supper the end of a journey or is it the viaticum for walking together? I leave the question to the theologians, to those who understand.

It is true that in a certain sense sharing is saying that there are no differences between us, that we have the same doctrine - I underline the word, a difficult word to understand - but I ask myself: don't we have the same Baptism? And if we have the same Baptism, we have to walk together.

You are a witness to an even more profound journey because it is a conjugal journey, truly a family journey, of human love and of shared faith. We have the same Baptism. When you feel you are a sinner - I too feel I am quite a sinner- when your husband feels he is a sinner, you go before the Lord and ask forgiveness; your husband does the same and goes to the priest and requests absolution. They are ways of keeping Baptism alive.

When you pray together, that Baptism grows, it becomes strong; when you teach your children who Jesus is, why Jesus came, what Jesus did, you do the same, whether in Lutheran or Catholic terms, but it is the same. The question: and the Supper?

There are questions to which only if one is honest with oneself and with the few theological "lights" that I have, one must respond the same, you see.

"This is my Body, this is my Blood", said the Lord, "do this in memory of me", and this is a viaticum which helps us to journey. … … … I respond to your question only with a question: how can I participate with my husband, so that the Lord's Supper may accompany me on my path? It is a problem to which each person must respond.

A pastor friend of mine said to me: "We believe that the Lord is present there. He is present. You believe that the Lord is present. So what is the difference?" — "Well, there are explanations, interpretations...".

Life is greater than explanations and interpretations. Always refer to Baptism: "One faith, one baptism, one Lord", as Paul tells us, and take the outcome from there.

I would never dare give permission to do this because I do not have the authority. One Baptism, one Lord, one faith. Speak with the Lord and go forward. I do not dare say more.

Francis notes that theology is not a matter of fixed answers. Instead, there is always a variety of explanations and interpretations, and it is the task of theology to find those answers which are most conducive to discipleship.

Another way of viewing the situation

So what would such an argument look like? We have one Lord, and this is the faith we share. At baptism each of us was joined, not only to the Christ, but to one another as forming the children of the Father.

This is the kernel, the basis, and cornerstone of our identity - and this is not limited to any one Church but is the basis of "the Church". All who are in this great host of witnesses to God's love are on the journey of faith and are sustained on this often difficult path by each other and "the food for the journey".

This is an expression of God's love, mercy and care. And if it is God's mercy, are we not overstepping the mark to limit it?

A Lutheran church in Morschen, Germany. Can our common re-birth in the baptismal fond lead to our sharing sustenance at the Lord's table?

Theology is a process in the midst of life

Theology is not only more than "an encyclopedia"; it is a creative process by which we seek out what is the way of faith amid an often-dark forest of clashing ideas.

It helps us to recall that because "God is always greater", and we have to watch out for a bad habit of making God appear to be as narrow such as we have a tendency to become with our "possessions".

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.

A door to a synodal Church

But if voices are to witness to the truth, the speakers must seek to be as informed as they can be.

In matters relating to faith, an essential part of that personal equipment is to be theologically literate. Viewed in this light, we can see the study of theology as a doorway to a synodal Church.

But there are three obstacles to such widespread literacy.

First, among Roman Catholics, "theology" was historically confined to the ordained. Many Catholics have simply never thought that taking a serious interest in theology is any of their business.

The old attitude of the "the clergy speak, the laity listen" is still alive as we reach the 60th anniversary of the opening of Vatican Council II (1962-65).

Second, there has been a marked swing away from the teaching of theology in many universities.

The emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ("STEM Subjects") means that theology is excluded as somehow useless, a confessional matter, or as a poor use of resources.

Third, many highly committed Catholics - both lay and clerical - have never considered how the formal study of theology can be a resource for the Church and the world.

While individual academic subjects strive to say everything about something, theology strives to say something about everything.

Therefore, what follows is the case for getting more and more Catholics to take up theological studies as an aspect of the synodal path we have no upon.

Discipleship

Words have a sparkle as well as a meaning.

For many Christians today the word "discipleship" - a notion that has a very wide range of meanings - has a very positive sparkle.

It captures a sense of personal commitment, of life as a movement of growth and learning, and seems to fit very well with a sense of belonging within a Church that imagines itself as the pilgrim people of God.

"Theology", by contrast, has little sparkle; indeed, it seems a dull word relating to a rather boring and obscure academic pursuit.

When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers' (Ps 8:3): the wonder of the universe - which we today see in greater detail than ever before - has always been a starting point for theological questioning.

But let us look at a series of situations - scenes that confront us as Catholic Christians every day - and see if looking at them with the resources of theological speculation can help us to do three things.

First, theology can help to reposition these problems so that they might be seen as opportunities rather than roadblocks.

Second, theology can help us to relate to them differently as individual disciples and as a community of disciples, the Church, and thus find ways "through" the problems.

Third, theology can provide us with alternative ways of talking about what we hold precious as disciples and so help us in the task of evangelization.

What is theology?

What exactly do we mean by theology?

Most Christians think of theology primarily as an academic subject. It's a body of information that exists "out there", something that's difficult to get one's head around and must be absorbed by religious experts. And, so, it is really the business of the clergy.

It is like the religious equivalent of physics. Physics is complex and seems to be awfully important. So we are glad that there are egghead off in some university somewhere who work on it, but we can get on with life quite well without it!

Just so with theologians. No doubt they are useful, but just as the egg still boils whether or not you understand the physics, so faith keeps going and God is still "above us all" whether or not you have read a theology book!

But, actually, theology is not really like physics. It is far more like cookery: the more you know about cookery, the easier everyday cooking - and cooking is not only unique to human but affects us every day - becomes.

'Wisdom is calling out in the streets and marketplaces' (Prov 1:20): wherever humans come together, there are latent theological questions. Theological questions are as close as the local weekly market.

This might seem a little bit arrogant but think of the number of times either religious questions or questions with a religious dimension come up in everyday conversation.

A person is knocked down on the road and someone says: "If your number's up, your number's up!" Do you accept that life is so determined? Even if you do - and there have been many deterministic religions - don't you still look both ways before crossing the road?

One athlete on winning a race bows to the ground and thanks Allah; another blesses herself; a third does nothing because he thinks that is superstition. Are there different gods or if just one God, why so many arguments. Or is it all hocus pocus?

As I write this I recall the bomb thrown into a church in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday a couple of years ago, another bomb that exploded in Kabul in a dispute between Sunni and Shia, and the tensions in the United States that arise from some of the apocalyptic ideas held by members of the fundamentalist "Christian" right who deny climate change and imagine they can predict the future by stringing together a few biblical texts.

All three stories set me thinking. Perhaps religion is bad for human beings. Should it perhaps be consigned to the dustbin of failed stupidities? That is a basic theological question.

'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these' (Mt 6:28-9): the beauty of the world around us is another starting point for theological reflection.

Religion produces discord but could it also be the sponsor of discourse between groups since societies always develop religions, even if today they are usually god-less religions. That too is a theological question.

Discord or discourse
All religions argue about what their "original" texts/stories or founders meant/ said/wanted.

Are there better ways of looking at these questions that might generate more light than heat, and are there ways of pursuing these questions that are creative rather than destructive?

Once again, we have theological questions.

If we are encountering these questions, then as a community we might seek to address them in a careful, considerate manner - and we have a noble goal: replacing discord with discourse.

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches.

Sadly, this request reads as if this change were not already possible.

It has been available to the New Zealand Church since September 3, 2017, when Pope Francis published Magnum Principium (The Great Principle).

In Magnum Principium, Pope Francis gave the local bishops' conferences permission to work on and issue modifications to liturgical texts.

Although Magnum Principium concerns liturgical texts, it is part of a more extensive programme of curial reform, of which the Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evangelium (To Preach the Gospel), March 19, 2022, is the most recent.

Magnum Principium follows Francis' 2013 exhortation Evangelii Gaudium where he addressed the need to rebalance the relationship between the Roman Curia and bishops' conferences.

In referring to the Second Vatican Council, Francis said that the contribution of bishops' conferences brought a ‘collegial spirit' to the task.

Unfortunately, the ‘juridic status' of conferences, complicated by the then Cardinal Ratzinger and the Curia's ‘excessive centralisation' all ‘complicates the Church's life and her missionary outreach.'

In Magnum Principium, Francis shifted the responsibility and the authority for translating liturgical texts to the episcopal conferences by modifying clauses two and three of canon 838 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

He also redefined and limited the role of the then Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, now the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Beforehand the passages read:

§2. It is the prerogative of the Apostolic See to regulate the sacred liturgy of the universal Church, to publish liturgical books and review their vernacular translations, and to be watchful that liturgical regulations are everywhere faithfully observed.

§3. It pertains to Episcopal Conferences to prepare vernacular translations of liturgical books, with appropriate adaptations as allowed by the books themselves and, with the prior review of the Holy See, to publish these translations.

The revised text now reads (my italics):

§2. It is for the Apostolic See to order the sacred liturgy of the universal Church, publish liturgical books, recognise adaptations approved by the Episcopal Conference according to the norm of law, and exercise vigilance that liturgical regulations are observed faithfully everywhere.

§3. It pertains to the Episcopal Conferences to faithfully prepare versions of the liturgical books in vernacular languages, suitably accommodated within defined limits, and to approve and publish the liturgical books for the regions for which they are responsible after the confirmation of the Apostolic See.

Vernacular languages

To understand Magnum Principium, we must look at the larger context of the Second Vatican Council and the central principle of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of 1963, Sacrosanctum Concilium, active participation.

Local or vernacular language in Mass and other rituals predates Vatican Two.

Local vernacular language in worship has been the constant practice of the churches of Orthodoxy.

In the Western Church in the centuries before Vatican Two, Latin was undoubtedly the dominant liturgical language, but not the only one.

In the twentieth century, the Sacred Congregation of Rites permitted the use of vernacular languages in several missionary countries, including China in 1949 and India in 1950. It allowed for local languages in the Mass, except in the Roman Canon or Eucharistic Prayer.

Similarly, bilingual missals and the dialogue Mass became popular in France and Germany.

Other non-eucharistic French (1948) and German (1951) texts were also permitted.

Sacrosanctum Concilium discusses the use of vernacular languages, the need for enhanced lay-formation and participation in liturgy and the process of inculturation and issued in a period of liturgical reform and translation of texts.

Writing from Rome after the Sacrosanctum Concilium, John Kavanagh, Bishop of Dunedin, noted that it was the first Constitution approved because its ‘pre-conciliar preparation proved far more satisfactory than that of other comparable important texts'.

In New Zealand, the seven years between 1963 and 1970 saw the implementation of new rites and the introduction of new translations.

In May 1967, Peter McKeefry, Archbishop of Wellington, petitioned Rome for permission to use English in the ordination rite and received an affirmative answer on June 9 that year.

The most significant change was using vernacular in the Canon of the Mass.

In his letter, Concilium ad Exsequendam Constiutionem de sacra Liturgia od June 21, 1967, Cardinal Lecarno, President of the Concilium, wrote of the place of the vernacular in the Canon as the ‘last step in the gradual extension of the vernacular'.

Towards the end of 1969, the Apostolic Delegate put pressure on the New Zealand bishops to ‘adopt as soon as possible the new liturgical text for the Mass as issued by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy'.

The Vatican had directed that only one liturgical text could exist for the same language group.

All the English-speaking churches shared a single organisation or mixed commission for translations called the International Committee for English in the Liturgy or ICEL.

The English-speaking bishops created ICEL as their official mechanism for translations at their first meeting at the venerable English College in Rome on October 17, 1963.

Geotheological politics

Fast forward to the 1990s and the division in the Church over what has become known as the "liturgy wars".

These wars are not about liturgy but how power operates in the Church.

The growing centralisation of liturgical control during the reign of Pope John Paul II came at the expense of the authority of conferences of bishops, and New Zealand was not immune.

The process that began under John Paul II became calcified during the pontificate of Benedict XVI, who promoted the use of the 1962 Roman Missal, commonly and incorrectly referred to as the Tridentine Rite.

Further centralisation came with revising mixed commissions and ICEL's statutes by the Vatican.

Now, bishops' conferences were less able to control ICEL's work.

At a similar time, in July 2001, a rival committee to ICEL called Vox Clara was set up by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (CWD).

Vox Clara was a tool to provide advice to the Holy See concerning English-language liturgical books, but unlike ICEL, it was not a representative group of English-speaking episcopal conferences.

Within this context came the new liturgical translation tool, Liturgiam Authenticam (2001) and the reintroduction of the 1962 Roman Missal in Summorum Pontificum (2007).

Translation tools differences

Following the Council, translators used a philosophy of translation called dynamic equivalence or a sense-for-sense translation.

This translation philosophy was given in the Instruction, Comme le prévoit (January 25 1969). Translations were done hastily following the Council.

But, after the initial translations were ratified, most major language groups then worked on refining and improving their translations. They worked through all the ritual books (baptism, confirmation, funerals, etc.).

Quoting St Jerome, Pope Paul IV told liturgical translators on November 10 1965: ‘If I translate word by word, it sounds absurd; if I am forced to change something in the word order or style, I seem to have stopped being a translator.'

Nevertheless, the Pope proposed that translations should enable the faithful ‘to share actively in the liturgical prayers and rites'; therefore, the Church permitted ‘the translation of texts venerable for their antiquity, devotion, beauty, and long-standing use.'

In this short excerpt, the Pope drew the translators' attention to the liturgical principle of actuosa participation as a principle of liturgical translation, or what Francis has called the Great Principle.

On March 28, 2001, Pope John Paul II replaced Comme le prévoit with a new instruction for translations called Liturgiam authenticam.

As the name suggests, the object was correctness.

Texts "insofar as possible, must be translated integrally and in the most exact manner, without omissions or additions in terms of their content, and without paraphrases or glosses. Any adaptation to the characteristics or the nature of the various vernacular languages is to be sober and discreet."

Comme le prevoit had understood that a liturgical text is ‘a ritual sign... a medium of spoken communication', the purpose of which is to ‘proclaim the message of salvation to believers and to express the prayer of the Church to the Lord'.

By contrast, Liturgiam authenticam was less concerned with the comprehension of language and more with creating a distinctive liturgical language.

For example, where difficult or archaic expressions ‘hinder comprehension because of their excessively unusual or awkward nature', they should not be avoided but considered ‘as the voice of the Church at prayer, rather than of only particular congregations or individuals', thereby ensuring that the texts are ‘free of an overly servile adherence to prevailing modes of expression.'

Liturgiam Authenticam was the corrective to Comme le prevoit with the object to ‘create in each vernacular…a sacred style that will come to be recognised as proper to liturgical language' that many would call a staid, clumsy rendering, using words like ‘oblation' and ‘consubstantial with' and ‘man' as the collective noun for all human beings.

The translations were not without controversy nor always honest in their approach to the texts.

In the Second Eucharistic Prayer, the phrase ‘astáre coram te et tibi ministráre', which means to ‘stand as one or as a body and minister [to you]', was translated as ‘to be in your presence and minister to you' as a way of ensuring people remain kneeling for the Eucharistic Prayer.

Interestingly, the episcopal conferences of France, Spain, Italy and Germany rejected their translations using Liturgiam authenticam.

The bishops of Japan contested the Vatican's right to judge the quality of a translation into Japanese, questioning both the quality of the review and the subsidiary position in which the CDW's review placed them.

Magnum Principium

For Pope Francis, the liturgical text and its translations are about the mission.

Their goal is to ‘announce the word of salvation to the faithful in obedience to the faith and to express the prayer of the Church to the Lord.'

Following the thinking of Pope Paul IV, Francis writes that ‘individual words must be sought in the context of the whole communicative act'.

Liturgical language belongs to the experience of communication and which gives freedom and the responsibility that some ‘texts must be congruent with sound doctrine.'

Francis hopes vernacular languages will share the ‘elegance of style and the profundity of their concepts' as liturgical Latin and become the languages of authentic liturgy again.

He is inviting local churches, like New Zealand, to work on improving the texts.

In this process, the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments' role is to promote a ‘vigilant and creative collaboration full of reciprocal trust' between themselves and episcopal conferences.

Cardinal Arthur Roache, then secretary of the Congregation, outlined this in an Accompanying Note where he explained that the Congregation's (Dicastery's) role was to confirm translations but leave the ‘responsibility for the translation…to…the bishops' conference'.

The Dicastery still has a role in reviewing enculturated "adaptations", that is, additions or modifications introduced into a liturgy to incorporate or reflect local culture, which can include practices, movement, costume, and music as well as text.

The Synod's call

The onus has been on the local bishops to take the initiative.

However, this work can only be done by a team of professional liturgical theologians and assisted by other professionals.

Sadly, this work will probably not be undertaken because New Zealand is such a small country without these resources.

Nonetheless, the bishops' conference could easily permit using the ICEL 1998 presidential prayers and propers. It would bring a higher standard of written and proclamatory English into the Mass and other sacraments again.

• Dr Joe Grayland is a theologian and a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North. His latest book is: Liturgical Lockdown. Covid and the Absence of the Laity (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).

Many reasons have been advanced for this shift in how people relate in society, but all are agreed that it has occurred.

What is a culture of deference?

Deference can be seen in the notion that one would greet another, not as an equal in status and dignity, but as someone who is deemed superior to oneself.

Deference assumes someone inherently deserves respect. It assumes that you acknowledge the other's authority, superiority or worth as radically different from your own.

In those countries that are still monarchies, there is still an in-built system of deference. This deference is based on just who the person is: people are not born equal - and so one must bow, curtsy or salute that person whose status is greater than yours.

British coinage still asserts, in Latin, that the monarch is not only worthy of deference, but has been placed there by God. 2019. ELIZABETH II . D[ei] . G[ratia] . REG[ina] . F[idei] . D[efensor] = ‘2019, Elizabeth II is Queen by God's grace [and] Defender of the Faith'

The basic idea is that certain people were somehow "more" than the rest and should be given the first word. They should be heard with respect (ie not contradicted) and given the last word as well.

The new situation

Anyone who has been in hospital or a classroom recently knows that that the culture of deference is dead. People do not want to be "spoken down to". They want to be informed and allowed to make their own decisions. The age of the professor-is-god is over!

Moreover, those who used to be on a pedestal have been shown to be no different - and sometimes much worse - that the rest of us.

There was even the deference that came from money. We have all seen just how quickly a concierge or a receptionist in a hotel would respond to the needs of VIPs - and we find it insulting.

In the developed world, the age of automatic deference is over. And when we see people who imagine they merit such deference we react with a deep sense that we are all equal as humans and should just be treated with equal care and respect.

The Church situation

Deference has been a feature of Christian life at least since the time of the Synod of Elvira (306 AD) when Christian ministers began to claim the special privileges that Roman culture granted to the pagan priesthoods (sacerdotia), such as the flamines and the pontifices.

(Note that this occurred before Constantine's Edict of Toleration in 311 AD.)

Indeed, very soon these titles were adopted by Christian ministers. They called themselves sacerdotes (and justified this by an unfounded appeal to the Old Testament) and pontifices.

We still call the book of ceremonies used by bishops the "Pontifical" and refer to the Bishop of Rome as the "Supreme Pontiff".

Along with the titles went the uniforms — the heel-length gown (vesta talaris, usually called a soutane or cassock in English) that is still used by those ministers who like being clerics.

The use of purple - look at the trimming on the soutanes of monsignori and bishops - and the use of the title "reverend" (literally: O revered one) also comes from this ancient imperial culture of deference.

Bishops' purple attire is a legacy from the highly stratified society of the late Roman Empire. It was a culture built upon deference whereby the 'lowers' gave homage to their 'betters' and their 'betters' acted as their patrons.

More importantly than the kit is the attitude that being the subject of deference brings. It assumes that the revered one can speak first, is not challenged as to what he says, and then has the last word.

In a culture of deference, what Father says goes!

However, we see ourselves not as subjects, but as brothers and sisters in baptism who are on a common pilgrimage of faith.

All of us need to recall that no one likes to be patronised or "spoken down to".

Who speaks

Just imagine going into any group of adults (or even a schoolroom for that matter) and then speaking for 5-10 minutes.

What else would happen? There would, at the very least, be questions! Only an idiot would not make room for a "time for questions" into the plan for this communications slot.

Others would probably want to share their experience of what the speaker had been talking about. At the very least, into a 10-minute slot, a speaker would build in some time for reactions and comments.

If the communicator has had any training - or natural skill in talking to people - the whole event would take the form of a dialogue. It would be more like a class than a lecture. It would be done, at the very least, with some Q&A-style dialogue.

The style would be informal. For instance, it might pick up on the common jokes of the group on that day. And, unless one wants to intimidate a group when giving them a "dressing down", it would be done at the same level as them. Moreover, it would not be done from any throne or lectern.

Pulpits are places of power and belong to cultures of deference. The pulpit is the image of 'being spoken down to.' Few pulpits remain in our buildings, but we still use the metaphor. More importantly, we still think in terms of one-speaking / others listening. The pulpit mentality is still central to most Catholic liturgies.

Now think of the way that most homilies are given. The culture of deference still exists for most of those - be they bishops, presbyters or deacons - who preach at our celebrations of the Eucharist.

If you want proof that it no longer works, then stand at the back and watch the assembly and how they are moving their heads. How many are actually listening? How many are engaged? How many are looking at their iPhones?

A complex problem

The Church is out of sync on the subject of deference. That which most clergy take for granted is given them. But it is resented and becomes just a token. People have moved away.

Bishops are often glad to get presbyters from developing countries where deference is still part of the culture. But these men, in not realising that deference is no longer part of our culture, are often pushing people away from the gospel. This is a matter that needs cultural education.

We have a variety of ministries in the Church. We have to learn anew how to respect these differences without appealing to the modes of deference.

We are seeking to become a synodal Church, but the assumption of every synod is that all who meet at "the cross-roads" (the 'synodos') do so on a level-playing field. If we try to become synodal while ignoring that many of the laity involved no longer live in a world of deference, then the process will lead to resentment, frustration and rejection.

Hope or Trap?

We need to make a virtue of living in a post-deference society.

If you miss that - for instance, people deferring to you or greeting you by kissing your ring - then that is sad!

If we go into the synodal process without this virtue of post-deferential relationships with others, this process (on which many are pinning their hopes for the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church) will lead to the alienation of many of the very Christians we need for our renewal.

Source

• Thomas O'Loughlin is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton, emeritus professor of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK) and director of the Centre of Applied Theology, UK. His latest award-winning book is Eating Together, Becoming One: Taking Up Pope Francis's Call to Theologians (Liturgical Press, 2019).
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.