The Challenge of a Synod That Walks Away from Christ

"If the Synod is to be ... truly a walking together, then it must walk with Christ. And walking with Christ means walking ... into the demanding, beautiful, life-giving fullness of the truth He has entrusted to His Church."

From Rorate Cæli

By the Canon of Shaftesbury

A guest article by the Canon of Shaftesbury. [This contribution expresses the opinions of its author and does not represent the official position of Rorate Cæli.]

 

Introduction

 

The superiors of the Society of Saint Pius X have argued that there exists a state of emergency in the Catholic Church. Those who deny this claim, who insist that all is well, that the concerns of the Society are exaggerated or unfounded, have, to employ a metaphor, buried their heads in the sand. The evidence is not obscure; it is visible in parishes, in chanceries, in synodal assembly halls, and in the documents these assemblies produce.

The crisis assailing the Church is not just a liturgical matter, though the liturgy remains intimately and inseparably bound to the broader question. Among the most pressing and proximate challenges confronting the faithful is that which has emerged from within the Synod on Synodality: a process formally constituted as an instrument of sensus fidelium and collegial discernment, yet one which has, in its concrete unfolding, produced expectations gravely at odds with sound doctrine: namely, that the Church possesses the competence to accommodate her perennial and binding teachings to the prevailing spirit of the age, and that the deposit of faith, received once for all and entrusted to the Apostles, stands subject to ongoing revision according to the fluctuations of popular opinion.

 

Such expectations are irreconcilable with the Church's magisterial self-understanding. The deposit of faith is not the property of the faithful of any given era to dispose of as they see fit, but is held in sacred trust by the Magisterium, to be guarded unaltered, authentically interpreted, and faithfully transmitted (Veritatis Splendor, N. 27). To subject defined doctrine to the arbitration of sociological consensus would constitute not renewal but rupture, not growth in the sense of Newman's development, but a corruption of the faith delivered to the saints.

 

What Is the Synod on Synodality?

 

The very name of the process contains its own irony. Synodality derives from the Greek ‘synodos’ which means walking together. But what appears that by adopting this synodal model in its present form, is that the Church risks walking together in a direction that leads away from Christ rather than toward Him.

 

The Synod on Synodality is a multi-year, global initiative of the Church, formally titled “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission.” It was launched by Pope Francis in October 2021 and is directed toward transforming how the Church governs itself and relates to her members. Its stated purpose was to shift the Catholic Church toward a more collaborative, inclusive, and listening-centered operational style.

 

Official synodal documents and Church leaders have consistently stressed that the goal of the process is renewal in mission; not a democratic revision of Catholic dogma. The stated end was discernment, not legislation; accompaniment, not doctrinal innovation. This was the theory. The practice it seems quite different. The tragedy of the Synod on Synodality is that it has become, in reality, a forum in which doctrine is questioned, critiqued, and in some quarters effectively condemned; and all of this carried out in the name of the Holy Spirit. If this were to be continued, the Church risks abandoning the very mission for which she exists: the salvation of souls.

 

The critical question is not whether we should listen. Of course the Church must listen, and she has always listened. The critical question is: listen to what end? And it is here that the Synod has introduced a danger that cannot be overstated. The process has generated a widespread and prevailing expectation that listening to the lived experiences of the faithful is itself a doctrinal act, that sufficiently widespread suffering, dissatisfaction, or dissent constitutes a new form of the sensus fidei, the sense of the faith, and that this newly constructed sensus fidei may, in turn, override and change the defined teachings of the Church. This is not a minor misunderstanding easily corrected. It is a systematic confusion about the nature of the Church, the nature of revelation, and the nature of truth.

 

Origins and History of the Synod: A Cautionary Tale of the Anglicans and the

Eastern Orthodox

 

Any honest consideration of synodality must contend with the Anglican experience. The Anglican Communion has operated with a synodal model: governance through councils of bishops, clergy, and laity for generations. The results are very instructive, but not in the way that proponents of the Catholic synodal process might hope.

 

Synodality in the Anglican Communion has been characterized by factionalism, politicization, and increasingly severe institutional gridlock. The highly democratic nature of Anglican synods tends to prioritize the tactics of secular political negotiation and majority voting over genuine spiritual discernment. The result has not been unity, but the opposite: a fracturing of the Communion along deep theological and global lines, an accelerating confusion about what Anglicanism actually believes, and a gradual institutional irrelevance that becomes more pronounced with each passing year.

 

The lesson is unambiguous: when a Christian body treats theological questions as matters to be resolved by parliamentary procedure, the inevitable result is not resolution but schism, drift, and the slow but certain emptying of doctrinal content. One must ask, with genuine honesty, whether those who advocate most enthusiastically for a synodal Catholic Church have in all conscience reckoned with what synodality has produced in the communion that pioneered it.

 

The Eastern Churches, both the Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome and the Eastern Orthodox, present a more theologically sophisticated version of synodality. In Eastern Orthodoxy especially, what is called conciliarity is considered not merely an administrative framework but a fundamental theological principle, reflecting the belief that the Church is a living communion of autonomous local churches governed collectively.

 

In Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology, synodality is understood as a reflection of the Holy Trinity itself: a community of equal persons in perfect harmony and mutual charity. In the Eastern Churches the highest expression of synodality is the celebration of the divine Hierarchical Liturgy. Decision-making power is grounded in synods rather than in a single individual bishops.

 

In this model, synods are exclusively led by bishops and are deliberative assemblies. Their purpose is to elect bishops, articulate doctrine, and establish church law. Every synod is led by a primate, either a Patriarch, Metropolitan, or Archbishop, who is the first among equals. The primate who leads the synod is bound by it and is unable to act independently of it. This system operates at local, regional, and universal levels, with the highest canonical authority being an Ecumenical Council representing all autocephalous churches.

 

The contrast with the Roman model is significant and must be stated clearly. In Eastern Orthodoxy, there is no single central figure with supreme, universal jurisdiction over the entire Church. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople holds primacy of honour, but cannot override a regional synod or unilaterally declare dogma. In the Latin Church, by contrast, the Pope holds, in the words of the First Vatican Council, full, supreme, and universal power. The College of Bishops possesses no authority except in communion with the Roman Pontiff.

 

However, a crucial historical observation must be made at this point. Even in the Eastern model, when we examine the great Ecumenical Councils; those moments of highest synodal expression, it becomes apparent that the voice of Rome was decisive. The famous acclamation at the Council of Chalcedon in 451: “Peter has spoken through Leo” confirms this reality. And this was not a mere formality. It was a recognition that when Leo the Great's Tome was read to the assembled bishops, they heard in it the voice of the Apostle Peter. The most solemn synods of the Eastern tradition were confirmed by, and in many instances settled by, the intervention of the Roman See.

 

Furthermore, it must be remembered that today, in both the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, synods serve primarily as instruments of governance, not as organs for ongoing doctrinal development. They do not convene to revisit settled dogma. They govern. This is a distinction of the utmost importance when evaluating the ambitions of the current synodal process in the Latin Church.

 

In the Latin Church, synodality has historically been a consultative tool rather than a governing principle. The Second Vatican Council, in its decrees on the episcopate, envisioned synods as mechanisms for the College of Bishops to advise and assist the Pope, not to legislate, and certainly not to revise doctrine by consensus. The Pope remains the sole possessor of supreme authority. The synod advises; it does not decide. The Synod on Synodality represents, in the view of many theologians and canonists, a departure from this tradition; a transformation of a consultative instrument into something resembling a deliberative parliamentary assembly with quasi-doctrinal authority.

 

What the Synod on Synodality Truly Is, and What It Seeks to Accomplish

 

The first problem with the Synod on Synodality is one that its proponents rarely acknowledge: no one can satisfactorily define what it is, what its precise purpose is, or how it is to be integrated into the divinely established constitution of the Church.

 

It is not an Ecumenical Council; it lacks the membership, the dogmatic authority, and the canonical standing of a Council.

 

It is not a synod in the Eastern sense; it is not a bishops-only deliberative assembly.

 

It is not a synod in the sense envisioned by the Second Vatican Council, which imagined a consultative body assisting the Pope in his governance of the universal Church.

 

What, then, is it?

 

In its practical manifestation, what is being promoted by its most enthusiastic advocates is something resembling a democratic parliamentary assembly within the Church; a forum in which all voices carry roughly equal weight, in which the Holy Spirit is invoked to validate whatever conclusions the majority reaches, and in which traditional moral teaching is treated as a subject of negotiation rather than a received inheritance.

 

The second problem is the confusion generated by it. A grave theological error discernible at the very foundation of the synodal process consists in a tendency present within certain currents of contemporary Catholic thought and given institutional expression during the pontificate of Pope Francis toward the promotion of personal, subjective experience to a position of magisterial or quasi-normative authority, to the loss of the objective deposit of faith as it has been revealed, defined, and authoritatively transmitted by the Church's ordinary and extraordinary Magisterium. The Synod has, in effect, elevated the malformed conscience as an absolute arbiter of personal truth. This is not a minor pastoral accommodation; it is relativism. And it is dangerous precisely because it presents itself in the language of mercy, accompaniment, and the Holy Spirit, making it more difficult to identify and resist.

 

The sensus fidei (the sense of the faith by which all the baptized share in the prophetic office of Christ) is a real and important theological concept. But it does not mean that popular sentiment determines doctrine. The sensus fidei is not a polling mechanism. It is not the aggregated preferences of the baptized at any given moment in history. It is the instinctive, supernatural perception of truth that belongs to those who are genuinely living in fidelity to the faith; the faith as it has been received and handed on, not as it is being reinvented.

 

The Problem of Authority, Implementation, Membership, and Outcome

 

When Pope Francis elevated the final document of the Synod on Synodality to the level of the ordinary papal magisterium, he created a structural problem that will take years, to fully manifest. He did not declare every detail of the text to be strictly normative; instead, he tasked local churches and national episcopal conferences with discerning how to implement its general orientations within their own cultural and pastoral contexts.

 

The difficulty with this approach is profound and practical. When a document of magisterial weight is given to local churches for contextual implementation, without strict normative content, the inevitable result is discrepancy. Doctrinal implementation will vary from one episcopal conference to another, from one diocese to another, depending on the theological inclinations and pastoral priorities of local leadership. What is, in one region, a matter of clear and settled teaching, may be, in another, a matter of ongoing pastoral discernment. The unity of the Church's doctrine, one of the hallmarks of her divine origin, will be jeopardized.

 

Also there is a problem with the composition of the Synod. Traditionally, synods consist of bishops and their canonical equivalents. The inclusion in the current synodal process of laity, religious, and even, in some consultative contexts, non-Catholics represents a departure from every historical precedent. This departure is not merely canonical; it is symbolic, and the symbolism matters enormously. When doctrine is debated in an assembly where bishops, lay activists, and non-Catholic observers hold equivalent status, the impression created is an impression almost impossible to correct that Church teaching is the product of a democratic negotiation among interested parties. Whether this impression is fair to the intentions of the architects of the process is almost beside the point. The impression itself causes scandal and confusion.

 

Moreover, during the pontificate of Pope Francis, there is a well-documented pattern in the synodal process of well-organized advocacy groups of progressive theological orientation exercising disproportionate influence. The process has not been a neutral listening exercise. It has, in many of its phases, been shaped by those with predetermined conclusions. This is a fact that has led even those who are in favour of the synod to question the integrity of the process.

 

Nowhere is the danger of the synodal process more concretely illustrated than in the report of Study Group 9, released in May 2026. The report presents, as its own hope, a shift in the Church's teaching on marriage, family, and human sexuality. Most scandalously, it features the testimonies of two men living in civilly recognized same-sex partnerships as positive contributions to the Church's discernment about love, relationship, and family.

 

The report does not present these testimonies neutrally, as data to be evaluated. It presents them as instances of the kind of lived experience to which the Church must listen and adapt. In doing so, it implies that the Church's defined teaching on the nature of marriage and on sexual morality is not a received truth to be proclaimed, but an ongoing conversation in which those who contradict it have equal standing with those who uphold it.

 

Cardinal Müller and other figures in the Church have condemned the report in the strongest terms, warning against the relativization of sacramental marriage and identifying in the document a systematic accommodation to secular ideologies that are incompatible with the Gospel. The theological error of Study Group 9 is not merely that it reaches wrong conclusions. It is that it changes the nature of the question. Rather than asking how the Church can more effectively announce and explain her teaching on marriage and sexuality to a world that has largely rejected it, the report asks how the Church's teaching might be adjusted in light of the experience of those who reject it. This is not pastoral accompaniment, this is confusion of the worse kind and this is doctrinal surrender.

 

The line between pastoral care and doctrinal capitulation must be maintained with absolute clarity. Pastoral care accompanies the sinner with mercy while maintaining the integrity of the moral law. Doctrinal surrender blurs or abolishes the moral law in the name of mercy, thereby depriving the sinner of the very truth that makes genuine repentance and conversion possible. If doctrine no longer clearly identifies sin as sin, what remains of the Church's mission? What is there to be saved from?

 

Furthermore, the synodal process, which claims to be concerned with hearing all voices, has been strikingly selective in which voices it amplifies. The voices of those who uphold traditional teaching, who have suffered for doing so in increasingly hostile cultural environments, these voices have received markedly less attention than those of progressive advocacy groups in Western Europe and North America.

 

On the Holy Spirit: Clarifying a Confusion

 

The most theologically serious dimension of the synodal controversy concerns the invocation of the Holy Spirit. Supporters of the synodal process, including, at times, its most senior participants, have claimed that the direction the process is taking reflects the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Church today. Resistance to the synodal process, on this view, is equivalent to “resistance to the Holy Spirit.” This claim must be examined because it is both theologically serious and profoundly misleading.

 

There is a pervasive tendency in contemporary Catholicism to pit the Spirit against structure, charism against doctrine, pastoral accompaniment against moral clarity. The reasoning proceeds approximately as follows: the letter kills, the Spirit gives life; therefore, whenever the Spirit moves (understood as whatever contemporary consensus demands), the letter may be set aside. The Spirit is invoked as an endorsement for whatever the synodal majority wishes to affirm.

 

But this is not the Holy Spirit who descended on the Apostles at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost is the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who was promised by Christ to the Apostles as the Advocate who would teach them all things and remind them of everything Christ had said. The purpose of the Spirit was to remind and teach them: He teaches; meaning He brings understanding of what was received. He reminds; meaning He recalls the Church to what was already given. He does not innovate. He does not invent new doctrines agreeable to a given century. He illuminates the deposit of faith; He does not replace it.

 

The descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost did not occur in a context of doctrinal dissolution or institutional deconstruction. The tongues of fire descended upon those who were gathered together, in one place, in prayer, under the headship of Peter. The Holy Spirit came to a community that was structured, ordered, united under apostolic authority, and persevering in prayer. The first fruits of the Spirit were not confusion, doctrinal debate, and the revision of received teaching. They were courage in proclamation, unity of heart and mind, and the conversion of thousands.

 

The spirit of confusion, the spirit that pits pastoral feeling against doctrinal precision, that privileges the experience of dissent over the tradition of faith, that treats the deposit of revelation as raw material for perpetual reconstruction is not the Holy Spirit. It is a sham. And the fact that this sham presents itself in the language of the Spirit, of listening, of accompaniment, and of mercy makes it more dangerous, not less.

 

Saint Paul warned the Galatians that even if an angel from heaven were to preach a gospel contrary to what they had received, he should be considered accursed. This is not rigidity. It is faithfulness. The Gospel is not ours to revise. It was given to us. Our task is not to improve upon it but to proclaim it clearly, faithfully, and with the courage that the Spirit of Pentecost alone can give.

 

The Church’s Divine Constitution is Not Democratic

 

Underlying the entire synodal enterprise, as it has developed in practice, is an ecclesiological confusion of the first order: the implied assumption that the Church's governance is, or ought to be, democratic in character, that theological truth is the kind of thing that can be discovered or confirmed by majority vote.

 

This assumption is incompatible with Catholic ecclesiology at its most basic level. The Church is not a voluntary association of like-minded believers who periodically assemble to determine their shared values. She is the Body of Christ, the Bride of the Lamb, the pillar and ground of truth. Her constitution is divine, not human. Her teaching authority, the magisterium, derives not from the consent of the governed but from the commission of Christ to the Apostles and their successors.

 

What, then, is the purpose of a broad consultation that generates unrealistic expectations of doctrinal revision? Worse, what happens to those who participate in such a consultation in good faith, who share their suffering and their questions, and who are then told, whether explicitly or implicitly, that their experience constitutes a claim upon Church teaching? They are not served by this process. They are misled by it.

 

Genuine pastoral care for those who struggle with Church teaching does not consist in raising their hopes that the teaching will eventually be revised to accommodate their preferences. It consists in accompanying them with patience, compassion, and honesty that includes the proclamation of the truth that sets free, even when that truth is hard.

 

The Church's hierarchy is not an obstacle to the Gospel. It is part of the Gospel's structure. It is the framework through which the Word continues to be proclaimed with authority across centuries and cultures. To undermine it even in the name of listening, even in the name of accompaniment is to undermine the very mechanism by which the faithful receive what they need for salvation.

 

Conclusion: Walking Together Toward Christ

 

The word synodality, as has been noted, derives from the Greek for walking together. The Church does walk together: the faithful with their pastors, the pastors with their bishop, the bishops with the Pope, and all together with Christ, who is the Way. The question is not whether we should walk together. The question is in which direction we are walking, and whether the one who leads us is Christ or the spirit of the age.

 

The Synod on Synodality, in its present form and its practical manifestations, has introduced a grave danger into the life of the Church. It has created a structural expectation that doctrine is negotiable. It has elevated the subjective experience of dissent to quasi-doctrinal authority. It has provided a platform for the systematic relativization of Catholic moral teaching. And it has done all of this under the invocation of the Holy Spirit; a Spirit who, properly understood, is not the author of confusion but of truth.

 

The Society of Saint Pius X and others who have sounded the alarm about the state of the Church are not alarmists. They are witnesses. They see what those comfortable with the current trajectory prefer not to see: that a Church which cannot clearly proclaim the truth about sin and salvation, about marriage and sexuality, about the nature of God's moral law, has lost her way and can no longer guide others to find theirs.

 

The solution is not a rejection of genuine pastoral sensitivity or legitimate institutional renewal. The solution is a return not to a romanticized past, but to the unchanging Christ. To the faith once delivered to the saints. To the Holy Spirit who does not contradict what Christ has taught but unfolds it, with ever-greater depth and clarity, for each generation.

 

If the Synod is to be truly synodal, truly a walking together, then it must walk with Christ. And walking with Christ means walking where He leads: into the demanding, beautiful, life-giving fullness of the truth He has entrusted to His Church.