They were there to pray together and share a fine meal over a glass of Cabernet Francis — all in an effort to overcome polarisation.

In the Catholic world, it's hard to imagine an unlikelier pair than Tim Busch and the Rev. Jim Martin.

A successful businessman and entrepreneur, Busch founded the Napa Institute in 2011 to combat secularisation in the Church and uphold conservative values.

Martin, the editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine "America" is best known for his Outreach programme, aimed at promoting inclusivity and welcome for LGBTQ+ members of the Catholic community.

Together, these two representatives of opposing factions in the Church have created a framework for dialogue, even friendship, among priests, activists and journalists who would otherwise be arguing over divisive theological issues on social media.

Busch contacted Martin and asked for his help to bring left leaning Catholics to the table and today the two speak regularly to work on common issues and think of ways to bring their dinner experiment to U.S. parishes.

The dinners started in late 2023, as Busch became increasingly concerned with rising political polarisation in the U.S. and the deepening fractures he saw mirrored in the Catholic Church.

Of course, in the minds of many liberal Catholics, Busch is partly responsible for those fractures, having hosted gatherings at the Napa Institute where some of the most vocal conservative Catholic voices in the U.S. railed against woke-ism and liberal ideologies.

By this year's annual summer gathering of the Napa Institute, held July 24-28 at the Meritage Resort and Spa in Napa, California, Busch had struck a new tone, urging Catholics during his keynote speech to leave the culture wars behind and to "stop hating and start loving."

Busch has hosted four dinners, with 40 guests so far, and plans to host three more this year.

"We are not there to debate or have a theological conversation, although it's not prohibited, it's just not the primary goal," Busch told Religion News Service in an interview on Monday (July 29).

"After all, we all share the same beliefs on 95 percent of the issues," he added.

Pray, eat, love

The meetings start with a short Mass in the chapel in Busch's apartment, followed by reciting the rosary before a Marian shrine that his daughter made.

After a brief reception, guests are invited to sit for dinner. It was Martin's idea to ask participants in turn to share their favorite Bible verse and describe how it has impacted their lives.

"That allows them to talk about their spiritual life, but also the family, the kids, the priests, the conversions. It's really touching," he said.

"There are so many people who break down crying during the event.

"I think it shows the impact of meeting people that they have never met before, but they know who they are, and every day they get up in the morning and fight them instead of fighting the devil. I think that's a big relief."

There are 12 guests for every dinner, with Busch and his wife attending every one. "It was very Eucharistic," the Rev. Ricky Manalo, a member of the Paulist Fathers, who attended one of the dinners in March, told RNS.

"Any type of gathering that centers around food is always a good start to conversation and common ground," he said.

A French chef prepares a Mediterranean-inspired dinner for the guests, and Busch, who is in the wine business, pulls out copious amounts of wine — averaging one bottle per guest — from his Trinitas Cellars. "It dials everybody down," he said.

Many of the wines are named after Marian shrines, but the one titled after Pope Francis is the real conversation starter, Busch said.

"Especially for left/center people, they think, "Oh, this guy doesn't hate the Pope — he makes wine with the Pope's name on it!" he said, adding that he sends cases of the wine to the Pope as well.

Carefully curated guest lists

Busch said he tries to invite six people from both camps, conservative and liberal.

Every guest receives a bio of the other participants before the dinner so "nobody gets surprised," he explained.

No one has canceled last minute, and overall people who attended said they were glad to have come, Busch said.

Conservative guests have included the editor of "First Things" magazine, Russell Ronald Reno, and Catholic commentator and author Sohrab Ahmari, and Father Javier del Castillo, the U.S. vicar of the Prelature of Opus Dei.

The list of progressive Catholic guests who have attended the dinners includes professors from Fordham University but also influential Catholics such as Kerry Robinson, who heads Catholic Charities U.S.A., and Sam Sawyer, the editor in chief of "America Magazine."

Inviting left-leaning Catholics to dinner would have been impossible for Busch without Martin's support, he said.

"I've suggested a number of names to Mr. Busch, and when my friends receive their invitations they almost always write to me and say, ‘Should I go?'

And I say yes," Martin said in an email to RNS. "Afterwards they write to tell me how grateful they were to have gone."

Martin's perspective

The bestselling author of "Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity," Martin has faced considerable vitriol from conservative faithful on social media and traditional news outlets.

At Pope Francis' request he was also invited to bring his perspective to the Synod on Synodality, born from a three year consultation of Catholics at every level to discuss major issues and challenges facing the Church, which will have its second and last summit in October at the Vatican.

The synod adopts Jesuit-inspired methods to promote thoughtful and respectful dialogue in the Church.

"The Synod has invited us to be a Church that listens to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and how can we listen to the Spirit if we don't first listen to one another?" Martin said.

After posting an article by Busch describing the dinners and their goal to lower tensions in the Church, Martin received many comments on X criticising him for "siding with the devil," and some stopped following him on social media.

"I think the more important feedback was from the participants, all of whom seem to have found it valuable," Martin said.

Soaring polarisation

The issue of polarisation in the church has reached soaring heights, especially in the United States.

Pope Francis directly addressed conservative opposition in the U.S. during an interview with CBS in April, where he described his detractors as being engaged in a "suicidal attitude" by being "closed up inside a dogmatic box."

Francis has also recently taken action against his strongest critics, revoking the pension and Vatican lodgings of the leading voice of U.S. conservatives, Cardinal Raymond Burke, and dismissing fiery papal critic Bishop Joseph Strickland from his diocese in Tyler, Texas.

In early July, the Vatican also excommunicated former U.S. papal envoy Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for the crime of schism, after the prelate claimed Francis was not the rightful pope.

A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that Catholics are extremely polarised in the U.S., with 44 percent Democrat or leaning Democrat and 52 percent Republican or leaning Republican.

Moreover, in April, Pew found that partisan affiliation strongly impacts Catholic views of Pope Francis — with 89 percent of U.S. Catholics who are Democrats or lean Democrat having a favorable view of the Pope, compared to only 63 percent of Catholics who are Republican or lean Republican.

It's the most politically polarised view of Pope Francis since Pew began surveying on him.

Reuniting the Church

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has attempted to address this issue through the "Civilize It" initiative, which includes asking faithful to promise to respect the dignity of every human being, including those who think differently.

"When you're writing the Tweet, imagine Jesus is there with you and when you think through that, question ‘should I do this?'" said Bishop McElroy of the Diocese of San Diego during a panel discussion as part of the initiative.

The Paulist Fathers, a Catholic religious society, organised a summit on polarisation in April where they invited hundreds of Catholic leaders, communicators and thinkers to discuss how to promote dialogue and reconciliation within the Church.

"Polarisation is a first-order crisis," said Manalo, who was among the organisers of the San Diego event.

"We can't talk about anything, about gun control, abortion, gender or ecology, in our country or in our church unless we learn to talk to one another."

Manalo believes religious leaders have been caught up in the cultural upheavals of the past 50 years, which have created a "perfect storm" where tribalism has dominated the public discourse.

When he attended the Napa gathering this summer, he walked up to Busch to suggest further steps and initiatives to ensure the dinners don't become a one-off event.

Busch said that even the "archconservative and traditional" members of the Napa board and guild fully support the dinners and that he plans to continue hosting them.

The calendar for 2024 is full, and dinners are already being planned for 2025. Busch is particularly interested in getting prelates together, including Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington.

"We just need to figure out how to become more effective and intentional about bringing the Church together so it's not just a one-night phenomenon," he said.

• First published by Religion News Service
• Claire Giangravé is an author at Religion News Service.

Yet others have partially removed themselves from in-house discussion by opting for a "spirituality" more or less independent of the Church.

Confusions that come to us from the wider secular culture are another matter again.

Some of the polarisations within the Church can be described as "push-back."

It is important to understand the reasons for push-back - from whichever direction it comes.

It needs to be made fruitful. Otherwise, it just degenerates into culture wars. These have already reached fever pitch in some parts of the world. We don't need that.

But, first the good news: the common ground between polarised positions within the Church is that people's faith really matters to them.

Perhaps we should be more concerned about those who seem not to notice.

Above all, however, small family arguments should not be given more time than we give to reaching out to people in need and working to transform society.

Push-backs and pendulum swings

Some of today's push-backs are residue from previous pendulum swings.

In its day, feudal society had found an echo in the Church, some of the bishops being princes and lords.

That kind of society is what the French Revolution pushed back against by calling for liberty, equality and fraternity - and by persecution.

Persecution rebounded in the form of many new religious orders, expanded missionary work, and a revival movement, which was known as Ultramontanism because it was centred on Rome ("over the mountains" from northern Europe.)

Features of this revival included parish missions and multiple devotions, processions, apparitions, miracles, pilgrimages, scapulas, medals, and novenas - which have their place, though not as bargain for salvation.

It is the era of neo-Gothic and baroque architecture, and exuberant adornment of churches. Clergy became a group apart even more, and later, with dress to match.

The First Vatican Council (1869-70) was the first to which no lay people were invited.

The era featured a theology that became increasingly unable to address modern questions, culminating in the anti-Modernism of Popes Pius IX and X.

Intellectual enquiry was not encouraged, and complete subordination to Church authority, especially the Pope's, was the order of the day.

With some variations, this gave us our experience of Catholicism up until the 1960's.

The much-needed corrective came with ressourcement: better methods of studying the ancient scriptures, and the liturgies, theologies and practices of Christianity's earlier centuries, gradually emerged, and fed into the renewal mandated by the Second Vatican Council.

Some of today's push-back is a hankering for features of Ultramontanism; and some of those features are mistaken for "tradition."

Different experiences

Push-back can also arise from different generations' experience.

Some of us grew up within a Church that was controlling, paternalistic, clericalist and conformist.

The post-Vatican II Church included push-back against that way of being Church. There were good reasons for this - based on what it means to be a person and what it means to fully respect the primacy of conscience:

The dignity of the human person is a concern of which people of our time are becoming increasingly more aware.

In growing numbers people demand that they should enjoy the use of their own responsible judgment and freedom.

They want to decide on their actions on grounds of duty and conscience, without external pressure or coercion. (On Religious Liberty -Dignitatis Humanae, n.1.)

A true appreciation of personhood and of conscience fosters personal responsibility in others. It relies more on catechesis and moral formation than on regulation and penalties.

It is more akin to authorising or enabling others to grow as persons. It requires a formation aimed at helping them to understand the issues and to choose well.

It moves away from social patterns and leadership styles that were more typical of feudal societies, and that prolonged over-dependence and personal immaturity.

This accounts for different expectations of how Church leadership should be exercised.

There has been push-back from some who fear that respect for the autonomy of persons and the primacy of conscience involves a failure to uphold church teachings.

Those who grew up since the 1960's have not experienced a highly authoritarian and conformist way of being Church.

But they have experienced the emptiness of secular ideology and the triteness of consumerism, and they are pushing back against that.

They rightly look to the Church for a strong sense of the transcendent and clear markers against false ideologies, and are concerned when it seems to them that the liturgy renewal involves a diminished sense of mystery and of the transcendent.

From ceremony to ritual

Conversely, of course, some of their efforts to emphasise transcendence can seem to others like an over-emphasis on secondary matters and externals.

After all, even the Church's teachings do not all have the same level of importance:

The "... biggest problem is when the message we preach seems identified with secondary aspects which important as they are, do not in and of themselves convey the heart of Christ's message…" (Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, n.34)

That applies also to Church practices. In his scholarly article, One Hundred Years of the Discipline of the Liturgy (Australasian Catholic Record, Oct 2023), Gerard Moore reminds us of the difference between "ceremony" and "ritual".

We watch a ceremony, and we participate in a ritual (acknowledging some overlap).

Before the Second Vatican Council, it was assumed that the congregation "attended" Mass, which the priest "celebrated."

It was the priest's responsibility to ensure the ceremony was correctly performed, and there were manuals that spelled that out in much detail.

It easily became a preoccupation with rubrics, vestments, birettas, mitres, candles etc.

But the Council reminded us that the Mass is not a ceremony which the congregation attends, it is a ritual in which they participate.

Although the priest has a special ministry, it is the whole congregation that celebrates Eucharist.

There are also polarised expectations resulting from how we think of "mystery" and "reverence."

The confusion derives from pre-Council times when we did not have a good understanding of the difference between "devotions" and "liturgy" - they were all "what we did in church."

Our understanding of "reverence" derived mainly from our demeanour before the Blessed Sacrament.

That kind of reverence, proper to Eucharistic devotions, can inhibit the sense of mystery and of reverence that properly belong to liturgy.

(That is why official sources prefer the reserved Sacrament to have its own sacred space, apart from the sanctuary. It is not part of the liturgy of the Mass.)

In liturgy, properly understood, the "mystery" is indeed Christ's real presence, and "reverence" is the way we respond to what He is doing for us, which is different in each of the sacraments and at different moments in the celebration of Eucharist.

An example might help:

For Polynesian Catholics, the Gospel procession involves song, dance and expressions of joy at Christ's coming among us in his word, and the congregation rises to its feet out of respect.

When I explained this to a group of seminarians, one commented that this could be "a distraction."

That good man was still thinking of the kind of reverence we express in the presence of the reserved Sacrament and in private prayer.

The Gospel procession invites us to come out of our private time to join a worshipping community - to participate in a ritual.

Intrusions

Where the difference between devotions and liturgy has not yet been well understood, efforts are still being made to re-insert various devotions into the liturgy, and objects of devotion into the sanctuary.

But nothing is more striking than the "noble simplicity" of which the Introduction to the Roman Missal speaks.

There have been sporadic efforts to re-introduce the maniple, the biretta, etc, but these are more usual with fringe groups, which tells its own story.

Good ritual doesn't need things that have lost their meaning.

For example: when the priest had his back to the congregation and prayed the Eucharistic Prayer quietly, in Latin, the people had no way of knowing where he was up to. And so, a bell was rung at various stages of the Mass to help the people know.

The current rubric allows that a small bell may be rung "if appropriate," "as a signal to the faithful" (it has no other meaning) - e.g. in a large congregation where it may be difficult for people to see or hear.

But in a small building, where the people are carefully following the prayer which they can hear clearly, the sudden interruption of a bell can be quite a distraction.

Some ways of not causing distraction during the Eucharistic Prayer seem to be little more than common courtesies.

But many of them come back to the fact that one voice prayerfully proclaiming the Eucharistic Prayer helps the prayerful participation of the people, and so the less shuffling around at the altar the better.

This led priests and bishops, some years ago, to forgo options that are open to them, sharing different parts of the Eucharistic Prayer among the concelebrants, all concelebrants saying the words of institution out loud, bishops putting mitres off and on during the Mass…

Forgoing such options occurs naturally to those who think of the congregation's needs more than their own prerogatives.

Same signs, different meanings

Of course, "secondary things" and "externals" are often intended to point beyond themselves.

Signs are a kind of language. Clerical dress is an example of this, and of a recent push-back. Dress can be a sign of being different, separate, apart.

Alternatively, it can indicate closeness to people, being one with them.

What counts is not what our signs means to ourselves, but what they mean to those we want to communicate with.

Up-to-date research by the Wilberforce Foundation (Faith and Belief, 2023) confirms that it is not status or position that attracts New Zealanders to explore the faith:

People living in Aotearoa New Zealand value authenticity with 66 percent of respondents being attracted to explore spirituality if they see people living out a genuine faith or spirituality first-hand.

"Authenticity around faith and spirituality in conversations is … a key factor in leading individuals to consider faith or spiritual matters…" (p.28)

Then, more pointedly, it says: "the number one repellent to exploring faith and spirituality" was hearing it from people who publicly and officially represent it.

The reasons for this might not be recent scandals, because the Wilberforce Study goes on to say that:

… the above finding does not hold for the younger generation, who are more open to influencers. Gen Z are the most likely generation to investigate faith or spirituality if they hear it from a representative public figure…

Gen Z are also the most likely to be attracted to exploring spirituality further because of stories or testimonies from people who have changed because of their faith or spirituality… (p 28).

So, perhaps the research is saying, as many Catholics do, that ministry is not helped by regalia, customs or titles that symbolise power - the remnants of Christendom.

Adaptation to pastoral need goes with being incarnational - being not of the world, but truly in it nevertheless - not just physically, but also socially.

In 1971, the International Theological Commission had warned against "the tendency to form a separate caste".

I have been struck by the coincidence of two unrelated events: in order not to re-traumatise victims, the NZ bishops knew better than to wear clericals when they came before the Royal Commission.

Nearly fifty years earlier, one of our most pastorally dedicated priests had been visiting a hospital, and he told the nurse that a patient he visited had seemed agitated.

She told him that the monitoring machines often showed a rise in blood pressure and pulse rates when "you men come in dressed in deep black".

After that he was always smartly dressed and identifiable as a priest, but never again in "deep black."

We need to be sensitive to these matters because how we come across is meant to be for the benefit of others and not just to satisfy some inner need of our own.

Throughout the Church, pastoral savvy has resulted in many different forms of clerical dress.

It's the mission that doesn't change.

Some push-back on this account comes out of a pious exaggeration relating to ordination which led Pope St John Paul II to remind us that "what one becomes through ordination is in the realm of function, not dignity or holiness" (Christi Fideles Laici, 51).

It is the function that is special.

The importance of belonging

Our "small family arguments" do not cancel our belonging. They take place within the context of family bonds that go deeper than differences.

There is a Catholic culture formed through the inter-action the Church's scriptures, liturgies, devotions, hymns, literature, art, pilgrimages, parishes, Religious communities, schools, work for justice, peace, development and health care, personal sacrifices, faithfulness…

Within this culture, the desire to belong is mysteriously stronger than anything that offends.

But I could be accused of avoiding the more serious issues if I omitted to acknowledge the kind of differences that can threaten unity within the Church.

At one level, the continued use of the unrevised Missal might seem harmless enough - live and let live.

But it can also smudge reality: a General Council of the Church mandated a revision of the Missal, and every Pope since has emphasised that continued use of the unrevised Missal is a special concession for specific pastoral needs.

In other words, the revised and unrevised Missals are not just alternative, ordinary, ways of celebrating Mass.

What matters here is not just the difference between two Missals; it is our Catholic practice of accepting the mandate of a General Council, and its endorsement by all subsequent Popes.

There is no point in blaming Pope Francis: he is the one charged by the Holy Spirit to preside over the unity of the Church.

Fortunately, he can be unfazed by small family arguments, but he is also clear about the boundaries of unity. Our prayers for him need to be accompanied by our loyalty.

• Peter Cullinane is Emeritus Bishop of Palmerston North, New Zealand and a respected writer and retreat leader who, in his retirement, is still busy at the local, national, and international levels.

As measured in surveys, Americans' negative attitudes toward political parties other than their own have increased dramatically in recent decades and at a much faster pace than in other countries.

These entrenched divisions simultaneously increase the vehemence of our arguments and decrease our willingness to listen to one another.

We exhaust ourselves by declaring our opinions but are not in conversation.

We produce monologues that are intended more to reassure us than to convince those with different views—or worse, that are received by them as taunts and provocations which must be answered in turn.

Constant exposure to arguments that we are not willing or able to engage with in dialogue is draining as well.

It is like listening to a radio tuned to a station that is half static, half shouting—but that we dare not turn off lest we miss the point our own monologue will aim to refute later.

When we think about polarisation in terms of its derangement of public discourse, we often think first of political partisanship.

But it is clear that this dynamic also plays out in many realms of common life, including religion. In the Catholic Church, it is easy to recognize polarisation operating both within the life of the church itself and in the church's relation to the secular world.

For example, conflicts over the Traditional Latin Mass and over how the church should engage with a wider culture whose sexual norms have changed radically both reflect different factions arguing fervently but often talking past each other.

Indeed, what most characterizes polarisation is the constant sense of threat: Everything is always at stake, always in need of defence.

In fact, a closer look at the relationship between religion and secularity provides powerful insights about how polarisation arises and how it becomes so intractable—and it also helps us imagine how to find a way toward greater unity.

The reality of the church as a communion, not just an association of individuals, offers a powerful antidote to polarisation.

Finding resources within the church's tradition for a healthier engagement across internal divisions can also provide a model for responding to secular forms of polarisation.

Where polarisation and secularity intersect

Polarisation is not simply an intense form of extremism but not just the worst case of division or disagreement.

The kind of polarisation that is exhausting us is, instead, a pathology endemic to pluralism.

It is a name for how attempts to live together with others who hold different accounts of meaning, goodness and human nature—accounts that overlap and intersect but do not fully agree—break down and turn into fear and scapegoating instead.

Our arguments about how to live together run in circles.

As we despair of ever convincing each other, the "other side" in a polarized discourse becomes less a partner in conversation and more a threat to be neutralized.

Indeed, what most characterizes polarisation is the constant sense of threat: Everything is always at stake, always in need of defense.

Because we lack shared ground on which to agree or disagree, we also feel the lack of safe ground for our own beliefs.

This is the ugly and dangerous truth of why the outrage machines of social media and the 24-hour news cycle work so well on us.

We are already afraid—and they are ready at hand to tell us why.

Believers or not, we all live in a secular age in which we become responsible for opting to believe.

In thinking through how polarisation operates, I have found that the philosopher Charles Taylor's analysis in A Secular Age offers crucial insights into how the stakes of disagreement have risen so high in our contemporary situation.

(While I would encourage everyone interested in these issues to read A Secular Age themselves, a 900-page tome is a very good reason to make a recommendation of a shorter précis as well. James K. A. Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is an excellent exploration of the key points of Taylor's work.)

Two main points from Taylor have bearing on the question of polarisation: his distinction between three different meanings of secular and his concept of being "cross-pressured" by having to constantly choose among many sources of ultimate meaning. Continue reading

• Sam Sawyer is Editor in Chief of America Media

This gathering, and a second one in October 2024, are the culmination of the Synodal Path on which Pope Francis launched the Catholic Church in late 2021.

The various churches around the world have experienced the synodal process in very different ways due to their distinct national and continental characteristics.

But there have also been dissimilarities even with within the same nation.

Important issues that Catholics have been wanting to address for a long time will surface in one way or another at the Synod assembly in Rome.

That will be done with differing if not divergent expectations.

Catholics in some places are less patient than others.

Interestingly, many bishops seem fearful of what Catholics in countries other than their own (especially in Germany) might do in response to the Synod, even more than they fret about what might come from Rome during or after the two assemblies.

This is a remarkable sign of our ecclesial times.

Synodality relies on rules and procedures that are now in a transitional stage, in the process of being established and tried out.

The theological and magisterial tradition of synodality is being refashioned under our very eyes.

Synodality today cannot be an identical copy of synodality as it was in the early Church.

This moment is showing us the plasticity that exists in the ecclesial and ecclesiastical forms of the one subject the Church.

This is why the approach to this moment requires an unwritten wisdom for a synodal conversion that has to face a variety of obstacles.

Here I intend to propose five of them, in an effort to develop a synodal wisdom.

But first a word of caution: we are in for a long haul; synodality will not be a done deal after October 2024.

Polarisation

There is real challenge to being a synodal Church in our current climate of hyper-polarization.

The two-party mindset has become part of the cultural DNA, where everything is a contest or a choice between two — and only two — options that are mutually exclusive and where each side is tempted to excommunicate the other and win over the other.

In the United States, for instance, this has led to the formation of two ecclesial parties that mirror the country's two-party political system - not only in shaping orientations on social and cultural issues, but also in terms of style of communication, of ethics of belonging and relating to the other side.

This has created an almost automatic instinct to talk to the other side as a group that is different, rather than talk with those who — although they do not agree with you — are still part of the same family.

Dismantling this partisan way of understanding synodality is important at a moment in which listening to the voices of the people will have consequences on the representatives to the Synod.

Like never before, the members of the Synod assembly will have a sort of ecclesial mandate precisely because the listening period now is so central to the process.

Synodality as "paperwork Church"

Unfortunately, skeptics often see synodality as just another example of the "paperwork Church"; that is, an exercise that ultimately produces documents that will feed a bureaucratic ecclesiastical apparatus but have no impact (or perhaps a negative one) on the spiritual life of Catholics.

This is why is extremely important to see synodality in the context of the Church as "field hospital", to use Pope Francis' moving image. (I was recently reminded of this on the 40th anniversary of the final episode of the American TV series "MASH" about Army surgeons trying to save lives, while clinging to their own sanity, in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War)

Synodality is about rediscovering the inter-personal and relational experience of the Christian faith, where healing is never just the application of procedures and protocols but always has a human face.

Synodality in the Church as field hospital is an antidote to the temptation of lifeless, contactless Christianity.

An unreasonable desire for the spectacular

Synodality is a slow communal and spiritual process that requires patience.

It challenges the habits and expectations on our horizon, as well as our ecclesial expectations.

We live in a "society of the spectacle", which emphasizes the "groundbreaking event" or the "paradigm shift" at every moment, and where every election is "the most consequential election in our history".

But synodality is not the drama that puts the individual at the centre, the "homo faber" or maker of Promethean decisions that turn his fortune upside down.

Neither is synodality one more evidence of the theological tragedy of modern Catholicism; that is, the impossibility of Church reform, of the inevitable and inescapable fate of decline.

Risk of getting hung up on structures

Synodality will certainly have to find a structural way to favour new modes of participation.

But it is not only about creating new structures.

In some churches, the decision to revive (or give life for the first time to) structures of participation that should exist already — such as parish and diocesan pastoral councils, for example — would be a synodal event.

In many places, this would be like discovering Vatican II for the first time (or starting a reception of Vatican II that was interrupted many years ago). It would not simply be applying structures that were created almost sixty years ago to today. Rather, it would mean living them in a different way.

Wanting to decide everything all at once

This is probably the most difficult and unpopular obstacle of all.

There are issues that must be very present in the synodal process, like the participation of women in new roles in the life of the Church and the consequences of the abuse crisis.

But there are also issues that may be better addressed by postponing them, especially those do not require new legislation or do not rise to the level of doctrinal decisions.

Synodality has a long history in the Christian tradition, but it's a history full of interruptions, detours, and deviations.

The current synodal process is, by nature, experimental.

If our local communities develop a more synodal way of being, it's an energy that the Church — that is, the people of God, as well as the institutional Church — will not give up.

There are the synodal moments proper, but there are also "peri-synodal" events that can contribute to the Synod without having to be sanctioned by the hierarchy of the Church.

After the Synod assemblies take place, the Catholic Church is likely to look less monarchical and more synodal.

Nonetheless, a hierarchical structure will continue to exist.

It is important to remember that the lived experience of many Catholics is not and will not be involved in the synodal process.

This is fine: no one should wish for a synodal Jacobinism.

To paraphrase what Pope Francis says about holiness in Gaudete et Exsultate, there is also "middle class of synodality".

If we were to stake our staying or leaving the Catholic Church on the outcome of this two-year synodal process it would be a mortal risk.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.