If the Vatican’s newly released working document guiding the Synod on Synodality’s closing session in October is any indication, delegates at the monthlong assembly in Rome will spend little, if any, time deliberating over women deacons, LGBTQ inclusion and other hot button issues that dominated last year’s session.

The 32-page document, called the Instrumentum laboris, scarcely mentions those controversial topics, several of which were shifted to the purview of separate study groups — a welcome development for theologians like Larry Chapp. 

A frequent Register contributor, Chapp has previously raised concerns that the Synod was being used as a “stalking horse” to change moral teachings, but he described the new text as “balanced, focused, and concrete.”

“I think the document is really quite good. Far better than I had hoped for,” he told the Register.

But not everyone who has reservations about the Synod is ready to relax.

“This is a big, ‘general’ document that opens a lot of doors, for good and for ill,” Chris Ruddy, a theologian at The Catholic University of America, told the Register. “I think the synodal organizers know that the hot button stuff is off the table for October, but they’re laying the groundwork for big transformations/deformations.”

Structural Changes

Ruddy’s concerns largely focus on proposed changes to widen decision-making roles for the laity in ways that could conflict with a bishop’s legitimate governing authority. For instance, he expressed concerns about the text’s “effacement of the difference between consultation and deliberation,” highlighting a passage that says that canon law should be reformulated to no longer describe the votes taken by advisory bodies as consultative only. 

He also said that the text’s focus on promoting the participation of all in decision-making processes above and beyond liturgical and sacramental participation “betrays a certain fixation on ecclesial power,” and may also privilege those “with greater articulacy, education, and time to participate in lots of meetings.”

The text’s call for the inclusion of the “marginalized” in decision-making also raised concerns for Ruddy, given the ambiguity of the term and its susceptibility to be used in ways that promote the views of groups considered to be unjustly treated according to secular accounts, while ignoring others.

“I don’t have a problem with LGBTQ people being involved in synodality, but I do have a problem with ‘marginalized’ being used as a code word,” he told the Register, adding, “I presume that TLM [traditional Latin Mass] devotees don’t count as ‘marginalized’ in the present ecclesial moment.”

The CUA theologian also called attention to passages that seem to promote diversity between local Churches in ways that could be problematic if applied to doctrinal matters, such as a call to streamline the Vatican’s official recognition of conclusions made by regional ecclesial bodies. 

University of Notre Dame theologian John Cavadini, meanwhile, expressed concerns that the image of the Church as the “People of God” in the text “dominates” other theological descriptions of the Church, in a way that could imply a “complete but imbalanced ecclesiology.” 

Cavadini also described the document’s articulation of revelation as “blurry,” since it appears to “demote” Tradition, by not describing it as an expression of the supernatural Word of God but instead placing it alongside God’s communication via means like “events in space and time” and “the natural world.”

Dominican Father Bernhard Blankenhorn, a professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, also took issue with the Synod document’s account of revelation, which he said was overly reliant on the thought of Jesuit Father Karl Rahner, the controversial 20^th century German theologian. Specifically, Father Blankenhorn said the document reflects Father Rahner’s idea of “an ongoing revelation in the experience of believers today, one that can justify the reversal of previously defined dogma.”

Father Blankenhorn critiqued the Synod text for failing to “represent the broad consensus of Catholic theology, across different schools of thought, regions and generations.”

“Instead, this working document seems to assume a key set of Rahnerian theological ideas as a foundation, ideas that remain highly debatable for many respected Catholic theologians and pastors,” the Dominican told the Register

Activists Emboldened

Concerned theologians weren’t the only ones to identify avenues to push for profound changes via the Instrumentum laboris. Activists eager to see major changes in the Church welcomed the Synod document and the session it will guide as an opportunity to advance their agendas. 

For instance, New Ways Ministry, an LGBTQ activist group that Church authorities have said is not a legitimate Catholic organization, claimed that by calling for the participation of all Catholics in decision-making processes, the Instrumentum laboris “opens the door” for “revising church teaching” and ensuring that LGBTQ+ identifying people have “access to all the sacraments,” presumably referring to sacramental marriage for same-sex couples.

“If all these reforms are carried out, a renewed church with greater justice and equality for LGBTQ+ people will emerge,” the group’s head, Francis DeBernardo, said in a press release.

Similarly, Jesuit Father James Martin, a proponent of controversial approaches to LGBTQ inclusion, said that while the document doesn’t mention LGBTQ concerns by name, it “sets out a far broader plan for real listening, dialogue and progress in the church in coming years.”

“It proposes a truly ‘synodal’ Church, that is, one that listens to all voices and discerns the invitations of the Holy Spirit in those voices,” Father Martin said on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “As such, it should be a great sign of hope for those who have not felt included, welcomed or heard, including LGBTQ people.”

Meanwhile, leadership of the Central Committee for German Catholics (ZdK), a lay organization pushing for radical changes to the Church teaching and practice via the controversial German Synodal Way, welcomed the document, saying in a statement that it indicates that the Church “wants to become synodal” and “struggles in this process with the transformation of her tradition.”

ZdK president Irme Stetter-Karp claimed that the text makes clear that the Church’s teaching authority must not conflict with each local Church’s cultural context, an apparent attempt to connect the Synod’s agenda with the group’s position that the Church in Germany should be able to make changes in governance, ordination, and moral teaching that deviate from other parts of the universal Church.

 

Noted Improvements

Despite these concerning signals, theologians consulted by the Register all pointed to noted improvements in the new working document, compared to last year’s Instrumentum laboris.

Chapp said that the Synod text’s avoidance of more contentious topics will allow the 360-plus clergy, religious and laypeople to focus more clearly on tangible proposals of synodality in the life of the Church, such as establishing a “properly instituted ministry of listening and accompaniment.” 

“As a document meant to guide discussions, this is a very specific proposal that the synodal participants can flesh out in concrete ways with various proposals for such a ministry,” Chapp observed.

He also said the text was marked by a “renewed emphasis upon the Church as a sacramental communion that flows from the divine life of the Trinity,” which “forecloses any ‘populist’ reading” of the importance of listening in decision making,” such as using “opinion gathering procedures” to gauge the sensus fidelium. 

Father Blankenhorn noted the document’s “insightful reflections” on charisms and baptismal dignity, while Notre Dame’s Cavadini said he was “grateful” that the text appeared to respond to concerns that had been raised about previous synod documents, including ambiguities about the nature of “co-responsibility,” which he previously said seemed to be grounded in a Protestant understanding of ministry.

The new text, Cavadini said, better distinguishes between Holy Orders and the charisms and ministries that flow from baptism, making it clear that “ordained ministry as such does not arise from baptism.” 

Ruddy, too, found positive elements of the new text, such as its call for accountability and transparency in church finances and its promotion of all Christians’ participation in the Church’s life and mission.

But the CUA theologian, who is an expert in the ecclesiology of Vatican II, remains concerned about “vague, open-ended proposals with potentially significant consequences” throughout the document.

“I’m not an enemy of synodality and think it has a lot of promise, but I am concerned about how some wish to use it as a Trojan Horse for heterodoxy,” he told the Register. “The Instrumentum laboris doesn’t assuage those concerns.”