Hi Steve! Thanks for this reflection on the Pope’s message for World Communications Day and how it can help us think about the Synod. You asked about critiques of the “going out” and “listening” stages of the synodal process, and I think that a particularly detailed and critical review of the methodology comes from Mark Regnerus: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/01/86704/. His concern seems to be that the way in which the effort at both the data collection stage and the synthesis stage is open to shaping that introduces the biases of those leading the process - in other words, that Cardinal Hollerich and his fellow successors to the St. Gallen mafia will hear what they want to hear (a critique their ideological predecessors voiced of synods under John Paul II and Benedict XVI). I also think it’s interesting that your concern is that only a change in tone, and not in doctrine, could emerge from the Synod. Given its topic, Synodality, seems to be more about the practices of the church and not the various doctrinal issues that some of our more radical prelates wish to change, it seems to me that such an outcome would be a feature, not a bug, and that synods lend themselves better to examination of pastoral strategies and Church discipline than to doctrinal matters anyway.
Hi Steve! Thanks for this reflection on the Pope’s message for World Communications Day and how it can help us think about the Synod. You asked about critiques of the “going out” and “listening” stages of the synodal process, and I think that a particularly detailed and critical review of the methodology comes from Mark Regnerus: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/01/86704/. His concern seems to be that the way in which the effort at both the data collection stage and the synthesis stage is open to shaping that introduces the biases of those leading the process - in other words, that Cardinal Hollerich and his fellow successors to the St. Gallen mafia will hear what they want to hear (a critique their ideological predecessors voiced of synods under John Paul II and Benedict XVI). I also think it’s interesting that your concern is that only a change in tone, and not in doctrine, could emerge from the Synod. Given its topic, Synodality, seems to be more about the practices of the church and not the various doctrinal issues that some of our more radical prelates wish to change, it seems to me that such an outcome would be a feature, not a bug, and that synods lend themselves better to examination of pastoral strategies and Church discipline than to doctrinal matters anyway.