On the value of listening (and some reservations)

 I am a great believer in the value of listening. Both at a practical and at a theoretical level, it is of great importance. Without listening we cannot understand and engage usefully with another; and it is frequently an act of charity.

So there is a part of me that understands, and sympathises with, the theoretical justification of the Synodal Way. And yet...

My concerns are significant, and they are many.  Here I will address just the first few of them.

I volunteered to run the parish meetings to consider the synod questions. What I realised (inter alia) was that listening is not in itself a neutral activity.  Thus when I heard a small (but vociferous) number of people (n=2) saying that it was an injustice that women are not admitted to leadership positions in the Church, and specifically the priesthood, I reflected that how I heard - and the meaning I derived - from that argument depended on the assumptions, beliefs, values, and so forth that I already held.  And inevitably so.

If I listen as a Catholic, understanding that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women; and particularly as a thoughtful and informed Catholic, who understands some of the reasons for that reality, then what I hear is an expression of a lack of catechesis: these poor women have never heard, or at least never understood (and therefore never accepted) the Church's teaching. It is lamentable, but no fault of theirs, in all probability. We have been failing to teach the Faith (and in particular the difficult bits) for a whole generation or more.

Whereas, if I listen without a full Catholic understanding, and particularly if I have imbibed a worldly perspective on such issues, I might reach a different conclusion: that the Holy Spirit is speaking through the Synod to change the Church. 

So that is risk number one; what it requires, of course, is listening with discernment, to distinguish the Heilige Geist from the Zeitgeist.

But I fear that I see a lack of such discernment being played out on a large scale at the moment. 

The second risk that my involvement in the process highlighted was about representation. In our parish, at least, the people who participated came from a very small selection of parishioners who were characterised by a common feeling of discontent. These were people who wanted more inclusion - by which they meant a celebration of things heretofore regarded as sinful, such as homosexual relationships, and the revision of Church teaching to suit their own particular agenda, including (as I mentioned previously) issues such as ordaining women, and condoning divorce.

On the other side of the equation, my Schola also submitted a written response to the Synodal questions, from a perspective of, let us say, a more traditional understanding of the Faith. 

But clearly, neither of these are representative of the typical person in the pew (if that is the idea) the vast majority of whom simply declined to participate. 

The process is only really of interest to those who are unhappy, one way or the other, or to the 'professional Catholics' who make up so much of the commentariat (and they are typically unhappy, too...). So for all the listening of the listening Church, what will be heard is a very distorted account of the views of the Faithful. Is that really how we hear the voice of the Holy Spirit?   

A third problem is the problem of recording. I tried to record the meetings accurately, with some clarity about which views were commonly held and which were individual.  But it would have been very easy for me to have recorded as important those issues I held to be important, and so forth.  And that risk is repeated at every level, as the diocesan and national summaries are prepared, and then as the great and the good in the Vatican look at the overall picture and draw up their summaries. 

These risks are inherent in the process, regardless of the good intentions (or lack thereof) of those running the process.   And then there's the question of the questions, and the thinking behind this sudden interest in synodality, and the desired outcomes...  But I will come to those another day.