BETWEEN TWO SYNODS
by George Weigel
On November 19, 1964, the draft text of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom was abruptly pulled from the floor of the council and a vote on it deferred for a year. The announcement of this unexpected decision, prompted by a request from Italian and Spanish bishops thought to be opposed to the Declaration, led to something approaching chaos. A petition to Pope Paul VI was hastily cobbled together and signed by hundreds of council fathers, asking the pope to permit a vote on the declaration before the council adjourned its third period in two days’ time. Paul VI determined that, despite the complaints of the majority, procedure had not been violated and the vote would be deferred until the council’s fourth period in the fall of 1965—at which point, Paul VI promised, the declaration would be the first item on the agenda.
Nothing like this legendary Black Thursday (which that patrician Latinist, John Courtney Murray, preferred to call the dies irae, the “day of wrath”) had been seen in the Catholic Church in the intervening fifty years until another Thursday: October 16, 2014, near the conclusion of the extraordinary synod on the family, convoked by Pope Francis to prepare an agenda for the ordinary synod on the family scheduled to meet in October 2015. (Synod 2015 will be “ordinary” because it’s one of the regularly scheduled synods that take place every three or four years.) The synod meeting last October, which involved presidents of national bishops’ conferences around the world and other senior Catholic officials, was indeed extraordinary, not least because, on October 16, the fathers of synod 2014 staged a mass revolt in the synod hall. There, amid another dramatic scene that included raised and angry voices, the fathers forced the synod leadership to release the full texts of the reports of their discussion groups (organized by language spoken), many of which had been highly critical of the “interim report” issued after the synod’s first week of plenary debate. That majority revolt, in turn, set in motion a process that led to a much modified, and considerably improved, final report from synod 2014.
In both these instances, the outbreak of very un-Roman behavior indicated that something serious was afoot, something that involved the very self-understanding of the Catholic Church. In 1964, the topic was religious freedom, but the deeper issues were the nature of the human person, the relationship between the rights of conscience and the claims of truth, the historic relationship of the Church to state power, and Catholicism’s evolving attitude toward political modernity. In 2014, the topic was the family and the Church’s pastoral response to the sexual revolution, but the underlying disputed questions were almost exactly the same, although this time they involved the Church’s relationship to postmodern culture more than its relationship to democracy and the separation of Church and state.
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