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By Brad Miner
The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church doesn't invent, revise, or vote on its Magisterium, its authoritative application of that depositum fidei. It receives, guards, and transmits that ancient faith. Doctrine can develop in the sense that St. John Henry Newman described it, growing in clarity and application, as an acorn becomes an oak tree. But it cannot be renegotiated – or reversed! – by majority sentiment or contemporary enthusiasm.
The claim of having received the Truth and of guarding it is the Church's entire reason for existing and makes it something other than a voluntary religious association. But synodality, no matter what its defenders suggest, introduces a mechanism capable of dissolving that claim: a standing, undefined, participatory process for generating endless, contemporary ecclesial consensuses that increasingly function as rival sources of authority alongside, and – from the standpoint of the innovators – ahead of the settled deposit of faith and, therefore, the Magisterium meant to guard it.
The vagueness we've seen so far in the synodal process has not been incidental. It's a feature, not a bug. After multiple synodal gatherings, the Church still has no fixed definition of synodality – only descriptions of a "style," a "process," an "instinct," and this inability to clearly define synodality is no minor omission.
It's reminiscent of the first Barack Obama campaign, which defined its agenda with one word: "Change." It meant nothing then; "Walking together" means nothing now. Where is our fixed point?
Aquinas and others, including the early Church Fathers, and several councils, have given the Church a fixed point and a shared technical vocabulary precise enough to allow the adjudication of all real disputes. Synodality has nothing equivalent. It runs on "individual discernment" and "the sense of the faithful" – categories that are functionally unfalsifiable: whatever the assembled body concludes gets read backward through the outrageous claim that each new proposal is what the Holy Spirit was saying all along! Finally, they tell us, we're listening!
But a process with no fixed criteria for correction isn't discernment; it's consensus-building with theological vocabulary attached, like the stickers my grandkids slap onto seemingly everything, including Grandpa's face.
History shows where this will lead us. The Church of England is the closest institutional analog we have, and it demonstrates exactly how the process plays out over time: synodal bodies incorporating clergy and laity into decision-making, provincial autonomy under a loose central authority, and a steady sequence of changes, each introduced as modest, "pastoral" accommodations – remarriage after divorce, women's ordination, blessings for same-sex unions, approval of artificial contraception, ambiguity on abortion – all over time transforming Anglicanism's doctrines and fracturing its unity.
Entire Anglican and Episcopal provinces now refuse to recognize each other's positions on same-sex "marriage" and the ordination of women. Sarah Mullally's installation as Archbishop of Canterbury has caused a schism within Anglicanism.
Yet it's the mechanism, not any single decision, that always was and remains the real and ongoing danger.
And that same mechanism is inherent in any Catholic version of synodality. Germany's Synodal Path pushes for a permanent Synodal Council that would hand the laity shared governing authority with bishops over doctrine and discipline. Rome has intervened directly to halt it, but several German bishops still openly resist the Vatican's warnings. Who knows what the outcome will be? But a "national" church attempting to institutionalize exactly the Anglican pattern within Catholic structures has been restrained so far only by direct ...
The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church doesn't invent, revise, or vote on its Magisterium, its authoritative application of that depositum fidei. It receives, guards, and transmits that ancient faith. Doctrine can develop in the sense that St. John Henry Newman described it, growing in clarity and application, as an acorn becomes an oak tree. But it cannot be renegotiated – or reversed! – by majority sentiment or contemporary enthusiasm.
The claim of having received the Truth and of guarding it is the Church's entire reason for existing and makes it something other than a voluntary religious association. But synodality, no matter what its defenders suggest, introduces a mechanism capable of dissolving that claim: a standing, undefined, participatory process for generating endless, contemporary ecclesial consensuses that increasingly function as rival sources of authority alongside, and – from the standpoint of the innovators – ahead of the settled deposit of faith and, therefore, the Magisterium meant to guard it.
The vagueness we've seen so far in the synodal process has not been incidental. It's a feature, not a bug. After multiple synodal gatherings, the Church still has no fixed definition of synodality – only descriptions of a "style," a "process," an "instinct," and this inability to clearly define synodality is no minor omission.
It's reminiscent of the first Barack Obama campaign, which defined its agenda with one word: "Change." It meant nothing then; "Walking together" means nothing now. Where is our fixed point?
Aquinas and others, including the early Church Fathers, and several councils, have given the Church a fixed point and a shared technical vocabulary precise enough to allow the adjudication of all real disputes. Synodality has nothing equivalent. It runs on "individual discernment" and "the sense of the faithful" – categories that are functionally unfalsifiable: whatever the assembled body concludes gets read backward through the outrageous claim that each new proposal is what the Holy Spirit was saying all along! Finally, they tell us, we're listening!
But a process with no fixed criteria for correction isn't discernment; it's consensus-building with theological vocabulary attached, like the stickers my grandkids slap onto seemingly everything, including Grandpa's face.
History shows where this will lead us. The Church of England is the closest institutional analog we have, and it demonstrates exactly how the process plays out over time: synodal bodies incorporating clergy and laity into decision-making, provincial autonomy under a loose central authority, and a steady sequence of changes, each introduced as modest, "pastoral" accommodations – remarriage after divorce, women's ordination, blessings for same-sex unions, approval of artificial contraception, ambiguity on abortion – all over time transforming Anglicanism's doctrines and fracturing its unity.
Entire Anglican and Episcopal provinces now refuse to recognize each other's positions on same-sex "marriage" and the ordination of women. Sarah Mullally's installation as Archbishop of Canterbury has caused a schism within Anglicanism.
Yet it's the mechanism, not any single decision, that always was and remains the real and ongoing danger.
And that same mechanism is inherent in any Catholic version of synodality. Germany's Synodal Path pushes for a permanent Synodal Council that would hand the laity shared governing authority with bishops over doctrine and discipline. Rome has intervened directly to halt it, but several German bishops still openly resist the Vatican's warnings. Who knows what the outcome will be? But a "national" church attempting to institutionalize exactly the Anglican pattern within Catholic structures has been restrained so far only by direct ...