The Thomist 87 (2023): 173-90

DIACHRONIC SYNODALITY:
SYNODALITY WITHIN TRADITION
GREGORY F. LANAVE
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

T

HE ANNOUNCEMENT OF a “synod on synodality”
and the subsequent efforts of dioceses to engage great
numbers of the faithful in the preparations give the topic
an air of extreme moment. In the West, at least, there has been
a temptation to equate synodality with a move toward democratization in the Church—a prospect regarded variously with
enthusiasm or dismay. Whether this association is fair or not, it
brings to mind a comment G. K. Chesterton made about
democracy and tradition: “Democracy tells us not to neglect a
good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us
not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”1
Chesterton’s maxim is a fitting thematic statement for this
article. Synodality is, arguably, very much of a piece with
Tradition within the Christian life. But at the same time, it
stands in tension with Tradition—and the primacy of Tradition
in its fullest sense must be acknowledged.
I. DEFINITIONS

Aside from the existing documents for the synod on
synodality, the most important documents for establishing the
meaning and parameters of synodality are (1) Pope Francis’s
address commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Synod of
Bishops (Oct. 17, 2015); (2) the apostolic constitution
1

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 48.
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Episcopalis Communio (2018); and (3) the International
Theological Commission’s “Synodality in the Life and Mission
of the Church” (2018).2
While the term “synod” is of ancient origin in the Church—
being roughly synonymous with “council”—the noun “synodality,” so ubiquitous now, is a neologism.3 The ITC sees it as
springing from the emphasis in the Second Vatican Council on
the common mission and destiny of the members of the
Church.4 It is well known that the Second Extraordinary Synod
of Bishops in 1985 spoke of “communion” as the key ecclesiological concept of the council.5 It follows, in the view of the
ITC, that one can speak of the way in which the Church lives
out the reality of this communion, and this is the meaning of
synodality: “In this ecclesiological context, synodality is the
specific modus vivendi et operandi of the Church, the People of
God, which reveals and gives substance to her being as communion when all her members journey together, gather in
assembly and take an active part in her evangelising mission.”6
“Synod” suggests a body gathered to walk a path together,7 and
nods toward the good of having a permanent body in the
Church dedicated to this “walking together,” such as the Synod
of Bishops. “Synodality” emphasizes rather the way in which a
gathering of believers would walk together. “Synod” is a thing;
“synodality” is a quality. And it is the latter that is particularly
emphasized in the current discussions.

2
A background work that is very important is the International Theological
Commission’s “Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church” (2014). However, my focus here
will be specifically on synodality, and not broadly on the sensus fidei. For the latter, see
Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., “The sensus fidei and Synodality: Theological Epistemology and the munus propheticum,” The Thomist 87 (2023): 311-38.
3
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 5.
4
See John C. Cavadini, “Could ‘Synodality’ Defeat ‘Co-Responsibility’?,” The
Thomist 87 (2023): 289-309, for a discussion of the connection between the common
priesthood of the faithful arising from their baptism, and synodality.
5
“The ecclesiology of communion is the central and fundamental idea of the
Council’s documents” (The Final Report of the 1985 Extraordinary Synod, II, C, 1).
6
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 6.
7
Based on the etymology of suvnodoς; see ibid., 3.

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For our purposes the above description will suffice as a
definition of synodality. A brief description of Tradition is also
required, for understanding the relationship of synodality and
Tradition requires seeing Tradition in light of its formal
distinction from Scripture and the magisterium.8
Christ handed on to the apostles the full revelation of the
Gospel, which they passed on to the whole Church. This encompasses “what they themselves had received—whether from
the lips of Christ, from his way of life and his works, or
whether they had learned it at the prompting of the Holy
Spirit” (Dei Verbum, 7).9 Formally, tradition is the handing
down of what was received; materially, Tradition is the content
of what was received. The preeminent expression of this Tradition is Scripture, the truth of which is guaranteed by the grace
of inspiration. The task of authentically—authoritatively—interpreting revelation is “entrusted to the living teaching office of
the Church alone” (DV, 10), that is, the magisterium. But in
addition to Scripture and the magisterium we distinguish a wide
realm of Tradition, the manifold ways in which the revelation
of the Gospel exists and is passed down in the Church. Any way
8
For a helpful summary of various approaches to a theology of tradition, see Avery
Dulles, The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, chap. 6, “Tradition as a
Theological Source” (new expanded edition: New York: Crossroad, 2001). The view I
present in this article is what Dulles calls the “classical view,” associated with, e.g.,
Vincent of Lerins and Thomas Aquinas: “According to one school all the truth needed
for salvation was contained explicitly or implicitly in the canonical Scriptures. Tradition
was required for the correct interpretation of Scripture, especially for spelling out what
was merely implicit in the text” (87). The other pre-Tridentine positions identified by
Dulles collapse Tradition formally into either Scripture (the partim . . . partim view,
according to which some things necessary for salvation are contained in Scripture and
others are contained in Tradition; the difference between them is simply material) or the
magisterium (“Tradition” comes to be equated with authoritative statements of the
magisterium).
9
See also Dei Verbum, 9: “Tradition transmits in its entirety the Word of God which
has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit. It transmits it
to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, they may
faithfully preserve, expound, and spread it abroad by their preaching.” Translations of
the documents of the Second Vatican Council are taken from Vatican Council II, vol. 1,
The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (new rev. ed.;
Northport, N.Y.: Costello Publishing Company, 1975).

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by which the Gospel is received and passed on can in principle
be called part of Tradition. However, it is common to distinguish recognizable ways in which that passing on happens, what
might be called “objective tradition,” and what Yves Congar
called the “monuments” of Tradition.10 Some of these are
clearly articulations of the faith of the Church, otherwise are
less formally cognitive but belong rather to an illuminated way
of living out the reality of the Gospel. Examples of the former
are the writings of the Fathers of the Church and the great
schools of theology, as well as the preaching of the successors of
the apostles; examples of the latter are the liturgy, devotions,
Christian art, and the life of the great religious orders and of the
saints.11
In short, the understanding of Tradition used here is based
upon a formal distinction between Scripture, Tradition, and
magisterium, all of which are necessary for the passing on of
revelation. To put it simply, Scripture is the preeminent text of
revelation, Tradition is the necessary context, and the magis10

See esp. Yves M.-J. Congar, O.P., Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and a
Theological Essay, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (New York:
Macmillan, 1967), part 2, chap. 6, “The Monuments of Tradition.”
I am leaving aside here the distinction between Tradition and traditions, that is, the
full content of the Gospel, coming down from Christ through the apostles, and the
myriad of particular traditions which can be traced to individuals or groups of Christian
believers and are meant to be normative not always and everywhere but at a particular
time or in a particular place (e.g., the Augustinian tradition in theology, or the
Tridentine tradition in liturgy). The way we fruitfully encounter the Tradition is, no
doubt, often through particular traditions, and it is worthwhile not to confuse the two.
But both Tradition and traditions are formally distinct from Scripture and magisterium,
and that is the point I wish to emphasize.
11
Cf. Aidan Nichols, O.P., The Shape of Catholic Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: The
Liturgical Press, 1991), 169: “Throughout the history of the idea of tradition, we find
these two elements. On the one hand, Tradition is the institutions, rites, and practices
that make up the Christian religion in all its concreteness. On the other hand, Tradition
is the rule of faith of a Church in continuity with the apostles.” Also Guy Mansini,
O.S.B., Fundamental Theology (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America
Press, 2018), 46-52, where he distinguishes seven things constituting the content of
Tradition: witness to Jesus of Nazareth, the framework of the Old Testament, the New
Testament, the Rule of Faith, the episcopacy as an authoritative interpretive office, the
Eucharist as the normative place for the reading of Scripture, and a form of life
informed by charity.

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terium is the office that is able to make binding determinations
about revelation. In the words of the Second Vatican Council,
“Sacred Tradition, sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the
Church are so connected and associated that one of them
cannot stand without the others. Working together, each in its
own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit, they all
contribute effectively to the salvation of souls” (DV, 10).
II. CLARIFICATIONS
A) Tradition and Magisterium
To say that Tradition is based on Christ’s handing on to the
apostles the full revelation of the Gospel might be understood
as implying that there can be no new formulations of that revelation, that if someone today proposes a new doctrine the only
question that needs to be asked is whether it repeats something
we have already clearly known, or if it can be strictly deduced
from what we can see that Christ passed on to the apostles.
Such a view can be criticized on various grounds, including the
role of the Holy Spirit in the Church12 and alternative ways of
understanding the development of doctrine. For our purposes,
it suffices to say that this view is not a necessary consequence of
the basic understanding of Tradition I am sketching here. In
fact, it tends to confuse the formality of Tradition with that of
the magisterium. Tradition contains a number of identifiable
teachings and practices, but it does not have the same kind of
material fixity as Scripture or the dogmatic teachings of the
magisterium. Rather, the doctrine of Tradition means in part
that we have reason to expect new ways of living out the
Gospel, and even the advent of new articulations of the deposit
of faith: they may appear to be things that were not said before,
but this is not a problem so long as they are judged to be in
conformity with the revelation in Christ.

12

For more on this as it results specifically to synodality, see Peter Casarella, “The
Pneumatology of the Synodal Church,” The Thomist 87 (2023): 283-87.

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Dei Verbum 7 does emphasize that the first agents of the
Tradition were the apostles, who were formed in the following
of Christ and charged by him with passing on and guiding that
life. And it is the same apostles who received the authority that
is the magisterium. This might lead one to think that Tradition
most properly means the dogmatic teaching of the magisterium.
However, whereas the full array of the Christian life and
thought insofar as it is sanctified and passed on is part of Tradition, not all of it is the magisterium. One should distinguish two
kinds of teaching activity of the magisterium. One, which is its
more properly magisterial function (in that it is clearly formally
distinct from both Scripture and Tradition), is the authoritative
determination of the content of Scripture and Tradition. That
is, the normal way by which Christians know revelation is
through Scripture as understood in Tradition—but since there
can be disputes about what Scripture and Tradition teach, we
have been given the magisterium to make authoritative
determinations about this. The other kind of teaching authority
of the magisterium is its everyday teaching activity by which it
communicates revelation and forms the Church accordingly.
This activity belongs to Tradition, because it is a means whereby
revelation is passed down. Some of what is passed down has
dogmatic authority, and some does not. For example, the
Nicene Creed is an authoritative determination of the
magisterium about the content of Scripture and Tradition, and
is an instance of the first kind of magisterial teaching above.
However, the Creed is also received by the Church as an
expression of revelation that guides the life and thought of the
Church. When it is taken as such, and when it is taught and
expounded by the teachers of the Church, it enters into the
great stream of Tradition.
B) Tradition and Charisms
Furthermore, when we acknowledge that the Holy Spirit is
the agent of Tradition, and that new things can be added to the
Tradition (obviously, without fundamentally altering the
revelation received), it appears that there may a strong con-

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nection between Tradition and charisms. As the Second Vatican
Council taught, charisms, though they originate from the Holy
Spirit, are subject to the determinations of the hierarchical
ministry;13 similarly, Tradition is moved by the Holy Spirit, but
it is always subject to the determinations of the magisterium.
But this is not exact. One of the features of charisms is that they
need not be permanent. An individual may be given the gift of
prophecy for a single utterance, and never again. And a community may be given the gift of a charism solely for one age of
the Church. Tradition requires more: it requires that the great
gift that is given be meaningfully passed down to subsequent
ages. Therefore, no instantiation of the sensus fidelium at one
time and place is, just by that very fact, part of Tradition—and
it is, again, Tradition that is the normative context for
understanding revelation.
C) Tradition and the sensus fidei
Revelation can be received as revelation only by means of the
virtue of faith, the supernatural sense of the faith (sensus
fidei).14 Clearly, faith is necessary as the context of revelation.
However, when we talk about the importance of Tradition as
the context of revelation, we don’t just mean the virtue of faith.
The root of the idea of Tradition is that Christ passed on the
fullness of revelation to the apostles, who passed it on to the
whole Church. We may suppose that that handing on was in
formal teaching, but also in the example of the moral life,
communal action, prayer, and so on. Thus, the context in which
revelation is received is not just the virtue of faith, but the
formation of the Christian people in all these ways.
This point allows us to emphasize what synodality cannot
mean. It is true that every member of the Church, by the
possession of the virtue of faith, has the requisite virtue for

13

Lumen Gentium, 12.
See ITC, “Sensus fidei,” 2-3. The ITC notes that the sensus fidei refers to a reality
possessed by each individual believer, and the reality that is the Church’s communal
instinct of faith (ibid., 3).
14

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receiving and in some measure understanding revelation.15 It is
also true that the Church as a whole cannot fail in its faithful
adherence to revelation. Neither of these points means,
however, that the truth of a dogmatic statement precisely as
normative for the faith of the Church can be determined either
by the personal judgment of a member of the Church or by a
canvassing of the Church as a whole. So, synodality does not
and cannot mean that the normative teaching of the Church is
determined by toting up the votes of the members of the
Church on her beliefs.16
III. SYNODALITY AND TRADITION
In order to clarify the relationship between synodality and
Tradition, we may say something about the relationship of
synodality and Scripture and magisterium as well.
A) Synodality and Scripture
This point may be dealt with very briefly, just to indicate the
parameters of the discussion. No one is seriously proposing that
synodality should produce a new text to replace Scripture as the
inspired text of revelation.17

15
For qualifications on this as it relates to the sensus fidei, see Blankenhorn, “The
sensus fidei and Synodality.”
16
See Tracey Rowland, “Between the Theory and the Praxis of the Synodal Process,”
The Thomist 87 (2023): 240-42; Christopher Ruddy, “Synodality and the Second
Vatican Council,” The Thomist 87 (2023): 227-28.
17
It is conceivable, of course, that various persons engaged in a synodal process—
even bishops—will propose rejecting biblical teaching on some subject, and thus effectively replace the authority of Scripture with a different authority. It seems most likely,
though, that this would be phrased as a reinterpretation of Scripture, rather than a
rejection thereof. Even in the extreme case of a claim that, for example, the experience
of certainly marginalized people is more foundational than the authority of Scripture,
this involves setting aside the authority of the written text, not replacing it with another
written text.

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B) Synodality and Magisterium
One must distinguish between the teaching activity of the
magisterium and the governing activity of the hierarchy. Pope
Francis, in his address on the fiftieth anniversary of the institution of the Synod of Bishops, commented, “Synodality, as a
constitutive element of the Church, offers us the most appropriate interpretive framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself.” One might conclude from this that
synodality has to do purely with the governance of the Church.
If so, it does not have to do with the reception or proclamation
of revelation. It would then have to do not with Church
teaching, but with Church life. In that case, the conversation
about synodality belongs to a long line of earlier conversations
about, for example, lay authority (from the investiture controversy in the eleventh century to Catholic Action in the
twentieth century) or the role of episcopal conferences,
councils, and the Synod of Bishops itself. The common life of
the Church will require that normative decisions be made about
her practice, and it could be that synodality is being put forth
explicitly as a necessary part of that decision making. Sometimes
this will touch upon matters of Church teaching: for example,
as the Church decides exactly how it will relate in a particular
cultural context to non-Christian religions (a practical matter) it
will need to keep in mind what it believes about the status of
those religions (a theoretical/dogmatic matter). But it remains
easy enough to distinguish these realms, because one can clearly
distinguish between what we know about a situation and what
we should do in that situation—and it is quite possible to make
synodality a decisive element of the latter without requiring that
it somehow determine the former. Still, what synodality cannot
mean, as it relates to Church governance, is that a process of
listening, or consultation, or decision taking, would supplant
the hierarchical ministry, which is of divine institution.18
Although it may entail modifying the way in which the Church’s
hierarchical ministry is exercised, nothing that properly belongs
18

See ITC, “Synodality,” 69.

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to the hierarchical ministry can be given to any other person or
body within the Church.19
As synodality cannot possibly replace Scripture, it cannot
possibly replace the teaching responsibility of the magisterium.
The magisterium is a divinely established office with a specific
teaching function that cannot be taken by anything else. Now, it
can be said—and repeatedly is said—that a warrant for synodality can be seen in the fact that both Pius IX and Pius XII
consulted with the bishops of the world before issuing their
dogmatic definitions of the Immaculate Conception and the
Assumption, respectively.20 And the popes were not just asking
what the bishops thought; they specifically asked what the sense
of the faithful was on these subjects.21 One may argue, therefore, that synodality in the sense of some kind of consultation
with the sense of the faithful may be a reasonable action, and
even a moral obligation, before the magisterium would issue an
authoritative teaching. Whatever one thinks about this, the fact
remains that it is only the magisterium that has the authority to
19

It is of course possible—and canon law prescribes this—for certain aspects of the
hierarchical ministry to be delegated or participated. In such cases, the action is still
fundamentally that of the hierarchical minister, but accomplished through another
person or body. Other aspects of that ministry simply cannot be delegated: it is
impossible, for example, for a pope or council to delegate its authority to teach infallibly
to any others; likewise, it is impossible for a priest to delegate the confecting of the
Eucharist to someone who has not received priestly ordination.
20
See, e.g., ITC, “Synodality,” 37.
21
Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (December 8, 1854), “Although we knew the mind of the
bishops from the petitions which we had received from them, namely, that the
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin be finally defined, nevertheless, on
February 2, 1849, we sent an Encyclical Letter from Gaeta to all our venerable brethren,
the bishops of the Catholic world, that they should offer prayers to God and then tell us
in writing what the piety and devotion of their faithful was in regard to the Immaculate
Conception of the Mother of God. We likewise inquired what the bishops themselves
thought about defining this doctrine and what their wishes were in regard to making
known with all possible solemnity our supreme judgment." Pius XII, Deiparae Virginis
Mariae (May 1, 1946), 4: “we earnestly beg you to inform us about the devotion of your
clergy and people (taking into account their faith and piety) toward the Assumption of
the most Blessed Virgin Mary. More especially We wish to know if you, Venerable
Brethren, with your learning and prudence consider that the bodily Assumption of the
Immaculate Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith, and
whether in addition to your own wishes this is desired by your clergy and people.”

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make such teaching, and this cannot be alienated to other
agents, or even the Church as a whole (the consensus
fidelium).22
C) Synodality and Tradition
There are features of synodality that suggest a connection to,
or at least a similarity with, Tradition. As synodality highlights
the fact that one expects the body of the faithful at any one time
to have a sense for the fullness of revelation, so Tradition highlights the fact that one expects to find the same in the fullness of
the faith as handed down. Moreover, as the perceptions of
individual believers and groups of believers today—which is
precisely what ought to emerge through synodality—can illuminate the understanding of revelation, so too we expect that
the myriad forms in which the faith has been handed down shed
light upon revelation. Indeed, Francis’s comment that synodality is “the most appropriate interpretive framework” for
understanding hierarchical ministry echoes the profound sense
that Tradition is the indispensable context for understanding
Scripture.
This general comparison may be drawn further. We may be
confident that certain aspects of the governance of the Church
have been entrusted to the hierarchical ministry—that is, the
ministry of the ordained—from having the care of instruction in
the faith to administering the sacraments to governing the
parish or diocese. But of course, nothing assures us that just
because a priest or bishop has a proper authority means that
that authority will be exercised well. There are various things
that are required of the hierarchical minister: prayer, development of virtue, communion with his fellow ministers (and
ultimately with the supreme authority in the Church), and so
on. The claim of synodality seems to be that the process of
traveling together should properly have a guiding role over the
22

The ITC thus distinguishes “decision making” and “decision taking,” the latter
being in the competence of the bishop alone. “Working things out is a synodal task;
decision is a ministerial responsibility” (ITC, “Synodality,” 69).

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work of the hierarchical minister as well. If the exercise of the
hierarchical ministry seems like it should happen in one way,
but this runs counter to the sense manifested through
synodality, one has reason to question whether this common
understanding of the exercise of the hierarchical ministry is
correct. In a similar way, nothing can replace Scripture as the
norm of revelation in its written form. When we read Scripture,
or hear it proclaimed, we may be assured that we are hearing
revelation. But simply hearing the Word does not mean that
one has received or understood it. The teaching of the
magisterium is a necessary guide; so too is belonging to the
Tradition. To put it another way, one may appeal to Scripture,
or to the magisterium, for a clear and succinct statement of the
content of revelation on a point; but if one is aware that the
apparent meaning of that statement is at odds with the weight
of Tradition, one will legitimately ask whether the apparent
meaning is the correct one. A robust sense of the Tradition is
important to keep the sense of revelation in Scripture and the
magisterium intact.23
It is clear that Francis sees synodality as a necessary new way
for the Church, and in that sense it may be a decisive
contribution to the Church’s understanding of her life. At a
recent meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America,
a presenter commented that if synodality is assessed in terms of
how the process of preparation for the synod on synodality
plays out, it will inevitably be judged a failure. That seems to me
exactly correct. Synodality, as Francis is promoting it, cannot be
understood as a one-time consultation of the faithful; the whole
point is rather that the Church becomes accustomed to understanding and developing its life and thought through a synodal
process. There is, in this ubiquity, a favorable comparison to the
dynamic of Tradition. But the comparison is not exact. The
monuments of Tradition are invariably particular: they are
23
In saying this, it is critically important also to realize that “Tradition” cannot mean
anything that has been held anytime, anywhere, by anyone—an inversion of Vincent of
Lerin’s famous formula. Something is considered to be part of Tradition not simply
because it is in the past, but because it belongs to the great formative stream of Christian
thought and practice.

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schools of thought, or patterns of life, or practices of prayer and
devotion that begin as highly individualistic perceptions and
articulations of the whole of the Gospel. The greatest monuments end up having a universal significance, but in their origin
they are particular. In other words, the dynamic of Tradition
does not involve an initial prescription of a universal practice
made by the supreme authority in the Church; the approbation
of that authority occurs later, after the particular tradition has
already proved itself. The authority of the Church then
enhances the reach of the particular tradition.
A good example of the ubiquity of an element of Tradition,
and its ongoing formative power, is the recognition of the
Doctors of the Church. Great teachers in the Church are held in
great honor on a widespread scale, and numerous Christians
find their life of faith illumined by the following of one of these
teachers. In recognition of this, the Church officially bestows
the title of “Doctor of the Church,” giving official approbation
and thus further extension to what is already experienced. The
current promotion of synodality cannot claim to have the same
kind of normative impact. It may meet the same fate as the
decree Frequens of the Council of Constance, which mandated
that general councils be held every ten years. As a simple
disciplinary decree—that is, as a disciplinary act of the
magisterium—the council certainly had the authority to make it;
but as an effort to alter the way Christians lived in the Church,
it quickly failed.24 More favorably, synodality might end up
being comparable to Pope St. John Paul II’s institution of the
luminous mysteries of the Rosary, which was a top-down
decision that seems to have taken hold in the Church as a whole
(though this was not inevitable).
The foregoing comparisons of synodality and Tradition deal
mostly with Church governance as it is guided by Tradition. We
turn now to the relationship of synodality and Tradition when
it comes to the teaching of the Church.
24
For lessons regarding synodality that might be learned from the experience of the
Council of Constance, see Thomas Prügl, “Synodality and the Conciliar Tradition of the
Church: Medieval and Early Modern Experiences of Synodality,” The Thomist 87
(2023): 204-10.

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Synodality is not part of the triad of Scripture, Tradition,
and magisterium (DV, 10), and so cannot be regarded as a
determinative element of the reception and articulation of
revelation. Having said this, it is worthwhile to indicate the
normative role of Tradition. What is incontestably true is that
Tradition as such does not have the kind of clear authority that
the magisterium as such does. If we can identify the dogmatic
teaching of the magisterium we may be certain that it is true
precisely as formulated. By contrast, if we identify something as
belonging to Tradition we recognize that it may need
clarification, that it may exist along with extraneous elements
that do not let us say, “and thus we know that X is true.” Let it
be said clearly: we do not look to Tradition for certitude in the
way that we look to the magisterium (or to Scripture). How
then does it function as a norm?
Fundamentally, Tradition is the conditio sine qua non for the
apprehension of revelation in Scripture (and the magisterium).
To say this is to say more than that the individual believer has
to have the sensus fidei. Tradition has an individualistic aspect
to it, but also a communal aspect. Because Tradition contains a
myriad of elements we should expect that a given believer will
be enlightened by some aspect of the Tradition that another
believer may not; this is the individualistic dynamic. But there is
only a very limited way in which the believer exists in isolation;
for the most part, any given believer is informed by what has
been passed down communally. To belong to the Tradition is to
know it, as it were, from the inside; it is to have received
something precisely as handed down, and to belong to the
community so shaped.
When the magisterium makes a determination about the
authority of different elements of Tradition, it becomes clear
what it means to think and live in accord with the Tradition.
Even short of such a magisterial judgment, however, it is
necessary to be able to make some determination about things
that are more or less central to the Tradition. This means that
there are different degrees of authority in different elements of
Tradition. Part of this we express with the idea that some
monuments of the Tradition are more important than others. It

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also means that we can and do judge that certain articulations of
revelation cannot be true because the preponderance of the
Tradition is against them, or, that something that may seem like
a part of Tradition cannot be such because it runs contrary to
something that is a central part of Tradition. An example of this
might be the way that Arianism was judged to be false because it
ran counter to the way the Church regarded Christ in its prayer
and devotion.
Given this fundamental, normative role of Tradition, what is
the place of synodality in receiving and understanding revelation? Clearly, synodality cannot replace Tradition. A believer
today who would regard synodality as a privileging of the present, and Tradition as a privileging of the past (or, as Josef Pieper puts it, of the “ancients”),25 and who would simply prefer
the former to the latter, is misconstruing the role of Tradition.
Perhaps, however, synodality can contribute to Tradition.
This seems to be the import of the quotation from Chesterton
that began this article. In this view, Tradition is, as it were,
synodality extended through time—“diachronic synodality.”
Tradition and synodality would then be fundamentally the same
kind of thing. Problems would presumably arise from
privileging one over the other; the effort should lie rather in
their integration.
In favor of such a view would be those times in the history of
theology when something that was opposed initially as a novelty
has later been judged to be an integral advance of the Tradition.
Consider the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: How should one
judge the growing approval by theologians of certain elements
of Aristotelian philosophy that might have been judged—and
sometimes were certainly judged by magisterial authority—to be
25
See Josef Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, trans. E. Christian Kopff (South
Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), 25-29. Pieper also notes that Tradition is
different from argument. If I hold a belief because I am persuaded of the arguments in
its favor, I hold it not because of Tradition but because of reason. There is nothing
wrong with this, any more than it is wrong to say that I think there is a God because I
am persuaded by the philosophical arguments demonstrating his existence. But neither
is it intrinsically wrong to hold a belief or practice simply because it has been handed
down; this is what it means to accept the authority of Tradition.

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opposed to the received Tradition? Is this not an instance of a
new thing emerging in the journey of the Church that did not
sit easily with Tradition? The easy thing to say here is that (1) in
fact when it came down to it the matter was determined by the
magisterium and (2) the efforts of those who were receptive to
Aristotle were precisely to demonstrate how accepting Aristotle
did not require one to jettison the Tradition. Beyond this there
is certainly an importance in the deference shown to received
Tradition; an attitude of fundamental suspicion toward Tradition was a later invention. In other words, if we can talk about
the synodal experience of the medieval theologians we can see
how it contained a docility to both the magisterium and the
testimony of Tradition. But this should not be construed as
mere obedience to an external authority. Docility to Tradition
also means apprehending it as a carrier of revelation. This
means that the one who is the recipient of Tradition must be
possessed of the virtue of faith. That is the only way the
Tradition can be assured of being living, and not sclerotic.
Therefore, the sensus fidei of the recipient of Tradition is
essential, and therein lies a principle of discernment. But the
sensus fidei is not a principle external to the Tradition by which
it may be judged—which may be the perception of certain
enthusiasts of synodality. It is an interior principle, a part of
receiving Tradition as revelation, that carries with it the
possibility of a refinement in the apprehension of revelation.
CONCLUSIONS
Synodality is not a criterion for the identification and
definitive articulation of revelation. Even if synodality is
regarded as essential to the Church being the Church, this does
not change the fact that the Church is fundamentally receptive
to revelation as it comes through Scripture and Tradition (DV,
7-10). It would be more telling to say that synodality must be
formed by Tradition, rather than exercising a decisive role with
respect to the determination of Tradition.
Insofar as synodality concerns Church life rather than
Church teaching, it simply occupies a sphere different from

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Tradition. We should expect that belonging to Tradition would
be formative for those involved in synodality today, but there is
no need that Christians today simply repeat the nondefinitive
inheritance of the past. It is fair to expect that new cultural
situations and genuinely new charisms bestowed by the Holy
Spirit will produce ways of living out the Gospel that can be
strikingly different from those of the past (e.g., mendicancy in
the thirteenth century, or new religious movements today that
are less clerical and more lay driven).26 It should be noted,
though, that synodality need not be the way these new forms
arise, and there is historical reason to be a little dubious that
they will arise that way.
The vision of synodality—that light is shed upon both
Church life and Church teaching by reflection on the experience of the whole Church travelling together—is compelling,
and sound. But it is undermined if it sees itself as separate from
Tradition. There is no reason to give special deference to the
present.27 Rather, what is called for is a diachronic synodality, a
sense that the Church that travels together encompasses all
times, and that the holy lives and thoughts of Christians in the
fourth, or thirteenth, or nineteenth centuries are just as
important as the lives and thoughts of Christians today.
In the end, there is a key contribution that synodality can
make with respect to Tradition. It must be emphasized again
that Tradition simply does not have the same sure fixity of
meaning as Scripture or the magisterium. That something was
implicitly understood in one age of the Church to be an
essential component of thinking in light of or following the
Gospel does not mean that simply repeating it will serve the
same function today. As living faith is necessary for the proper
intellectual reception of what the Church proclaims to be
objective revelation, so a vital, grace-informed living out of the
Tradition is necessary for receiving objective Tradition as truly
revelatory. Belonging to Tradition cannot mean simply
26
See Angela Franks, “Christ As the Way of Synodality” The Thomist 87 (2023):
265-69.
27
“Tradition refuses to bow to the arrogant oligarchy of those few who happen to be
walking around” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 48).

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GREGORY F. LANAVE

repeating Tradition; there must be a principle in the present
whereby the vitality of the Tradition is recognized. Perhaps the
best place to look for that principle is contemporary saints,
those who are not only holy but seem to be engaged precisely
with the proclamation of the Gospel in the world today.28 One
could also point to liturgy, the great theological schools, established religious movements, and so on. But perhaps there is a
case to be made for synodality being a part of that principle. If
what is revealed in the synodal process is the witness of those
who are fully engaged in both following the Gospel and
engaging the world, it is sound practice to regard this witness as
belonging to and being an important voice of Tradition today.

28
E.g., Pope St. John Paul II, who constantly displayed an engagement with
contemporary philosophy, science, and culture; or St. Therese of Lisieux, so often called
“a saint for our times.” See Blankenhorn, “The sensus fidei and Synodality,” 327-28;
Rowland, “Between the Theory and the Praxis of the Synodal Process,” 242-43.

The Thomist 87 (2023): 191-210

SYNODALITY AND THE CONCILIAR TRADITION OF THE
CHURCH: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN
EXPERIENCES OF SYNODALITY
THOMAS PRÜGL
University of Vienna
Vienna, Austria

P

OPE FRANCIS has elevated the concept of “synodality”
to the status of a new ecclesiological guiding concept,
comparable to a nota ecclesiae, which captures the essence
of the Church as comprehensively as do the traditional characteristics of the Church, namely, unity, holiness, catholicity, and
apostolicity. Vatican documents since then have sought to concretize and differentiate the concept of synodality, beginning
with interpreting it etymologically as syn-hodos, a path to be
walked together. This emphasizes, on the one hand, the waycharacter of the Christian faith and its missionary commitment
and, on the other hand, the community aspect of the Church,
which finds its expression in ecclesial structures, the liturgy, and
caritative life.1 In such explanations of synodality, reference is
regularly made to the rich synodal tradition of the Church.
Earlier theories concerning councils, however, are hardly taken

1
A key document is the declaration of the International Theological Commission,
“Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church” (March 2018). Since the
proclamation of the “synodal process” by Francis, many publications have tried to
contribute to a wider understanding of the concept. I mention only the recent special
issue “Synodale Kirche” of Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 51 (JulyAugust 2022) with contributions by Walter Kasper, Rowan Williams, Peter Erdö, Stefan
Oster, and others.

191

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THOMAS PRÜGL

into account in the specification of the theological
understanding of synodality.2
This article aims to recall some aspects of the synodal
tradition of the Middle Ages and the early modern period in
order to delineate some continuity with the current discussions
of synodality. Moreover, it also recalls the emphases of a Latin
synodal tradition against an inflationary use of the new concept
of synodality, one which runs the risk of distracting from the
importance of synods rather than clarifying their task and
nature.
Summarizing a long period of history, I would like to insist
on a connection between synod and reform. More than any
other operative concept in the history of the Church, “reform”
characterized the horizon and the expectations of synods in the
second millennium. “Reform,” however, tended to be as broad,
unspecific, and at times contradictory as “synodality” is today.
Yet, as expressions of and commitment to more missionary zeal
and higher standards in personal life and the life of the Church,
“reform” and “synodality” share a common concern. Synods in
the Middle Ages and the early modern period were not ends in
themselves, but means of mobilization and conflict management. By synods, the Church committed herself to regaining
momentum when stakes were high.
Already in ancient times, the regular holding of synods at the
level of ecclesiastical provinces was obligatory.3 Convened by
the metropolitan, the synod was to contribute to the strengthening of ecclesiastical structures, to ensure unity and
uniformity among the Churches in a specific area and beyond.
Synods were occasions for appointing new bishops, settling
disputes, and recalling canonical regulations. These provincial
synods are poorly documented in their entirety, but they shaped
2

The aforementioned text of the International Theological Commission surveys in
roughly fifteen pages the history of councils from antiquity to Vatican II.
3
Nicea, can. 5, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, ed. Istituto per le scienze
religiose Bologna, 3rd ed. (= COD), 8; Josef Fischer, Adolf Lumpe, Die Synoden von
den Anfängen bis zum Vorabend des Nicaenums (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997); Wilhelm
de Vries, Orient et Occident: Les structures ecclésiales vue dans l’historie des sept
premiers conciles œcuméniques (Paris: Cerf, 1974).

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193

the life and the constitution of the Church far more than did the
great ecumenical councils, which were admittedly of enormous
importance for defining doctrine and preserving the unity of the
Church. Synods were gatherings of bishops only (or their
representatives), even though congregations participated in the
solemn liturgies celebrated at these occasions. By synods the
monarchical structure of a local Church headed by a single
bishop was tempered and integrated into the koinonia of the
universal Church, represented by the gatherings of the bishops.4
I. SYNOD AND REFORM IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES
With the rise of the papacy and the growing alienation
between Eastern and Western Churches, communio ecclesiology
disappeared to some extent in the early Middle Ages. At the
beginning of the second millennium, an epochal change in the
history of the Church took place in Europe, a change that was
perceived as revolutionary. The papacy, escaping the grip of the
Roman nobility, began to reconceive the Petrine office and its
tasks. The movement was often misunderstood as a merely
political dispute between pope and emperor and connected to
the slogan “Libertas ecclesiae,” freedom for the Church. The
popes, however, aspired to spiritual and ecclesiastical goals
rather than political ones, even if the two areas were difficult to
separate in the Middle Ages. The movement strove radically to
change the life of the Church in important areas. In the eyes of
the popes, such “reform” was not modernization or “aggiornamento,” but a return to the discipline of the early Church. In
particular, the reform targeted the way of life of the clergy, of
4
Vatican II retrieved this ancient model of communio ecclesiarum, by making the
early history of councils and the role of the individual bishop in antiquity the basis for
its wider communio-ecclesiology. See esp. Lumen gentium 19-27. On the role of early
councils for the concept of communio, see J. Hajjar, “Die bischöfliche Kollegialität in
der östlichen Tradition,” in G. Baraúna, ed., De Ecclesia: Beiträge zur Konstitution
“Über die Kirche” des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils, vol. 1 (Freiburg i. Br: Herder,
1966), 125-47; G. Dejaifve, “Die bischöfliche Kollegialität in der lateinischen Tradition,’
in Baraúna, ed., De Ecclesia, 1:148-65; J. Ratzinger, “Die bischöfliche Kollegialität:
Theologische Entfaltung,” in Baraúna, ed., De Ecclesia, 1:44-70.

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THOMAS PRÜGL

whom sexual abstinence and celibacy was required.5 Priests
were to live up to their spiritual status and to be models of
holiness. To facilitate this, the Roman reformers recommended
establishing communities of priests who imitated the vita
communis sive apostolica of the early church (Acts 2:42-47;
4:32-37) and were thus free to devote themselves entirely to
pastoral care. A third item on the agenda was the fight against
simony. This referred to the abuse of paying for Church offices,
a rather common practice in medieval feudalism. In the imagination of the reformers, the Church was the property of Christ,
who paid for her by his suffering and death. Paying for offices
or sacraments would therefore be a blasphemy and also an
offense against older ecclesiastical canons. The reform agenda
demanded a separation of the Church from the “world.” It was
inspired by a new understanding of the Church as a holy space,
which must be freed from all worldly entanglements in order to
bring salvation to the world. Both symbol and consequence of
this ecclesiology were the celibate priest and the emancipation
of every church, diocese, or monastery from unjustified claims
of a powerful lay nobility.
This program, first formulated by Pope Leo IX (1049-54),
was implemented by synods celebrated both in Rome and
outside of Rome. Leo’s successors up to Gregory VII and
beyond continued the reform, relying also on synods. On the
basis of their decrees, it is possible to trace the three focal points
(celibacy, simony, investiture) well into the twelfth century. The
topics dealt with at these synods were manageable, and to a
large extent predictable. First the pope or his legate inculcated
5

On celibacy: Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy:
The Eleventh-Century Debates (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1982); Johannes Laudage,
Priesterbild und Reformpapsttum im 11. Jahrhundert (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau,
1984). Recent surveys on the investiture contests are: Claudia Zey, Der Investiturstreit
(Münich: Beck, 2017); Werner Goez, Kirchenreform und Investiturstreit. 910–1122, rev.
ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008). See also the classical study by Gerd Tellenbach,
Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1940; repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); this is the
translation of Tellenbach’s habilitation thesis, Libertas: Kirche und Weltordnung im
Zeitalter des Investiturstreits (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936; repr. Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1996).

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195

the few principles of the reform, then he inquired about simonistic bishops. These bishops were forced to do penance or step
down. The consistent policies of the papacy over a long period
of time helped to spread the reform and to find sufficient
support within the Church. The target vision was a Church that
took the call to holiness (of the clergy) and to sanctification (of
the laity) very seriously.6
The synod thus fulfilled several functions. It communicated
and simultaneously implemented the reform. It served as a court
where bishops were deposed or excused. The actual judge was
the pope himself, but the synod established the judicial context,
so that the papal judgment was supported by the synod’s
authority and the consent of the gathered bishops. The synod
also took care of specific problems in the particular local
Churches, promoting peace and justice. In addition to these
pragmatic functions, the synod fulfilled also a representative
purpose. It made clear to observers that the Church became
manifest or took on a visible form, not in a sacramental sense,
like the Eucharist, but in a dynamic and juridical sense as a
jointly exercised and hierarchical Church government.
Beginning in the twelfth century, the synod underwent some
transformations. Instead of pushing a small number of reforms,
the popes used the synods to produce new canon law. Synods
clarified existing law and identified new areas of reform. Papal
authority and synodal practice thus continued to shape medieval
societies according to Christian morals and social teaching.7 The
exclusive synod of bishops of the ancient Church was transformed into an assembly that mirrored the differentiation
within Church and society. Besides the bishops, representatives

6

F. J. Schmale, “Systematisches zu den Konzilien des Reformpapsttums im 12.
Jahrhundert,” in Annuarium historiae conciliorum 6 (1974): 21-39; Georg Gresser, Die
Synoden und Konzilien in der Zeit des Reformpapsttums in Deutschland und Italien von
Leo IX. bis Calixt II. 1049–1123 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006); Filippo Forlani, I sinodi
in Italia nei pontificati tra Onorio II ed Eugenio III (1124-1153) (Rome: Pontificia
Università della Santa Croce, 2019).
7
German historians use the term “Verkirchlichung” to describe the growing
influence of canon law on medieval societies.

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THOMAS PRÜGL

of the new orders (Cistercians, Premonstratensians, regular
canons) were invited to the councils, as well as princes and civil
authorities, especially when political disputes had to be settled
or when the Church needed the assistance of the secular arm, as
for the crusades or the prosecution of heretics.8 Little is known
about the procedures at these synods.9 Discussions and negotiations probably ran parallel, but a lot of work was done in
advance, so that the meeting itself consisted mostly of the
ceremonies and the promulgation of the decrees. Yet, the
council made visible the consensus of the participants and
obliged them to defend and implement the decisions. We do not
hear about votes or voting at these synods or about negotiations
to form majorities. The synod remained an instrument of papal
Church governance. It strengthened the ties between the papacy
and the bishops and ultimately the very primacy of the pope.
Synods in the high Middle Ages were not occasions to debate
Church authority or to check papal power; quite the contrary.10
II. LATERAN IV: THE IDEAL FORM OF THE REFORM SYNOD
The transformation of the papal synod came to a climax at
the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. This council, summoned
by Pope Innocent III, was one of the most impressive councils of
the Middle Ages. With its seventy decrees, it was also a
culmination of synodal reform legislation. Its resolutions had a
lasting impact on the Church. They addressed a range of
problems, such as the status of the hierarchy of the Eastern
Churches, aspects of sacramental pastoral ministry and preach-

8

Albert Hauck, Die Rezeption und Umbildung der Allgemeinen Synod im Mittelalter,
in Historische Vierteljahrschrift 10 (1907): 465-82; Georgine Tangl, Die Teilnehmer an
den Allgemeinen Konzilien des Mittelalters (2nd ed.; Weimar: Böhlau, 1932; repr.
Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1969).
9
In the Middle Ages, synodus and concilium were synonyms. Differences regarding
the nature of synods or councils were expressed by adjectives: concilium/synodus
universale/is (or generale/is), or concilium/synodus provinciale/is sive diocesanum/a.
10
Hermann Josef Sieben, “Das Konzil und sein Verhältnis zum Römischen Stuhl in
Kirchenrechtssammlungen (485-1140),” in idem, Die Konzilsidee des lateinischen
Mittelalters (847–378) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984), 188-231.

CONCILIAR TRADITION

197

ing, religious orders, schools, and even Jews. As in previous
decades, provisions concerning the life and duties of the clergy
took up a lot of space.11
In the invitation letter Vineam Domini the pope presented
himself as the supreme shepherd of the Church, who has to
weed the vineyard of the Lord and eradicate every abuse by his
“apostolic rake.” In preparation for the council, the pope
invited the bishops to collect everything that needed attention
and report it to the papal curia.12 The council thus started in the
local Churches, from which the pope received information
regarding problems to be fixed. Innocent used the time before
the synod to prepare the reform decrees according to the
complaints he had received from the bishops. This procedure,
or rather strategy, explains why the council lasted only three
months and why Innocent was able to present seventy-one
carefully drafted decrees at the final session. The synod itself
was mostly the solemn forum or the stage on which the pope
presented the results of his previous examination. We do not
hear about consultation with the bishops on these reform
matters. Unlike the few dogmatic decrees issued by the Fourth
Lateran Council, like the creed Firmiter and the condemnation
of some teachings by Joachim of Fiore, for which the pope
sought the explicit consensus of the bishops, the disciplinary
canons were apparently not debated or voted on. Their nature
as basically papal decisions has been preserved in the canonical
collections (esp. the Liber extra), where they are introduced by
11

The 800-year jubilee of Lateran IV in 2015 summarized recent scholarship: Gert
Melville and Johannes Helmrath, eds., The Fourth Lateran Council: Institutional
Reform and Spiritual Renewal (Affalterbach: Didymos, 2017); Agostino Paravicini
Bagliani, “Le concile de Latran IV: Un aperçu des recherches récentes,” Schweizerische
Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 109 (2015): 15-26; Raymonde Foreville,
Lateran I, II, III, et Lateran IV (Paris: Ed. de l’Orant; German trans. Lateran I-IV
[Mainz: Grünewald, 1970]); A. García y García, Historia del concilio IV Lateranense de
1215 (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 2005).
12
The text of Vineam Domini in Migne, Patrologia Latina 126, col. 824f.; A.
Melloni, “Vineam Domini—10 April 1213: New Efforts and Traditional Topoi—
Summoning Lateran IV,” in J. C. Moore, ed., Pope Innocent III and His World
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 63-73.

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THOMAS PRÜGL

the formula “Innocentius in synodo Lateranensi.”13 One could
ask why the pope celebrated the council at all, bringing so many
people to Rome and hosting an expensive council. An answer
may be found in his ecclesiological convictions, but also in his
political abilities. He knew about the prestige of a universal
council and that the decrees issued there would meet with
higher consensus and stronger urgency. The success of the
canons of the Fourth Lateran Council shows that he was correct. The solemn promulgation of the decrees in Rome in midst
of the assembled universal Church carried much more authority
than a lonely decision of the pope. The participants brought
copies of the decrees to their home places, along with the
momentum of an impressive display of the universal Church.
The Fourth Lateran Synod was the largest synod in the
Middle Ages up to that time. In the invitation letter Vineam
Domini, the pope attached importance to the fact that representatives from all Church provinces should come to the council
and that the bishops should be present as completely as possible.
In addition, the cathedral chapters were also invited, as well as a
large number of abbots and representatives of the religious
orders. Since one of the main reasons for the council was the
preparation of a new crusade, the pope also invited a large
number of princes to Rome. Lateran IV became the epitome of
the papal universal council in the Middle Ages.14 It aspired to
display a Christendom united and committed to expand,
bringing the representation of the universal Church to one
place. The fitting motto of this self-understanding was “Quod
omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet.”15 The focus was on
13

The place of the decrees in the Liber extra are referenced in the footnotes in COD,
230-67.
14
Lateran IV was the ideal type of council also for Thomas Aquinas: a manifestation
of the universal Church led by the Roman Pontiff; see Thomas Prügl, “The Fouth
Lateran Council: A Turning Point in Medieval Ecclesiology?,” in Melville and Helmrath,
eds., The Fourth Lateran Council, 79-98, esp. 95-97.
15
“What concerns everyone has to be approved by everyone.” On the role of this
legal formula for conciliar theory, see Yves Congar, “Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus
tractari et approbari debet,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 81 (1958):
210-59; reprinted in Y. Congar, Droit ancien et structures ecclésiales, Variorum collected
studies series 159 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1982).

CONCILIAR TRADITION

199

“omnes,” the council being an expression of the pope’s
“universal ecclesiology,” which emphasizes the one flock under
its leader, the vicar of Christ. “Approbation,” it should be noted,
did not entail any form of ratification or shared authority. At
the time of Lateran IV every participant attending a council was
aware of the fact that his coming signaled already consent and
approbation. Those who took issue with the pope and his
strategy would more likely abstain from coming rather than
openly contradict him in council. The council was organized as
a rally around the pope as the apostolic leader of the Church.
From this point on, the idea that the universal council
represented the Church was solidified. What was not reflected
upon was the nature and meaning of such representation. Did
this imply notions of delegated authority, so that the participants were each seen as representatives of their particular
Churches and social groups? Did the council receive its
authority from the assembled representatives, or was it an
ecclesial reality in itself? Neither theologians nor canonists
elaborated on the nature of such representation and its
meaning.16 The pope was careful enough to avoid speaking of
the council in terms of a sacrament. His understanding of the
Church, however, was developed also within a Eucharistic context. In his famous commentary on the Mass Innocent elaborated on the notion of Church, when the priest recites in the
Eucharistic Canon: “pro ecclesia sancta catholica, quam
pacificare digneris et adunare, quam etiam custodire digneris et
regere.”17 It is by the papal office and the pope that God grants
peace, unites, guards and governs the entire Church, which
faces dispersion, divisions, heresies, demons, and vices. The
16
For more details, see Massimo Faggioli and Alberto Melloni, eds., Repraesentatio:
Mapping a Keyword for Churches and Governance, Proceedings of the San Miniato
International Workshop, October 13-16, 2004 (Münster: Lit, 2006), esp. the
contributions by G. Alberigo, K. Pennington, and C. Nederman; Walter Brandmüller,
“Sacrosancta synodus universalem ecclesiam repraesentans: Das Konzil als
Repräsentation der Kirche,” in idem, Papst und Konzil im großen Schisma (1378-1431):
Studien und Quellen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1990), 157-70.
17
“. . . for your holy catholic church. Be pleased to grant her peace, to guard, unite
and govern her . . .”

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Church is already united by the sacraments of faith in an
invisible or inner way. However, she needs to be united and
taken care of also externally and visibly against the aforementioned enemies and obstacles.18 The council helps to bring
about this work, which evokes not a superficial activist reform
program, but the eschatological battle against the devil.
In the context of the council Innocent III suggested a
mechanism of synodality, by which he aspired to perpetuate the
celebration of synods and thus the ongoing solicitude for
Church reform. The decree Sicut olim obliged metropolitan
bishops to hold an annual provincial synod, which had the task
of correcting abuses and improving the way of life of the
clergy.19 Sicut olim goes into further detail: the provincial synod
had to recall the decrees of the universal synod (i.e., the Lateran
Council); if necessary, offenses against its stipulations had to be
punished. Then the provincial council was to appoint visitators
for every diocese, who were to collect and note the abuses
throughout the diocese during the year. The cases were to be
raised and corrected at the synod of the following year. The
orders of the provincial council should be made known and
implemented at diocesan synods, also to be held annually. Sicut
olim thus instituted a continuing synodal practice of alternating
provincial and diocesan synods, accompanied by reports from
visitations. These local efforts ought to be related to the
preceding and subsequent universal councils. The purpose of
this mechanism was to instill a permanent alertness for wiping
out tenacious abuses and to keep alive aspirations for ever
higher standards. It was a reform initiated and conceived “from
above,” that is, by the papacy, though the implementation had
to happen in the particular Churches.
A succession of annual synods in each diocese and in each
province was too ambitious a plan, which could not keep pace
with the situation in the local Churches. Nevertheless, nu18
Innocentius III, De sacro altaris mysterio – Il sacrosancto mistero dell’altare, lib. 5,
cap. 5 (In primis), ed. S. Fioramonti (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002),
220f.
19
Can. Sicut olim (COD, 236f.). The text became part of medieval canon law as can.
25, X, V, 1 of the Corpus Juris Canonici, ed. Ae. Friedberg II, 747.

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201

merous provincial councils were held in the course of the
thirteenth century, which helped to spread the legislation of
Lateran IV.20 From the end of the thirteenth century on, the
expectations regarding provincial synods changed. Instead of
providing information regarding the situation in the dioceses,
the meetings focused on the renewal of the so-called synodal
statutes, a collection of laws with a local reference, inspired by
the reform legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council. These
statutes were renewed at each provincial synod, with occasional
small adjustments.21 The bishops and archbishops were rather
hesitant in this regard. Mostly they took existing statutes of
other provinces as a model that remained consistent over long
periods of time. The reform of the Fourth Lateran Council thus
lost its momentum, and the synodal life vanished. Provincial
synods in the later Middle Ages were dominated by concern for
ecclesiastical property and privileges and by protest against
violations of these rights by the nobility. Besides, the moral and
intellectual formation of the clergy never ceased to be a prime
topic in these synods. Diocesan synods especially tried to
respond to the lack of theological training of ordinary priests.
The bishops invited university scholars to these synods to
deliver the synodal sermon and to provide simple theological
and catechetical literature for the clergy. Collegial elements,
such as joint deliberation or even voting, hardly took place at
these synods. By and large, the diocesan synod was an instrument of disciplining and instructing the poorly trained clergy.
For both bishops and priests, attending the synods was mostly a
20

Stefanie Unger, Generali concilio inhaerentes statuimus: Die Rezeption des Vierten
Lateranum (1215) und des Zweiten Lugdunense (1274) in den Statuten der Erzbischöfe
von Köln und Mainz bis zum Jahr 1310 (Mainz: Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische
Kirchengeschichte, 2004).
21
On provincial synods and synodal statutes in the Middle Ages, see Odette Pontal,
Les status synodaux (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975); Johannes Helmrath, “Partikularsynoden
und Synodalstatuten des späteren Mittelalters im europäischen Vergleich:
Vorüberlegungen zu einem möglichen Projekt,” in Michael Borgolte, ed., Das
europäischen Mittelalter im Spannungsbogen des Vergleichs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001),
135-69; Nathalie Kruppa and Leszek Zygner, eds., Partikularsynoden im späten
Mittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).

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THOMAS PRÜGL

burden, financially and personally, which explains the dwindling
number of such synods and the many excuses not to participate.
III. SCHISM—CONCILIARISM—CHURCH REFORM
As early as the fourteenth century, there was a growing
number of voices lamenting the stagnation of synodal activity.
The Council of Vienne (1311) undertook an effort to revive the
experience of 1215. Intensive preparations were made once
again to collect grievances and to find legal solutions. The
reform proposals were again collected in the run-up to the
council, but were not discussed there in a collegial way. As at
Lateran IV, the Vienne decrees were promulgated by the pope
and incorporated into legal collections.22 The Council of
Vienne—which was overshadowed by the outrageous scandal of
the dissolution of the Knights Templar—did not revive regular
synods in the provinces and dioceses. One reason for this was
that, after two centuries of intensive papal legislation, papal
decretal law had widely covered all the areas usually addressed
by synodal reforms. The need for councils and synods as
preferred venues for ecclesiastical legislation had ceased.
When in 1378 the Great Western Schism broke out, with
cardinals overestimating their role and power and electing two
popes within a few weeks, contemporary voices saw this scandal
as a result of the termination of synodal life and thus as a
standstill of reform commitment. University professors, who
were the first to call for a council to settle the schism,
complained that the papacy had stalled all conciliar activity for
too long, preventing reform and allowing the Church to

22
On the Council of Vienne, see Andrea Nicolotti, “Concilio di Vienne
(1311-1312),” in Onorato Bucci and Pierantonio Piatti, eds., Storia dei concili
ecumenici: Attori, canoni, eredità (Rome: Città nuova, 2014), 291-317. In the run-up
for the council, William Durant presented a plethora of reform ideas, suggesting, among
others, to celebrate universal councils every ten years and to put papal government
under the control of cardinals and councils. See Constantin Fasolt, Council and
Hierarchy: The Political Thought of William Durant the Younger (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 160-68.

CONCILIAR TRADITION

203

deteriorate to this miserable state.23 Although the schism was a
crisis of the papacy rather than of the Church, it is interesting to
observe how a new reform discourse emerged on account of the
schism. The reform literature of the time, which purposely
exaggerated in accord with the literary genre, gave the impression that there would be no hope for the Church unless a
council would shoulder the gigantic task of universal reform.
Calls for reform, which grew louder and louder during the
schism, gave rise to the idea of a necessary “general reform”
(reformatio generalis), which gave the impression that the entire
Church was in shambles, with the schism within the papacy
being only the most obvious symptom. Looking at individual
complaints, however, concern about the quality of the clergy
continued to predominate.24 Yet the schism was an eye-opener,

23
Among the first who called for a universal council were Henry of Langenstein and
Konrad of Gelnhausen, both professors at the University of Paris: Hans-Jürgen Becker,
Konrad von Gelnhausen: Die kirchenpolitischen Schriften (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2018),
29-50; Hélène Millet, “Le Grand Schisme d’Occident vu par les contemporains: Crise
de l’Église ou crise de la papauté?,” in idem, L’Église du Grand Schisme 1378-1417
(Paris: Picard, 2009), 13-28. John of Ragusa, O.P., one of the leading people at the
Council of Basel, also complained in retrospect about the halt of councils. He blamed
the papacy for having drawn all legal cases to the papal court, thus marginalizing the
provincial synods. H.-J. Sieben, “Basler Konziliarismus konkret (I): Der ‘Tractatus de
auctoritate conciliorum et modo celebrationis eorum’ des Johannes von Ragusa,” in
idem, Vom Apostelkonzil zum Ersten Vatikanum: Studien zur Geschichte der Konzilsidee
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 97-128, at 109f.
24
Henry of Langenstein summed up these ideas some months after the outbreak of
the schism: “If the priesthood had integrity, the whole church would flourish, but if it
were corrupt, the faith and virtue of all would be flaccid” (Henricus de Langenstein,
Consilium pacis de unione ac reformatione ecclesiae in concilio universali quaerenda, in
L. Dupin, ed., Johannis Gersonis Opera omnia, vol. 2 [Antwerp, 1728], 837 A). On
Church reform in the late Middle Ages see: Johannes Helmrath, “Theorie und Praxis
der Kirchenreform im Spätmittelalter,” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 11
(1992): 41-70; Klaus Unterburger: “Reform der ganzen Kirche, Konturen, Ursachen
und Wirkungen einer Leitidee und Zwangsvorstellungen im Spätmittelalter,” in
A. Merkt, G. Wassilowsky, and G. Wurst, eds., Reformen in der Kirche: Historische
Perspektiven (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2014), 109-37; Philipp H. Stump, “The
Continuing Relevance of ‘The Idea of Reform,’” in Christopher M. Bellitto and David
Z. Flanagin, eds., Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 42-57.

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THOMAS PRÜGL

showing that the papacy, too, was in dire need of reform.
Unable to resolve the schism by its own efforts and abilities, the
papacy (consisting of pope, cardinals, and curia) faced harsh
criticism. Obviously, it needed reform just as much as did other
reform targets in the Church. The formula reformatio in capite
et membris expressed the expectation for fundamental change
in the papal office. The only institution that would be able to
heal the schism, judge and depose the obstinate pope pretenders, and manage the reformatio generalis was a general council.
Consequently, the council was seen as the panacea for all the
Church’s woes and wounds.
The Councils of Pisa (1409) and Constance (1414-18) in fact
succeeded in putting an end to the schism that had lasted for
almost forty years. An important role was played by the decree
Haec sancta, which, in the face of a confused canonical
situation and putative vacancy of the papal see, granted supreme
authority to the General Council of Constance. Contemporaries
insisted that the Church could not return to business as usual
after the schism, and that the papal leadership of the Church
needed control. For this purpose, a general council was to meet
regularly and at intervals of ten years, in order to be prepared
against all possible crises and to have a solution at hand at any
time.25 The extent and character of the decree Haec sancta was
not clear, though. Did it resolve a one-time emergency situation
or did it introduce a general validation of conciliar authority?
Was the experience of the schism so grave that the claimed
superiority of the council over the pope rescued the Church and
therefore should stay in force? Or did the council simply restore
the papacy in all its former authority and power? These views
clashed at the Council of Basel (1431-49).26 Following a
conciliarist interpretation of Haec sancta, the council saw itself
25

Decree Frequens (COD, 438f.); decree Haec sancta (COD, 409f.).
Giuseppe Alberigo, Chiesa conciliare: Identità e significato del conciliarismo
(Brescia: Paideia, 1981), 187-256; Thomas Prügl, “Antiquis iuribus et dictis sanctorum
conformare: Zur antikonziliaristischen Interpretation von Haec sancta auf dem Basler
Konzil,” in Annuarium historiae conciliorum 31 (1999): 72-143; Walter Brandmüller,
“Besitzt das Konstanzer Dekret Haec sancta dogmatische Verbindlichkeit?,” in idem,
Papst und Konzil im Großen Schisma, 225-42.
26

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205

as the supreme ecclesiastical authority, which the pope had to
obey. We need not trace here the details of this dispute at the
Council of Basel. The fight between the two powers led to
another schism and another crisis. After years of intense
political negotiations and numerous theological debates, the
papacy prevailed and conciliarism was condemned as a heresy.27
The success of the papacy, however, was a Pyrrhic victory.
Although the papacy regained its former sovereignty after 1450,
it was permanently suspected of being an enemy of councils and
opposed to Church reform. Calls for a new general council
were indeed seen as the greatest threat for the papacy and the
monarchical constitution of the Church.
The conciliarism of the late Middle Ages left an ambivalent
legacy. The solution of the schism at the Council of Constance
made a deep impression. It paved the way for a new ecclesiology which subjected the pope to the control of general
councils and which elaborated on the notion of repraesentatio
ecclesiae: the Church as represented by a general council is able
to articulate herself and to take measures, if necessary even
against her head, the Roman Pontiff. Excited about the success
of the council and the reestablished Church unity, the participants left Constance with high spirits and the certainty that
they were part of the governance of the Church. For the first
time the universal Church was experienced as an event and as a
collegial and cooperating corporation. More than ever before,
the council fathers considered themselves as active “members”
of the Church, the council becoming the “member meeting” of
the faithful.
The central formula of the decree Haec sancta says: “This
holy synod, which represents the universal church, is legitimately gathered in the Holy Spirit.”28 It became the basis of a
conciliar theory that no longer viewed the council as an
27
Michiel Decaluwe, A Successful Defeat: Eugene IV’s struggle with the Council of
Basel for Ultimate Authority in the Church, 1431-1449 (Brussels and Rome: Institut
historique Belge de Rome, 2009).
28
“Haec sancta synodus, universalem ecclesiam repraesentantem, in Spiritu sancto
legitime congregata” (COD, 409).

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THOMAS PRÜGL

instrument for papal reform legislation, but understood it as a
manifestation of Church. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
and convinced that Christ is in its midst (Matt 18:20), the
council reclaimed Church reform as its original task. Many
enthusiastic conciliarists identified the decrees and the initiatives
of the Council of Basel as immediate expressions of the Holy
Spirit. In their eyes, anyone who opposed the general council
committed a sin against the Holy Spirit.29
Basel conciliarism bore striking features of ecclesiological
triumphalism. It displayed a strong corporative and institutional
view of Church. Of course the council fathers subscribed to the
traditional idea of Church as congregatio fidelium, but in a
proper sense, the Church was “re-presented” by the council—
not in terms of of delegated authority, but as enabling a
“presence” of Church.30 So close an interpretation of representation even claimed an identity between Church and council:
the council is the Church, it shares the Church’s characteristics
and notions such as oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity.31 The Council of Basel maintained a rather egalitarian
view of Church, but limited to clergy only. Everyone who
earned a baccalaureate in theology was entitled to join the
council and have voting rights. In view of the intensive discussions and the tiresome negotiation processes, by which the
council tried to reach maximum consensus, one could also
speak of proto-democratic procedures in Basel.32
29

Alberto Cadili, Lo Spirito e il concilio: Basilea 1432: Legittimazione
pneumatologica del conciliarismo (Bologna: Mulino, 2016).
30
The idea was so important for the Basel fathers that it became the standard
opening formula for every conciliar document: “Sacrosancta synodus Basiliense
universalem ecclesiam repraesentantem.” Despite the conciliaristic reminiscence, the
Council of Trent also adopted the formula.
31
E.g., John of Segovia, Liber de magna auctoritate episcoporum in concilio generali,
4th animadvertencia, ed. Rolf de Kegel (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1995), 218-35.
32
On the procedures of the Council of Basel, see Paul Lazarus, Das Basler Konzil:
Seine Berufung und Leitung, seine Gliederung und Behördenorganisation (Berlin:
Ebering, 1912); Stefan Sudmann, Das Basler Konzil: Synodale Praxis zwischen Routine
und Revolution, (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005); Thomas Prügl, “Geschäftsordnung
und Theologie: Synodale Verfahrensweisen als Ausdruck ekklesiologischer
Positionierung auf dem Basler Konzil,” in Bernward Schmidt and Hubert Wolf, eds.,

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207

Ultimately, the fathers of the Council of Basel failed in their
ambition to place the entire Church on a new footing. They
made serious mistakes, both political and theological. For one
thing, conciliarism did not find an adequate role for the
successor of Peter after he had been put in second place. The
formerly productive interaction between the two reform
institutions, pope and council, turned into a paralyzing
antagonism. Second, the council overestimated its authority.
Identification with the universal Church became ideological
self-immunization in the face of any criticism. After it broke
with the pope and caused a new schism in the Church, large
parts of the Church, especially the princes, distanced themselves
from the council. Thus the claim of repraesentatio ecclesiae
became a farce.
Nevertheless, synodal life did not collapse after the council’s
inglorious end. In 1433 a reform law had been passed in Basel
in which the regular celebration of diocesan and provincial
synods in the spirit of Lateran IV was renewed.33 Despite the
failure of the Basiliense as such, this decree was observed in
many countries. It established continuity with the earlier
synodal tradition and did not attempt to implement the collegial
and egalitarian structure of the Council of Basel at the level of
the local Churches. As in previous centuries, the diocesan and
provincial synods were conceived as measures for disciplining
and instructing the clergy. Basel urged the bishops to comply
with their most important pastoral duty, which is to “improve”
the clergy and pastoral care. The provincial synods were
furthermore recommended as peace-building events. During
wartime neighboring provinces should celebrate synods simultaneously in order to support peace activities. Last but not least,
provincial synods were commissioned to collect grievances
reports and bring them to the attention of the next general
council, where appropriate provisions would be made.
Ekklesiologische Alternativen? Monarchischer Papat und Formen kollegialer
Kirchenleitung, 15.-20. Jahrhundert, (Münster: Rhema, 2013), 77-99.
33
De conciliis provincialibus et synodalibus, Sessio 15 (Nov. 26, 1433) (COD
473-76).

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THOMAS PRÜGL

The regular celebration of diocesan and provincial synods
every two to four years was again mandated by the Council of
Trent.34 In the centuries after the Reformation, a number of
other questions required attention, but the Tridentine and postTridentine reform relied also on regular celebration of synods.
The Catholic countries of the world implemented this
Tridentine prescription very differently. While in France, on the
Iberian Peninsula, and in Poland this Tridentine mandate was
observed seriously, most dioceses and provinces in the Holy
Roman Empire (i.e., in the German-speaking countries), refused
to follow the decree. They considered it an inappropriate
attempt of control on the part of the Roman curia, incompatible
with their understanding of ecclesiastical autonomy.35
CONCLUSION
What insights can be gleaned from this historical review for
today’s question? The synodal life of the Church in the second
millennium was lively and it responded flexibly to the needs of
the time. The way that synods were celebrated, their occasions,
frequency, and topics, mirrors the respective ecclesiologies of
the time. Synods were generally identified with reform, whereby
reform meant in particular the “betterment” of the clergy. Much
of the synodal legislation of the Middle Ages and early modern
period regarded the life of the clergy, its sustenance, education,
duties, and chastity. The reform of the clergy aimed at an improvement of pastoral care. Both are leitmotifs and central goals
of medieval synodality. In addition to this pragmatic function,
the Middle Ages developed the notion of repraesentatio of the
entire Church in councils. It manifested the conviction that
synods and councils are privileged events, in which the Church
itself comes alive or in which the faithful recognize a kind of
obliging presence and impulse. The formula also underscores
34

Concilium Tridentinum, Sessio XXIV, Decretum de reformatione, can. 2 (COD,

761).
35

Maria Teresa Fattori, Provincial Councils in Polycentric Catholicism, 1517-1817
(Vatican City: Archivio apostolico Vaticano, 2024) (in press).

CONCILIAR TRADITION

209

that synods and the conciliar tradition stimulated ecclesiology
and promoted increased reflection on the nature of the Church
and its “Gestalt.”
The average synod in the Middle Ages showed much more
interest in ethics and canon law than in creeds and articles of
faith. The concern to shape people’s lives outweighed doctrinal
aspects. Since the social and juridic reality of Church in the
Middle Ages was identified mostly with the clergy, Church
reform was nearly identical with reform of clergy. Even the
famous reformatio generalis of the late Middle Ages was driven,
for the most part, by the concerns of the educated and higher
clergy. The laity was to a large extent absent and barely represented in the councils. If the laity was mentioned specifically, it
usually referred to secular princes.
Medieval and early modern conciliar tradition also offers a
number of lessons on the relationship of pope and council.
They are closely related. The pope gained much of his authority
and esteem by promoting reform programs via synods. In turn,
those synods that were most successful were supportive of and
cooperated with the papacy. Nevertheless, the Councils of
Constance and Basel left a lasting legacy for the Church. Papacy
and councils have tended since to be rivals, which again
produced rival ecclesiologies. While Basel conciliarism attempted to deprive the papacy of its power, the Renaissance
papacy was eager to dismiss any initiatives of conciliar reform,
emphasizing the sovereignty and monarchy of the Church. Only
unwillingly did either of them consider the benefit of cooperation and mutual support. Given the painful and conflicting
history of papal primacy and conciliar authority, the concept of
episcopal collegiality developed by the Second Vatican Council
found a promising balance between the responsibilities of the
Petrine office and the wisdom of the bishops worldwide. It
would be a step back to understand the concept of synodality
only in terms of authority and organization, instead of keeping
in mind the main task and only purpose of the Church, which is
to continue the mission of Jesus Christ, or in the word of
Lumen Gentium, to be “sign and instrument of union with God

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and of the unity of the whole human race” (LG, 1). When the
entire Church is called to engage in the “synodal process” these
days and to reflect on the many ways of participation and
communion in their inner and outer structures, it enters new
territory and tries new forms of communication. Within the
many voices and ideas, however, it will be expedient to not
forget the twofold role of the successor of Peter as the one who
gives direction and the one who throws the flag if reform turns
into abuse. This should not be misunderstood as a call for
papalist absolutism and disrespect for representative participation and dialogue. But respecting the rules that govern the
relation of different roles within the Church, and the
boundaries of synodality, should help to revive and strengthen
the Church’s mission.

The Thomist 87 (2023): 211-32

SYNODALITY AND THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL
CHRISTOPHER RUDDY
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

T

HE INTERNATIONAL Theological Commission’s 2018
document, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the
Church,” posits a bond between synodality and the
Second Vatican Council: “The fruits of the renewal promised by
Vatican II in its promotion of ecclesial communion, episcopal
collegiality, and thinking and acting ‘synodally’ have been rich
and precious. There is, however, still a long way to go in the
direction mapped out by the Council.”1 The ongoing worldwide
synodal process, officially convoked by Pope Francis in October
2021 and culminating in two sessions at the Vatican to be held
in October 2023 and 2024, has likewise repeatedly affirmed
that link: a synodal Church shaped by the council, and a council
whose ecclesiological vision is coming to fruition in an increasingly synodal Church. The pope himself has drawn attention to
the conciliar roots of the synodal “journey,” referring
frequently, for instance, to Lumen Gentium’s teaching that “the
entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy
One, cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special
property by means of the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when ‘from the Bishops down to the

1
International Theological Commission, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the
Church,” 8, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/
rc_cti_20180302_sinodalita_en.html.

211

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CHRISTOPHER RUDDY

last of the lay faithful’ they show universal agreement in matters
of faith and morals” (LG, 12).2
Sixty years after the opening of Vatican II, as the pope and
numerous other Church leaders and commentators have
suggested, the ecclesial renewal set in motion by the council is
now reaching a new, mature, and perhaps decisive stage: “It is
precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the
Church of the third millennium.”3 Because this ongoing synodal
journey has generated both enthusiasm and concern among
bishops, theologians, and the broader Church, it is necessary to
examine the link between synodality and Vatican II.
I will look first at the development of the theme of
synodality in recent decades, particularly by the International
Theological Commission and Pope Francis. Second, I will
examine key teachings from Vatican II that undergird an
authentic conception of synodality. Third, I will explore
conciliar teachings that have been misinterpreted or neglected in
some of the synodal discussion to date. I will conclude with a
reflection on contemporary dangers that threaten the Synod on
Synodality.
I
“Synodality,” the International Theological Commission
holds, is a neologism that has emerged in recent years as a “sign
of something new that has been maturing in the ecclesial
consciousness starting from the Magisterium of Vatican II, and
from the lived experience of local Churches and the universal
Church since the last Council until today.”4 Given such newness
2

Pope Francis, “Address Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Institution
of the Synod of Bishops” (October 17, 2015), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/
en/speeches/2015/october/documents/papa-francesco_20151017_50-anniversariosinodo.html.
See John Cavadini, “Could ‘Synodality’ Defeat Co-Responsibility?”, The Thomist 87
(2023): 289-309, on the necessarily Eucharistic shape of coresponsibility and the
dangers of a primarily baptismal approach.
3
Ibid.
4
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 5. For a bibliography on
synodality in the postconciliar period, see Salvador Pié-Ninot, Ecclesiologia: La

VATICAN II

213

and the still-largely embryonic state of reflection on the nature
of synodality, it is necessary here to give close attention to
recent theological and magisterial commentary, some of which
remains at the level of generality and exhortation rather than
systematic elaboration.
One key contribution has come from the late French Dominican theologian Jean-Marie Tillard, who wrote extensively
on ecclesiology and ecumenism. In his 1995 L’Église locale, he
describes synodality (synodalité) as “nothing other than the
unfolding of the ‘catholic’ dynamism . . .: the communion of all
and in all between all the members of the family of God and all
their human places.”5 He fleshes out these words elsewhere in
the same book:
The walking of the local Church is governed neither hierarchically where one
imposes his will nor democratically or “parliamentarily” where everything is
done collectively by votes on motions proposed, amended, and accepted by a
majority of voices. It is governed synodally where, at all its levels, the entire
community is active but respectful of each one’s function, some of which have
been given with the sacrament of [ordained] ministry. One of the difficulties
of our age comes precisely from the democratic mores of the western
world. . . . Everything takes place on the same level. In the local Church, on
the contrary, everything is located at the intersection of two levels whose
point of communion is relation to Christ: in one case Christ understood in his
members, in another Christ heard in the sacramentum of his transcendent
sacramentalità della comunità cristiana (Brescia: Queriniana, 2008): 602-12, esp. 604.
Perhaps the seminal influence, especially in the first decade after Vatican II, is Cardinal
Léon-Joseph Suenens, Coresponsibility in the Church, trans. Francis Martin (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1968). Although this book does not use synodal terminology, its
content is synodal avant la lettre. “If we were to be asked what we consider to be that
seed of life deriving from the council which is most fruitful in pastoral consequences, we
would answer without hesitation: it is the rediscovery of the people of God as a whole,
as a single reality; and then by way of consequence, the coresponsibility thus implied for
every member of the Church” (ibid., 30). “But we wish to be well understood. We are
not speaking exclusively, or even primarily, of organized collaboration for mere
practical pastoral efficiency, but rather of a cooperation which is the corollary and
manifestation of the church’s deepest nature” (ibid., 33).
5
Jean-Marie R. Tillard, L’Église locale: Ecclésiologie de communion et catholicité
(Paris: Cerf, 1995), 557. For a pertinent study, see Christopher Ruddy, The Local
Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology (New York: The Crossroad
Publishing Company, 2006).

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function as the Head vivifying and unifying his members. This properly
synodal articulation is essential to the life of the local Church.6

For Tillard, a synodal church is communional, marked by a
differentiated unity, centered in Christ, who is present in both
the head and members of his Body. A genuinely synodal church
is neither monarchical (the one without the many, the head
without the body) nor democratic (the many without the one, a
body without a head), but synodal (in which the one and the
many, the head and the body, are inseparable).
The Catalonian theologian Salvador Pié-Ninot has likewise
highlighted four characteristics of synodality:
(1) Its “departure point” is the “real equality and unity of all of the baptized”;
(2) Its “fundamental referent” is the “common priesthood of all of the people
of God,” to which the ministerial priesthood is ordered and serves;
(3) It has “diverse forms of synodal expression”: the “coresponsibility” of the
entire people of God, especially the laity; the “collegiality” of bishops; and
“cooperation” between priests and their bishops;
(4) Its operating “mode” is “counsel in the Church,” which makes possible the
“conspiratio” or agreement of bishops and the entire faithful.7

For its part, the ITC notes that synodality “is not explicitly
found as a term or as a concept in the teaching of Vatican II.” It
is, nonetheless, “at the heart of the work of renewal the Council
was encouraging.”8 Lumen Gentium, for instance, highlights the
mystical, sacramental, and communional nature of the Church;
the pilgrim people of God journeying in history to their
“heavenly homeland”; the baptismal dignity and equality of all
believers; and the sacramentality of the episcopate and the

6

Tillard, L’Église locale, 331.
Pié-Ninot, Ecclesiologia, 608.
8
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 6. The Final Report of
the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, “The Church, in the Word of God,
Celebrates the Mysteries of Christ for the Salvation of the World,” made a similar claim
in holding that “the ecclesiology of communion is the central and fundamental idea of
the Council’s documents” (II.C.1), even though the conciliar documents do not speak
explicitly about that communion. See https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/finalreport-of-the-1985-extraordinary-synod-2561.
7

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consequent collegiality of bishops with the bishop of Rome.9
Christus Dominus likewise affirms that the “local Church is a
subject” and so should elicit the participation of all of its members, while Orientalium Ecclesiarum recalls the role of patriarchates and synods in the Eastern Catholic Churches.10
Throughout its document, the ITC offers several descriptions
of synodality:
(1) “The specific modus vivendi et operandi of the Church, the People of God,
which reveals and gives substance to her being as communion when all her
members journey together, gather in assembly, and taken an active part in her
evangelizing mission” (6).
(2) “The involvement and participation of the whole People of God in the life
and mission of the Church” (7).
(3) “the whole Church is a subject and . . . everyone in the Church is a subject.
The faithful are σύνοδοι, companions on the journey. They are called to play
an active role inasmuch as they share in the one priesthood of Christ, and are
meant to receive the various charisms given by the Holy Spirit in view of the
common good” (55).
(4) “A synodal Church is a Church of participation and co-responsibility”
(67).

These different dimensions coalesce in the ITC’s most
comprehensive description of synodality. Although it certainly
involves structures and events, synodality is above all a way of
being, a “style” pertaining to how the Church exists and acts:
First and foremost, synodality denotes the particular style that qualifies the life
and mission of the Church, expressing her nature as the People of God
journeying together and gathering in assembly, summoned by the Lord Jesus
in the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the Gospel. Synodality ought to be
expressed in the Church’s ordinary way of living and working. This modus
vivendi et operandi works through the community listening to the Word and
celebrating the Eucharist, the brotherhood of communion and the coresponsibility and participation of the whole People of God in its life and
mission, on all levels and distinguishing between various ministries and roles.
(70)

9

See ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 6, 40.
Ibid., 40.

10

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CHRISTOPHER RUDDY

We see here the key elements of synodality: movement,
community, worship, fraternity, coresponsibility of all joined to
the unique roles of different ministries in the Church.
There is one further item to note here: synodality depends
upon the “circularity” or interplay of the sensus fidei—
“an instinct of faith . . . which helps them to discern what is
truly of God”11—of all believers, discernment at all levels of the
Church’s life, and the authority of those charged with the ministry of unity and governance in the Church.12 Significantly, the
ITC draws upon its earlier document, “Sensus fidei in the Life
of the Church” (2014),13 in order to propose “dispositions” that
strengthen the sensus fidei: participation in the life of the
Church, particularly the sacraments; listening and responding to
the Word of God; adherence to the Magisterium; solidarity
with other members of the Church, especially the “poorest and
most excluded”; and “sentire cum Ecclesia,” thinking and living
within the communion of the Church.14 I will return to these
dispositions during my analysis of synodality’s relationship to
Vatican II.
The key advocate of synodality in contemporary Catholicism
is, of course, Francis. Synodality has clearly been a central, and
increasingly preeminent, concern of his. His earliest use of the
concept, if not the actual word, came in his very first papal
homily, delivered in the Sistine Chapel to the College of
Cardinals the day after his election. He began by noting that the
three Mass readings (Isa 2:2-5; 1 Pet 2:4-9; Matt 16:13-19) had
a common theme: movement. The Church, he said, is called to
move by journeying, building, and professing the faith. Along
the way there are “jolts . . . movements that pull us back,” but
11

Ibid., 56.
See ibid., 72.
13
ITC, “Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church,” esp. 88-105,
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_201406
10_sensus-fidei_en.html.
14
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 108. The 2018
document does not mention, directly or indirectly, two of the six dispositions proposed
in the 2014 document: the integration of faith and reason, and the central role of
holiness.
12

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he hoped that the entire Church would have “the courage, yes,
the courage, to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the
Lord’s Cross. . . . And in this way, the Church will go
forward.”15
Four months later, at World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro,
the pope spoke at greater length to the Brazilian bishops about
movement. In words that presaged his synodal vision, he emphasized that the Church must accompany people of all kinds
on their journey through life, particularly in their suffering and
alienation, not least from the Church herself:
We need a Church capable of walking at people’s side, of doing more than
simply listening to them; a Church which accompanies them on their journey;
a Church able to make sense of the “night” contained in the flight of so many
of our brothers and sisters from Jerusalem; a Church which realizes that the
reasons why people leave also contain reasons why they can eventually return.
But we need to know how to interpret, with courage, the larger picture. Jesus
warmed the hearts of the disciples of Emmaus. . . .
That is why it is important to devise and ensure a suitable [pastoral] formation, one which will provide persons able to step into the night without
being overcome by the darkness and losing their bearings; able to listen to
people’s dreams without being seduced and to share their disappointments
without losing hope and becoming bitter; able to sympathize with the
brokenness of others without losing their own strength and identity.16

Although the pope spoke several times on synodality at the
2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family, it was only in 2015
that he set forth at length his synodal vision. Speaking to the
Ordinary Synod on the Family on the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s creation of the international
Synod of Bishops, he delivered a programmatic address on
synodality. He spoke on what have become the key themes of
his ecclesial vision: all of the baptized journeying together; an
attentiveness to the sensus fidei and a rejection of a rigid
15
Pope Francis, “Missa pro Ecclesia with the Cardinal Electors,” March 14, 2013,
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papafrancesco_20130314_omelia-cardinali.html.
16
Pope Francis, “World Youth Day 2013: Meeting with Brazilian Bishops,” Origins
43 (August 8, 2013): 190-94.

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separation between the Ecclesia docens and Ecclesia discens;17 a
mutual listening, which is more than mere hearing, and in
which “everyone has something to learn”; the synod as a
listening process at three levels: beginning with listening to the
people of God, then to the bishops, and finally to the pope; a
Church that is synodal at every level: local-diocesan, regionalnational, and international; and, a conception of authority as
service, in which “the only power is the power of the Cross.”
Finally, he noted that the gaze of a synodal Church extends
beyond itself in order to embrace all of humanity and to be an
example of a “standard” of “participation, solidarity, and
transparency.”18
Six years later, in 2021, the pope’s homily for the opening of
the synodal path reflected on Jesus’ encounter with the rich
man (Mark 10:17-30). He focused on what he called three
synodal “verbs”: encounter, listen, discern. Jesus is completely
present to others; he takes his time and does not “keep looking
at his watch to get the meeting over.” The pope invited his
hearers to let themselves be challenged by others, to be open to
the Lord in adoration. He likewise exhorted them to genuine
listening, avoiding the empty politeness of a “non-committal
reply” and a “prepackaged solution.” When Jesus listens carefully and patiently, “with his heart and not just with his ears,”
the result is that “people feel that they are being heard, not
judged; they feel free to recount their own experiences and
their spiritual journey.” Finally, discernment keeps the Church
from becoming a “convention, a study group or a political

17

See similar comments in Episcopalis Communio, his 2018 apostolic constitution
on the international Synod of Bishops: “Hence the Bishop is both teacher and disciple.
He is a teacher when, endowed with the special assistance of the Holy Spirit, he
proclaims to the faithful the word of truth in the name of Christ, head and shepherd.
But he is a disciple when, knowing that the Spirit has been bestowed upon every
baptized person, he listens to the voice of Christ speaking through the entire People of
God, making it ‘infallible in credendo’” (5), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/
en/apost_constitutions/documents/papa-francesco_costituzione-ap_20180915_
episcopalis-communio.html.
18
Pope Francis, “Address Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Institution
of the Synod of Bishops.”

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gathering, a parliament.” Instead, we realize “what [the] heart
truly treasures” and empty ourselves to receive it:
[The Word of God] guides the Synod, preventing it from becoming a Church
convention, a study group or a political gathering, a parliament, but rather a
grace-filled event, a process of healing guided by the Spirit. In these days,
Jesus calls us, as he did the rich man in the Gospel, to empty ourselves, to free
ourselves from all that is worldly, including our inward-looking and outworn
pastoral models; and to ask ourselves what it is that God wants to say to us in
this time. And the direction in which he wants to lead us.19

Taken together, these addresses and homilies provide a
vision of Pope Francis’s vision of synodality: a Church that
walks with and accompanies all people, especially those in
darkness and on the margins; a Church in which all of the
faithful—even those who have left “Jerusalem,” as he said in
Brazil—have an essential role to play in discerning the future
paths of the Church. Synodality is thus a “style,” a way of being
ecclesial before it involves particular structures or initiatives. It
is, as he said during the 2015 Synod, the path “which God
expects of the Church of the third millennium.”20
Ormond Rush says that “‘Synodality’ is [Francis’s] catch-all
phrase for how he believes the Second Vatican Council is
envisioning the church ad intra—in its inner workings—without
wanting to separate the church’s inner life with [sic] the
effectiveness of its outward (ad extra) mission in the world.”21
In order to understand that claim, we must turn now to the
council itself.

19

Pope Francis, “Homily for the Opening of the Synodal Path” (October 10, 2021),
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2021/documents/20211010omelia-sinodo-vescovi.html.
20
Pope Francis, “Address Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Institution
of the Synod of Bishops.”
21
Ormond Rush, The Vision of Vatican II: Its Fundamental Principles (Collegeville,
Minn.: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019), 544.

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II
The ITC, we have seen, stated that synodality is “at the heart
of the work of renewal the Council was encouraging.”22 Given
that a comprehensive survey of the council’s ecclesiology is
beyond the scope of this article, I will highlight four conciliar
documents that undergird a synodal Church: Lumen Gentium,
Ad Gentes Divinitus, Dei Verbum, and Gaudium et Spes.
Although any ecumenical council is more than its approved
documents, an adequate conciliar hermeneutics must nonetheless be grounded in them.23
I begin with Lumen Gentium and its contributions to a
synodal ecclesiology. Although that constitution is perhaps best
known for its teaching on the relationship of papal primacy and
episcopal collegiality, I am increasingly convinced that the
universal call to holiness is the council’s foundational teaching.
Writing shortly after the council’s conclusion, Gérard Philips—
the constitution’s chief redactor—said, “One can even predict
without fear of being wrong that the Council’s insistence on the
universality of the call to holiness will amaze more and more, as
the years pass.”24 Over fifty years later, it is striking that commentators as diverse as the late Jesuit historian John O’Malley
and the Kazakh bishop Athanasius Schneider agree that the
universal call to holiness is at the heart of Vatican II’s teaching.
O’Malley states,
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lumen gentium is chapter five, “The
Call to Holiness.” . . . Holiness, the council thus said, is what the church is all
about. This is an old truth, of course, and in itself is not remarkable. Yet no

22

ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 6.
Ormond Rush offers helpful hermeneutical criteria for Vatican II. In Still
Interpreting Vatican II: Some Hermeneutical Principles (New York: Paulist, 2004), he
speaks of a triple hermeneutic: of authors, texts, and receivers. In his recent The Vision
of Vatican II: Its Fundamental Principles, he offers six hermeneutical principles whose
two terms are to be held together in “dynamic relationship” (xv): (1) Council/
Documents, (2) Pastoral/Doctrinal, (3) Proclamation/Dialogue, (4) Ressourcement/
Aggiornamento, (5) Continuity/Reform, and (6) Vision/Reception.
24
Gérard Philips, L’Église et son mystère au IIe concile du Vatican, vol. 2 (Paris:
Desclée, 1968): 98.
23

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previous council had ever explicitly asserted this idea and certainly never
developed it so repeatedly and at length.25

Schneider has likewise claimed, “If we look at the span of
Church history, [Vatican II] was the first time an ecumenical
Council made a solemn appeal to the laity to take seriously their
baptismal vows to strive for holiness.”26 Lumen Gentium
declares,
The Lord Jesus, the divine Teacher and Model of all perfection, preached
holiness of life to each and every one of His disciples of every condition. . . .
Thus it is evident to everyone, that all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank
or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of
charity. (LG, 40)

Vatican II, here as elsewhere, proclaims the fundamental
dignity, equality, and high calling of every baptized person.
There are no second-tier or “amateur” Christians. This is the
bedrock of synodality.
Second, Lumen Gentium affirms in an unprecedented way
the dignity and role of the laity in the Church and the world. In
contrast to Catholic Action, which envisioned the laity’s role as
a participation in the hierarchy’s mission, Lumen Gentium and
Apostolicam Actuositatem (Decree on the Apostolate of the
Laity) state that “through their baptism and confirmation all are
commissioned to that apostolate by the Lord Himself” (LG, 33;
AA, 3) This direct dominical commissioning gives Christian life
and mission a sacramental grounding. The council also
encourages the laity to speak openly and respectfully to their
pastors of their needs and desires, and exhorts pastors to allow
laity “freedom and room for action” (LG, 37). In short, clergy
ought to “recognize and promote the dignity as well as the
responsibility of the laity in the Church” (ibid.).

25

John O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, Mass.: BelknapHarvard, 2008), 50-51; see also 174-75.
26
Athanasius Schneider with Diana Montagna, “Christus Vincit”: Christ’s Triumph
over the Darkness of the Age (Brooklyn: Angelico, 2019), 123; see also 127.

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Third, Lumen Gentium gives a certain primacy to understanding the Church as the pilgrim people of God. It is a
commonplace, but no less true for that, that the final version of
the constitution reversed the chapter order of its previous draft,
moving the chapter on the people of God ahead of that on the
hierarchical constitution of the Church. It thus emphasized this
people’s equality and solidarity, before addressing differences
among particular states of life in the Church.
In addition, the people of God ecclesiology contains within
itself the theme of pilgrimage—“movement” and “journeying
together,” as Francis emphasizes. The Church, like Israel, is a
people journeying as a community through history. In addition,
because the Church is still on its journey to the Kingdom, it is
both the “initial budding-forth” of that Kingdom and yet
“strains toward” its fullness (LG, 5). Thus, as it journeys
through history, the pilgrim people of God is called to repentance, purification, and renewal (see LG, 8, 48).
Fourth, regarding the sensus fidei, Lumen Gentium affirms
both that the entire body “cannot err in matters of belief” and
that the hierarchy’s irreplaceable task of teaching actually deepens that sense of the faith:
That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of
truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in
faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that
which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God. Through it, the
people of God adheres unwaveringly to the faith given once and for all to the
saints, penetrates it more deeply with right thinking, and applies it more fully
in its life. (LG, 12)

Fifth, the third chapter of Lumen Gentium, on the hierarchical
constitution of the Church, begins by situating all ecclesial
authority within a framework of service of the common good.
Such service, moreover, is ordered to promoting the dignity and
freedom of believers. When authority is exercised well, the
result is not infantilizing domination but liberating maturity:
“For those ministers, who are endowed with sacred power,
serve their brethren, so that all who are of the People of God,
and therefore enjoy a true Christian dignity, working toward a

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common goal freely and in an orderly way, may arrive at
salvation” (LG, 18).
Lumen Gentium makes clear in its opening paragraph that
the Church has the mission of “bring[ing] the light of Christ to
all men” by “proclaiming the gospel to every creature.” It is Ad
Gentes Divinitus (the Decree on the Church’s Missionary
Activity), though, that states explicitly that the “pilgrim Church
is missionary by her very nature,” as she originates in the
Father’s sending (or missioning) of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The Church on earth cannot be herself if she is not missionary.27 She is meant to move, as Francis said in his first papal
homily.
Dei Verbum, although not as immediately ecclesial as the
other conciliar documents, has great importance for synodality.
The constitution begins by speaking of the primacy of listening;
the Church’s evangelical activity begins in receptivity. It makes
two further points. First, it acknowledges that the Church
grows in its understanding of its faith. Doctrine can develop
through not only apostolic preaching but also the “contemplation and study made by believers” and “a penetrating
understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience”
(DV, 8). Second, it affirms that, while Scripture, Tradition, and
the magisterium are all connected inseparably, the Church’s
teaching authority “is not above the word of God, but serves it,
teaching only what has been handed on” (DV, 10); it is
revelation’s servant, not its master.28 Taken together with
27

For two perspectives on the centrality of mission at Vatican II, see Richard R.
Gaillardetz, An Unfinished Council: Vatican II, Pope Francis, and the Renewal of
Catholicism (Collegeville, Minn.: Michael Glazier-Liturgical Press, 2015); and Francis
Cardinal George, “The Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, Ad Gentes,” in
Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering
(New York: Oxford, 2008): 287-310. Gaillardetz sees mission as one of the “seven
pillars” (Unfinished Council, 49-71, at 65-66) of Vatican II’s ecclesial vision, and George
emphasizes the “originality of Jesus Christ” and warns against reductionist interpretations of Christ’s identity and saving work—which lead to equally reductionist
accounts of the Church’s missionary activity (“Decree,” 310).
28
Joseph Ratzinger, “Chapter II [of Dei verbum],” in Commentary on the
Documents of Vatican II, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, vol. 3 (New York: Herder and

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Lumen Gentium’s teaching on the sensus fidei, Dei Verbum sees
the entire Church as the recipient of revelation and—while
affirming clearly the unique teaching authority of bishops—
eschews a simplistic separation of the Church into an Ecclesia
docens and an Ecclesia discens.29
Finally, Gaudium et Spes emphasizes solidarity and dialogue.
Its well-known opening lines—“The joys and hopes, the griefs
and the anxieties of the men of this age . . . these are the joys
and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of
Christ. . . . That is why this community realizes that it is truly
linked with mankind and history by the deepest of bonds” (GS,
1)—are perhaps its best-known and the paradigmatic example
of Vatican II’s “epideictic” rhetorical style, which seeks reconciliation and employs a vocabulary of “equality” and “reciprocity” words.30 And, in turn, Gaudium et Spes says that there
is “no more eloquent proof” (GS, 3) of the Church’s solidarity
than dialogue. Dialogue itself runs throughout the entire pastoral constitution: from its preface to its body (e.g., GS, 43-44)
to its conclusion, which calls the Church to a fourfold dialogue:
with itself, with other Christians, with other religious believers,
and with all of humanity—even with “those who oppress the
Church and harass her in manifold ways” (GS, 92). This
conception of a dialogical Church runs through Francis’s
Herder, 1969), 181-98, at 197: “For the first time a text of the teaching office expressly
points out the subordination of the teaching office to the [W]ord, i.e., its function as a
servant. One can say, it is true, that there could never have been any serious doubt that
this was in fact the case. Nevertheless the actual procedure often tended somewhat to
obscure this order of things, although it had always been acknowledged in principle.”
29
This eschewal becomes clearer when compared to the first, preparatory draft
received by the council Fathers in 1962, which speaks, for instance, about “superiors
and subjects in the Church of Christ” (chapter 8, “Authority and Obedience in the
Church,” 38). Ratzinger noted that, according to Dei Verbum 10, “the whole Church
listens, and, vice versa, the whole Church shares in the upholding of true teaching”
(“Chapter II [of Dei verbum],” 197). Several decades later, he made an analogous point
in noting that Donum Veritatis—the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1990
Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian—speaks not of a binary
magisterium-theology relationship, but of a triangular people of God-magisteriumtheology one. See Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology, trans. Adrian
Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 104-5.
30
O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 45-52, at 47, 49, and 50.

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synodal homilies and addresses, as well as through the synod’s
preparatory documents. One sees in Gaudium et Spes clear
connections to the pope’s wish that the synodal journey would
involve listening to all people.31
III
Alongside these conciliar foundations or wellsprings of
synodality, though, are misinterpretations, incomplete interpretations, and even omissions. I will focus on three broad
areas: the universal call to holiness, the sacramental foundations
of Christian authority and ministry, and the nature of faith and
doctrinal development.
Although the universal call to holiness is central to the
teaching and vision of Vatican II, it is remarkable that the upcoming synod’s major preparatory documents—the Preparatory
Document and Vademecum of September 7, 2021; the Working
Document for the Continental Stage of October 27, 2022—
rarely speak of holiness, repentance, sin, grace, and the Cross.
The Working Document makes no reference to the holiness of
believers, for instance, while the Preparatory Document (12, in
relationship to the teaching of LG, 9 on the holy people of
God) and the Vademecum (section 2.3 on the “holy People of
God”) each mention it only once; in neither instance is the
content or nature of holiness mentioned. None of the three
documents makes any reference to the repentance of believers.
Sin is mentioned once in the Preparatory Document (17), twice
in the Working Document (39 refers to “those who consider
[same-sex relationships] a sin. . . . This is a problematic
challenge for the Church because these people feel excluded”;
44 refers to “structures of sin”), and twice in the Vademecum
(once in the opening prayer, and once in section 2.3’s
connection of “sinfulness” with the need to “leave behind
31

See Pope Francis, “Address Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the
Institution of the Synod of Bishops”; idem, “Address to the Faithful of the Diocese of
Rome,” September 18, 2021, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/
2021/september/documents/20210918-fedeli-diocesiroma.html.

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prejudices and stereotypes”). Grace is mentioned three times in
the Preparatory Document (e.g., 19 on “the grace of an inclusive
ministry of blessing and fellowship”), five times in the Vademecum, and twice in the Working Document. The Cross is not
mentioned in the Vademecum, while the Preparatory Document
(21) and the Working Document (21) each mention it once. It is
striking that Gaudete et Exsultate, Francis’s 2018 apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness in today’s world, is never cited
in these documents or even in the pope’s own synodal writings.
Even conversion is used most often in terms of “synodal
conversion” rather than in terms of the believer’s conversion
from sin to grace. The Preparatory Document, for example,
speaks of conversion in primarily sociological terms. Describing
Peter’s encounter with Cornelius in Acts 10, it says, “This is a
true and proper conversion, the painful and immensely fruitful
passage of leaving one’s own cultural and religious categories,”
as well as a conversion from seeing election as “separation and
exclusion from other people” to seeing it as “service and
witnessing of a universal breadth” (PD, 22-23). Even when the
document states that the Lord “goes out to meet people
individually to free them from what makes them prisoners of
evil and mortifies humanity” (PD, 24), it avoids the language of
sin. Such accounts fail to convey the scope of conversion to
which Christ calls everyone.
This impoverished vocabulary thus suggests an impoverished
vision of the Christian life and of the universal call to holiness.
It also raises questions about the nature of the synodal
“accompaniment” to which the Church is being called. To what
extent does such accompaniment accept people where they are,
and to what extent does it call them—that is, every one of us—
to transformation through repentance and the renunciation of
sinful habits and ways of life? To what extent is the call to
perfection being proposed? To what extent is what Pope John
Paul II called the “law of gradualness” being supplanted by the
“gradualness of the law,” even by the de facto changing of the
law itself?32
32

John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 34.

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Second, reflection on synodality to date has rightly
emphasized the baptismal equality of all believers. It has
sometimes been weaker on the nature and authority of the
episcopacy, not least on its sacramental foundation. Vatican II,
we have seen, affirms the irreplaceable roles of both the sensus
fidei and the unique, “exclusive” teaching authority of bishops
that is conferred through ordination33 (see DV, 10).
One of the most significant doctrinal developments at
Vatican II was its affirmation of the sacramentality of episcopal
ordination: it confers the “fullness of the sacrament of Orders”
and thus the offices of teaching, sanctifying, and governing (LG,
21). The bishop does not receive his offices of teaching and
governing by delegation or grant of the pope, but through
ordination itself, even if he must always exercise his ministry in
“hierarchical communion” with the pope and the other bishops
(ibid.). Vatican II labored to overcome a nearly millennium-long
increasing separation between the “power of order” and the
“power of jurisdiction.”34 It would be a terrible irony if, in the
laudable desire to foster lay participation and coresponsibility in
the Church, the sacramental foundation of episcopal authority
were undone and a more juridical conception of ecclesial
authority reinscribed.35
Finally, authentic synodality depends upon a correct understanding of faith and doctrine. The six dispositions for an authentic participation in the sensus fidei outlined in the ITC’s
Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church—and largely reprised in
the ITC’s 2018 document on synodality—are effectively absent
in the Preparatory Document, Vademecum, and Working Document for the Continental Stage, as well as in recent papal

33

See Dei Verbum, 10: “The task of authentically interpreting the word of God,
whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching
office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.”
34
See Laurent Villemin, Pouvoir d’ordre et pouvoir de jurisdiction: Histoire
théologique de leur distinction (Paris: Cerf, 2003).
35
See Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., “Communion, Sacramental Authority, and the Limits of
Synodality,” Communio 48 (2021): 663-85, at 676-80.

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CHRISTOPHER RUDDY

teaching and preaching on the synodal process.36 In a desire to
reach out to voices from the “margins”—Christian or
otherwise—neither the synodal process not its documents to
date have emphasized sufficiently the need for the sensus fidei
to be formed in believers. These dispositions are precisely what
distinguish the sensus fidei from what the ITC calls “public
opinion.”37 They also help one to distinguish doctrinal development from doctrinal corruption.38 Vatican II, while representing
sometimes significant developments of doctrine, nonetheless
cannot be used to argue for changes that run counter to the
apostolic faith.
IV
Synodality at its best expresses a Church united in
communion, energized by the equality and coresponsibility of
all of its members, engaged in dialogue with all people in and
out of the Church, and freed from unnecessary attachments so
that it can discern where the Lord is calling it to go on
mission—especially to the “existential peripheries.”39 One might
say that a synodal Church is a community that, as Francis said
to the Brazilian bishops, is “able to listen to people’s dreams
without being seduced and to share their disappointments
without losing hope and becoming bitter.” This is a noble and
demanding mission. Speaking in February, 2023 to the
European continental assembly of the international synod,
Eamon Martin, archbishop of Armagh and primate of all
Ireland, said that “One of the challenges facing a synodal
Church is learning how to foster that deeper communion—in
36

On this point, see Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., “The sensus fidei and Synodality:
Theological Epistemology and the munus propheticum,” The Thomist 87 (2023): 31138.
37
See ITC, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church,” 113-26.
38
See Thomas G. Guarino, The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II: Continuity and
Reversal in Catholic Doctrine (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2018). This book uses
Vincent of Lérins’s distinction between profectus (advance) and permutatio (alteration)
to address key points of tension at Vatican II.
39
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-4-minute-speech-that-gotpope-francis-elected.

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229

Christ—between the people of God, the bishops, and the
pope.” He continued:
Synodality should seek to affirm and enhance the teaching authority of the
pope and the bishops, not diminish it. This can happen if we walk together in
communion: we bishops must always remember that whilst we are entrusted,
in collegiality with the Holy Father, with the task of authoritatively
interpreting the word of God, we are called to do [so] in humble service of the
mission of Christ, a mission we share in communion with all the baptised. . . .
But to do so we must “remain” in Christ; “abide” in Him. This is Christ’s
Church—not ours to create at will to our specifications. Pope Benedict XVI
once remarked that Jesus did not say, “You are the vine”, but, “I am the vine;
you are the branches.”
Jesus refers to His Father as [a] “vinedresser” who sometimes must reach
for the secateurs [one-handed pruners]—to prune those branches that are
bearing fruit and to remove and throw away the withered branches.40

Three areas of “pruning” seem necessary if the ongoing synodal
process is to bear good fruit. First, the synod and its preparation
need to be transparent, free from manipulation. At the beginning of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family—the first
synod in Francis’s pontificate—he expressed the hope that its
participants would be committed to “speaking with parrhesia
and listening with humility.”41 A year later, at the beginning of
the 2015 Ordinary Synod on the Family, thirteen cardinals sent
to Francis a private letter—which was later made public by a
journalist—criticizing procedural changes on voting and
document-drafting that seemed “designed to facilitate predetermined results on important disputed questions.”42 Retired
40

Archbishop Eamon Martin, “‘Synodality and Hierarchy in Communion’—
contribution by Archbishop Eamon Martin at the European Assembly of the Synod”
(Feb. 7, 2023), https://www.catholicbishops.ie/2023/02/07/synodality-and-hierarchy-incommunion-contribution-by-archbishop-eamon-martin-at-the-european-assembly-ofthe-synod/.
41
Pope Francis, “Greeting to the Synod Fathers During the First General
Congregation of the Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops”
(Oct. 6, 2014), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/october/
documents/papa-francesco_20141006_padri-sinodali.html.
42
See https://voiceofthefamily.com/statement-by-cardinal-pell-synod-fathers-areconcerned-about-conduct-of-the-synod/

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CHRISTOPHER RUDDY

archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput served as a delegate
at the 2015 and 2018 synods and was elected by his fellow
participants in 2015 to the synod’s permanent council. He has
criticized the “reengineer[ing]” that he witnessed at those
synods:
Instead of being occasions for an honest exchange of ideas, both synods were
dominated by efforts to reengineer the direction of the Church. Synods should
be places where people speak freely and are anxious to listen to each other.
But both were exercises of power rather than efforts to arrive honestly at a
common position through listening and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Neither of those synods encouraged or gratified me. In fact, I was deeply
scandalized by the political maneuvering that took place in both.43

In a similar vein, Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the archbishop of
Bombay and a member of the council of cardinals, noted that
the themes of synodality and discernment were inserted into the
2018 synod’s final report, despite not being “very prominent in
the minds of the synod fathers.”44 And, as the 2023 synod
approaches, there are concerns about the consultation process’s
reductive therapeutic and sociological emphases, as well as its
unaccountable bureaucracy.45
Second, the Anglican Communion’s dissolution in recent
decades, the ongoing German Synodal Way, and calls by prominent American cardinals for a “pastoral stance of inclusion and
shared belonging”46 indicate that present-day appeals for

43

Charles J. Chaput, Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living
(New York: Henry Holt, 2021), 197.
44
John L. Allen, Jr., “‘Synodality’ in Final Doc Didn’t Come from Synod Fathers,
Drafter Says,” Crux, October 25, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20221206052110/
https://cruxnow.com/synod-of-bishops-on-youth/2018/10/25/synodality-in-final-docdidnt-come-from-synod-fathers-drafter-says.
45
See Francis X. Maier, “The ‘National Synthesis’ on the Synod,” The Catholic
Thing, September 21, 2022, https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2022/09/21/the-nationalsynthesis-on-the-synod/; and Michael Hanby, “Synodality, Sociologism, and the
Judgment of History” Communio 48 (2021): 686-726.
46
See Robert McElroy, “Cardinal McElroy on ‘Radical Inclusion’ for L.G.B.T.
People, Women, and Others in the Catholic Church,” America, January 24, 2023,
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2023/01/24/mcelroy-synodality-inclusion244587.

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231

dialogue and inclusion run only one way: toward heterodoxy
and the eventual proscription of orthodoxy. “Dialogue” and
“inclusion” are not stand-alone, self-evident concepts but must
respect the doctrinal boundaries established by the scriptural
canon and rule of faith.
Third, consequently and most fundamentally, synodality
must not be conscripted into service as a cover for doctrinal
change—likely tacit and gradual at first, “holding the form of
religion but denying the power of it” (2 Tim 3:5)—on matters
of human sexuality, sacramental discipline and doctrine, and
ordained ministry.47 Echoing Dei Verbum, Cardinal George Pell
put it bluntly: “We don’t know better than God. If divine
revelation, as found in the Scriptures, is accepted as God’s
Word, we submit and obey. We stand under the Word of
God.”48 True accompaniment and journeying together must be
guided by “the faith which was once for all delivered to the
saints” (Jude 3).49 Pope Benedict XVI spoke similar words at the
beginning of his pontificate:
The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On
the contrary: the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to
his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind
47
For instance, in February 2022 Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg,
the upcoming synod’s relator general, stated, “the sociological-scientific foundation of
this teaching [on homosexuality] is no longer correct. . . . I believe it is time for us to
make a revision in the foundation of the teaching”: https://angelusnews.com/news/
world/cardinal-hollerich-says-church-teaching-on-gays-no-longer-correct/). Almost a
year later, in January 2023, Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego called for the
upcoming synod to address such issues as homosexuality and the ordination of women
to the diaconate and priesthood. The cardinal was careful to avoid advocating directly
for a change in Church teaching, but his intent is evident. It is telling that, nearly a
decade ago, Richard Gaillardetz identified ministry and theological anthropology (“sex
and gender”) as the first two topics on a future ecumenical council’s agenda (Unfinished
Council, 157).
48
George Cardinal Pell, “Standing with the Word of God” First Things, September
22, 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/09/standing-with-the-wordof-god.
49
See Christopher Ruddy, “Responses to Synod 2014: A Journey of
Accompaniment,” America, October 27, 2014, https://www.americamagazine.org/
content/all-things/responses-synod-2014-journey-accompaniment.

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CHRISTOPHER RUDDY

himself and the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every
attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.
The Pope knows that in his important decisions, he is bound to the great
community of faith of all times, to the binding interpretations that have
developed throughout the Church's pilgrimage. Thus, his power is not being
above, but at the service of, the Word of God. It is incumbent upon him to
ensure that this Word continues to be present in its greatness and to resound
in its purity, so that it is not torn to pieces by continuous changes in usage.50

The full vision of Vatican II thus offers both helpful stimuli and
useful correctives to the ongoing synodal process. May the
Church have the wisdom, as Archbishop Martin prayed, to
discern rightly what she can and cannot change.

50

Benedict XVI, “Homily for Mass of Possession of the Chair of the Bishop of
Rome” (May 7, 2005), https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2005/
documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050507_san-giovanni-laterano.html.

The Thomist 87 (2023): 233-54

BETWEEN THE THEORY AND THE PRAXIS
OF THE SYNODAL PROCESS
TRACEY ROWLAND
University of Notre Dame (Australia)

T

HE TERM “SYNODALITY” has flourished under the
papacy of Francis but has also become something of a
“weasel word” in the sense that it means different things
to different people. Just as weasels are good at using their
slender elongated bodies to duck, weave, and slither under
fences into chicken coops and other places where they are not
wanted, the word “synodality” can change its theological shape
depending upon the precise theological content given it by the
person using it, and thereby justifying more than one form of
ecclesial governance. As Angela Franks has suggested, synodality
is a concept that needs a sound theology.1
Clearly there is an understanding of synodality that is consistent with centuries of ecclesial tradition. The word synod
comes from the Greek σύνοδος, meaning “assembly” or “meeting,” and is analogous with the Latin word concilium, from
which we get our English word “council.” Synods have occurred
throughout Christian history, at least as far back as the second
century. What is distinctive about the current enthusiasm for
this term of ecclesial governance is its association with new
criteria for choosing the delegates and the protocols for
governing the discussions within synodal gatherings. Whereas in
the past it has mostly been bishops who have been invited to
participate in the discussions, synods in the pontificate of
Francis have been characterized by the inclusion of large

1

Angela Franks, “Christ As the Way of Synodality,” The Thomist 87 (2023): 255.
233

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TRACEY ROWLAND

numbers of lay Catholics and by an openness to “discussing”
and “exploring” matters of long-settled magisterial teaching.
I. ST. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN ON CONSULTING THE FAITHFUL
The idea of extending the catchment field for synod
delegates is defended by reference to the concept of the sensus
fidelium. This concept is relatively new in Catholic scholarship.
Many authorities trace its classic expression to an essay published by John Henry Newman in 1859 titled: “On Consulting
the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” At the time of its publication Newman was the editor of a journal called The Rambler, and there were tensions between prominent lay people and
members of the episcopacy about aspects of Catholic education.
The bishops of the era did not think that lay people should
interfere in decisions they were making about the education of
Catholic children. Newman differed from the bishops in his
judgment and wrote his now famous article, in which he said:
I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the
whole Church in its various constituents and functions per modum unius,
manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the
episcopacy, sometimes by the [church] doctors, sometimes by the people,
sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes,
movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the
name of history. It follows that none of these channels of tradition may be
treated with disrespect; granting at the same time fully, that the gift of
discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion
of that tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia docens.2

This statement of principle has two limbs. The first is that the
tradition of the Apostles, the deposit of the faith, manifests itself
in many different ways, through many different agencies,
including the beliefs of the lay faithful. The second is that “the
gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and
enforcing any portion of that tradition resides solely in the

2

John Henry Newman, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,”
Rambler (July 1859), §2.

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235

Ecclesia docens.”3 These two concepts, the “apostolic tradition”
and the “Ecclesia docens,” the latter more commonly called the
magisterium, are extremely important. If these two “planks” in
the barque of Peter are splintered, then it is hard to see how it
can possibly keep afloat.
Newman thought that the barque had almost sunk in the
fourth century during the Arian crisis because the Ecclesia docens failed to remain true to the deposit of the faith. He wrote:
There was a temporary suspense of the functions of the “Ecclesia docens.”
The body of Bishops failed in the confession of the faith. They spoke
variously, one against another; there was nothing, after Nicæa, of firm,
unvarying, consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years. There were
untrustworthy Councils, unfaithful Bishops; there was weakness, fear of
consequences, misguidance, delusion, hallucination . . . extending itself into
nearly every corner of the Catholic Church. The comparatively few who
remained faithful were discredited and driven into exile; the rest were either
deceivers or were deceived.4

II. PARALLELS
Clearly there are similarities between the Church of the
fourth century and the Church of the twenty-first. Certainly one
can confirm that there has been, at least in relation to some
aspects of magisterial teaching, nothing of firm, unvarying,
consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years. Bishops today are
scarcely in agreement on the fundamental building blocks of
theology, and if there is no common agreement on the building
blocks there are disagreements in all of the subfields. Professional theologians, lay and clerical, also disagree about the
building blocks, and in many cases the divisions begin within
the Catholic academies that educate future priests and bishops.
The lack of “unvarying, consistent testimony” among those in
holy orders is but one consequence or epiphenomenon flowing
3

For a more extensive analysis of Newman’s concept of the sensus fidelium see
Tracey Rowland, “On the Development of Doctrine: A Via Media between
Intellectualism and Historicism,” in A Guide to John Henry Newman: His Life and
Thought, ed. Juan R. Vélez (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America
Press, 2022), 352-73.
4
Newman, “On Consulting the Faithful,” §3.

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TRACEY ROWLAND

from disagreements among academics. To put it plainly, the
primary teaching bodies of the Church are fractured across a
range of fault lines.
One major fault line, at least since the 1960s, is the issue of
what is to be made of contemporary social theory. The Catholic
intellectual tradition has always operated in partnership with
philosophy. Today the regnant philosophies are suspicious of
reason, while contemporary social theories, many spun out of
the Marxist tradition, are completely hostile to Christian moral
teachings and the theological anthropology that underpins
them. A major split in the 1960s divided Catholic theologians
who thought that the areas of ecclesiology and moral theology
needed to undergo a revolutionary transformation in the light
of such contemporary social theories, from those who believed
that the theories were but the latest ideological experiments
conducted in the social engineering laboratories of the disciples
of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, the great triumvirate of antiChristian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In 1973 Charles Davis published the essay “Theology and
Praxis,” explaining the fault line. He described the magnetic
attraction of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory to Belgian
and Dutch theologians in the immediate postconciliar era in the
following terms:
Fundamental for them as a consequence of their acceptance of the Marxist
unity of theory and praxis is a conviction that the permanent self-identity of
the Christian faith cannot be presupposed. . . . They reject a theoretical system
of identity. There is no purely theoretical centre of reference, which can serve
in an abstract, speculative way as a norm of identity. Truth does not yet exist;
it cannot be reached by interpretation, but it has to be produced by change.
For these theologians therefore, faith is in a strong sense mediated in history
through praxis. Praxis is not the application of already known truth or the
carrying out of a trans-historical ideal; it is that process in and through which
one comes to know present reality and future possibilities. If faith is mediated
in praxis, it must renounce an a priori claim to self-identity and universality.

However, if the mediation of faith through praxis is consistently
accepted, that means the destruction of theology in the current
sense of the articulation of the immanent self-understanding of
faith. Theology loses its boundaries as an independent disci-

BETWEEN THEORY AND PRAXIS

237

pline, because the only appropriate context for the conscious
articulation of praxis is a theory of the development of society
in its total reality. Included within such a comprehensive theory
would be a critique of theological consciousness, replacing
theology as a separate science.5
In his final paragraph Davis points to the significance of this
appropriation of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School for
theology with the rhetorical question: “Is theology, as [Edward]
Schillebeeckx says, the critical self-consciousness of Christian
praxis, or is [Leszek] Kołakowski right when he says: ‘For
theology begins with the belief that truth has already been given
to us, and its intellectual effort consists not of an attrition
against reality but of an assimilation of something which exists
already in its entirety’?”6
The reason Davis’s question is so important is that if Critical
Theory or some other version of a priority of praxis theory
becomes the intellectual partner for theology, then almost every
branch of theology is open for a radical revision. This was
recognized by Joseph Ratzinger in his Principles of Catholic
Theology when he wrote:
If the word “orthopraxis” is pushed to its most radical meaning, it presumes
that no truth exists that is antecedent to praxis but rather that truth can be
established only on the basis of correct praxis, which has the task of creating
meaning out of and in the face of meaninglessness. Theology becomes then no
more than a guide to action, which, by reflecting on praxis, continually
develops new modes of praxis. If not only redemption but truth as well is
regarded as “post hoc”, then truth becomes the product of man. At the same
time, man, who is no longer measured against truth but produces it, becomes
himself a product.7

In The Nature and Mission of Theology, Ratzinger further
endorsed the judgement of Albert Görres that “there is no
doctrine of Jesus without a skeleton, without dogmatic
principle” and Görres’s description of the mentality that “faith
5

Charles Davis, “Theology and Praxis,” Cross Currents 23 (1973): 154-68 at 167.
Ibid. These two paragraphs were also cited in chapter 4 of Tracey Rowland,
Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) on the Concilium scholars.
7
Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1987), 318.
6

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TRACEY ROWLAND

propositions do not matter because the important thing is
contact with a spiritual atmosphere” as the “Hinduisation of the
faith.”8
We will return to the issue of this theological division, but
suffice to say at this point that the kind of understanding of
synodality one has will depend upon the position one takes on
the question of theological method. If one endorses some form
of the priority of praxis principle, one will not follow anything
like Newman’s idea of the relationship between the ecclesia
docens and the sensus fidelium or his understanding of the
development of doctrine.
III. CHRISTOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY
To gain a more comprehensive understanding of what a
Newmanian understanding of the operation of the sensus
fidelium within a synod might look like, it is important to refer
to other contributions to the notion of the sensus fidelium.
Newman’s ideas were in some ways anticipated by Johann
Adam Möhler. His Unity in the Church, or, The Principles of
Catholicism: Presented in the Spirit of the Church Fathers of the
First Three Centuries was published in 1825. In this work,
Möhler describes the Church as the organic development of the
work of the Holy Spirit through history. The focus of the work
is to explain how it is that the Holy Spirit works in history to
see to it that the original deposit of the faith, revealed by Jesus
Christ, is handed down uncorrupted from one generation to the
next. Here the theological issue is the relationship between
Christology and Pneumatology, the work of Christ and the
work of the Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation. Also
necessary is an understanding of theological anthropology,
specifically how it is that the Holy Spirit works within the soul
to bring about the sensus fidei. In The Prophetic Church: History
and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves
Congar, Andrew Meszaros included a whole section on the
8

Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology: Approaches to
Understanding Its Role in the Light of Present Controversy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1995), 91.

BETWEEN THEORY AND PRAXIS

239

significance of sanctifying grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit
for the effective operation of the sensus fidelium.9
In a 2014 document of the International Theological
Commission on the subject of the sensus fidelium, it was said
that, in Möhler’s view, it is the Holy Spirit who animates,
guides, and unites the faithful as a community in Christ,
bringing about in them an ecclesial “consciousness” of the faith
(Gemeingeist or Gesamtsinn), something akin to a Volksgeist or
national spirit. The ITC theologians added that this sensus fidei,
which is the subjective dimension of Tradition, necessarily includes an
objective element, which is the Church’s teaching, for the Christian “sense” of
the faithful, which lives in their hearts and is virtually equivalent to Tradition,
is never divorced from its content.10

The Holy Spirit never teaches one thing and Christ another. In
§49 of the same document the ITC theologians concluded that
the sense of faith is
a sort of spiritual instinct that enables the believer to judge spontaneously
whether a particular teaching or practice is or is not in conformity with the
Gospel and with apostolic faith. It is intrinsically linked to the virtue of faith
itself; it flows from, and is a property of, faith. It is compared to an instinct
because it is not primarily the result of rational deliberation, but is rather a
form of spontaneous and natural knowledge, a sort of perception (aisthesis).

The point is significant because the instinctual element is
sometimes used to defend the idea that actual knowledge of the
Church’s intellectual tradition is not necessary for the
possession of the sensus fidelium. Au contraire, since the virtue
of faith itself is not without content, it presupposes a degree of
knowledge of the apostolic faith as presented in the Gospels.
Notwithstanding all the above, in §55 of the ITC document,
it is acknowledged that the correct intuitions of the sensus fidei
can be mixed up with various purely human opinions, or even
with errors linked to the narrow confines of a particular cultural
9
Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in
John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
10
International Theological Commission, “Sensus Fidei” in the Life of the Church
(2014), §35.

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TRACEY ROWLAND

context. Some people are simply not well catechized. They have
an understanding of bits of the tradition, pieces of the apostolic
faith, but there may also be gaps in their understanding. The
gaps may leave them open to appropriating ideas from hostile
traditions without being aware of the incongruities. This means
that “not all the ideas which circulate among the People of God
are compatible with the faith.”11 This is a problem that has been
acknowledged by St John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope
Francis.
In §5 of Familiaris Consortio (1981) St. John Paul II declared
that the sensus fidei
does not consist solely or necessarily in the consensus of the faithful.
Following Christ, the Church seeks the truth, which is not always the same as
the majority opinion. . . . The Church values sociological and statistical
research, when it proves helpful in understanding the historical context in
which pastoral action has to be developed and when it leads to a better
understanding of the truth. Such research alone, however, is not to be
considered in itself an expression of the sense of faith.

IV. READING THE “SIGNS OF THE TIMES”
During a retreat conducted by Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.,
in 1987, St. John Paul II wrote that “reading the signs of the
times,” a phrase often used in the context of all forms of
ecclesial deliberations, “must not be done according to an
ideological key.” He stated in his retreat notebook that one
must not forget that the interpretation of the signs of the times
is always liable to fall into the traps of “the father of lies,” and
further that the “only key with which the Church and
humankind should open ‘the signs of the times’ is the crucified
and risen Christ.”12 In other words, contemporary social
phenomena need to be analyzed from the perspective of the
Christian kerygma rather than the kerygma finding itself under
review by the proponents of contemporary social theories.

11

Ibid., §55.
Karol Wojtyła, In God’s Hands: The Spiritual Diaries of Pope St. John Paul II (New
York: Harper Collins, 2017), 272-73.
12

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241

Similarly, in his seminal work Lay People in the Church Yves
Congar wrote:
The history of modern culture is dominated by various forms of immanentism,
rationalism, the spirit of Faust; and eventually there is Marxism, the most
consistent endeavour that has ever been made to give the world a purely
immanent meaning, excluding all transcendence, an endeavour to overcome
all contradictions and to attain integrity without any reference whatever to
God. Even things that are in themselves good and true, authentic earthly
values, are susceptible of becoming idols and a “home-ground” for the Prince
of this world. Think what can happen to country, production, progress, class,
race, the body and sport, domestic comfort; and how many names can be
given today to Egypt, Canaan or Babylon.13

Hence, in an address to the ITC, Benedict XVI remarked that it
is important to clarify the criteria used to distinguish the
authentic sensus fidelium from its counterfeits. He emphasized
that the sensus fidelium is not
some kind of public opinion of the Church, and it is unthinkable to mention it
in order to challenge the teachings of the Magisterium, this because the sensus
fidei cannot grow authentically in the believer except to the extent in which he
or she fully participates in the life of the Church, and this requires a
responsible adherence to her Magisterium.14

These limitations of the scope of the sensus fidelium echo
earlier comments made by a young Professor Joseph Ratzinger
in the late 1960s, with reference to article 10 of Dei Verbum:
It is to be regarded as a fortunate decision of the Council that, in emphasizing
the share of the laity in the work of keeping the word pure, it did not become
involved with the theory of the consensus of faith, which, in connection with
the dogmas of 1854 and 1950, resulted in the acceptance of the view that the
whole Church has a share in the making manifest of the word. For there is still
too much that needs clarification in this theory before it can be regarded as a
safe expression of this particular point.15

13

Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1965), 100.
Pope Benedict XVI, “Address to the International Theological Commission,”
December 7, 2012.
15
Joseph Ratzinger, “The Transmission of Divine Revelation,” in Commentary on
the Documents of Vatican II, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder & Herder,
1969), 196.
14

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TRACEY ROWLAND

With this caveat in mind, at least one issue requiring
clarification is the criteria for choosing lay participants in
synods.
V. PAPAL CAVEATS AND MANAGEMENT THEORY
Continuing this line of papal caveats, in an address to the
ITC in December 2013 Francis exhorted the members to
develop criteria that allow the authentic expressions of the
sensus fidelium to be discerned since “the sensus fidelium cannot be confused with the sociological reality of a majority
opinion.”16 In their response to this call the ITC’s theologians
argued that individual Catholics needed to possess at least the
following six dispositions:
(1) participation in the life of the Church,
(2) listening to the word of God,
(3) openness to reason,
(4) adherence to the magisterium,
(5) holiness, and
(6) seeking the edification of the Church.

This list found in the 2014 ITC document is affirmed in the
2018 ITC document on the topic of Synodality in the Life and
Mission of the Church and further elaborated. Paragraph 108
declares:
The same dispositions that are required to live and bring to maturity
the sensus fidei, with which all believers are endowed, are also required to put
it to use on the synodal path. This is an essential point in forming people in a
synodal spirit, since we live in a culture where the demands of the Gospel and
even human virtues are not often the object of appreciation or sufficient
preparation.

Paragraph 109 declares:

16

Pope Francis, “Address to the International Theological Commission,” December
6, 2013.

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243

The Eucharistic synaxis is the source and paradigm of the spirituality of
communion. In it are expressed the specific elements of Christian life that are
called to mould the affectus synodalis.

Five specific elements are then mentioned. The first is the
importance of the Trinity and especially the gifts of the Holy
Spirit; the second is the importance of reconciliation; the third
is the importance of listening to the Scriptures and participating
in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist; the fourth is titled
“Communion” by which is meant something like an harmonious
symphony of different gifts and charisms; and the fifth point is
the importance of possessing a missionary disposition.
In theory, all participants in synods should show evidence of
the full set of dispositions listed in the ITC documents, qualifying them for the trust that the synod leaders place in their
judgment. In practice, however, a survey of lay persons chosen
to be synod delegates in recent times is likely to reveal that the
overwhelming majority do not possess the full list of dispositions outlined above, especially the disposition of fidelity to
magisterial teaching. In fact, one of the common criteria for
selection as a synod delegate has been employment by the
Catholic Church. Synods are very time-consuming events and
those chosen to attend are not paid to do so. Most working
Catholics or Catholic mothers rearing children do not have the
ability, either in terms of time or financial capacity, simply to
drop everything and to spend a couple of weeks away from
work and family attending a meeting. Most employers would
not tolerate such absences. Those already on the Church’s
payroll have no such problems. Yet being on the payroll of the
Church is scarcely synonymous with an education in the
Church’s theological tradition, or even with regular Mass
attendance or familiarity with Sacred Scripture, or with the life
of prayer conducive to holiness of life.
Corporate executives occupying senior management positions in Catholic curial offices or social welfare agencies, as well
as educational and medical institutions, are more likely to hold
degrees in management theory or (if the institution is a hospital)
a degree in the health sciences or (if the institution is an
educational foundation) a degree in pedagogy in combination

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TRACEY ROWLAND

with qualifications in business management, than in any deeply
grounded theological discipline. This is especially so in countries where the Church is comparatively wealthy and manages
numerous institutions, such as in Germany and Australia. It is
perhaps therefore no surprise that it is these two countries—
countries where the Catholic Church is the largest private
employer in the entire employment sector—that have held a
national synod or plenary. One journalist described the
Australian Plenary Council of 2022, an event that was marketed
as an exercise in synodality, as a gathering of the Church’s “HR
[Human Resources] Department.”
VI. THE GERMAN FACTOR AND THE
RATZINGER AND MAIER CRITIQUES
German Catholics have led the way in calls for ecclesial
governance by national synods. This is not a recent development of the pontificate of Francis but can be traced back to the
immediate postconciliar years when Karl Rahner was the biggest
name in postconciliar theology, busily writing works such as
The Shape of the Church to Come, and Hans Küng was
publishing books such as Structures of the Church (1965), which
he dedicated to Karl Rahner, and Reforming the Church Today
(1990).17 In the wake of the trauma of the Nazi era the German
generation of 1968 was passionate about the promotion of
democracy and was correspondingly critical of all forms of
hierarchical governance. Yet what often went missing in these
calls for democratic talk fests is the notion that the persons
taking part in the discussions needed a high level of sanctity and
understanding of the ecclesial tradition.
Many calls for synods or national plenaries appear to be
motivated not by a desire to seek the wisdom of the holy but to
promote the democratization of ecclesial governance because of
a preference for democratic forms of governance as a general
social principle. Such a preference is easily defended by
17

Hans Küng, Structures of the Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1965); idem,
Reforming the Church Today: Keeping Hope Alive (New York: Crossroad, 1990); and
Karl Rahner, The Shape of the Church to Come (London: SPCK, 1974).

BETWEEN THEORY AND PRAXIS

245

reference to the history of episcopal negligence in the child
abuse tragedy. The resultant attitude is not that the episcopacy
needs to be reformed in such a way that bishops actually
shoulder the responsibilities they have undertaken, symbolized
by the pallium given to an archbishop, but that bishops need to
be reduced to corporate CEOs, answerable to boards of
directors and circumscribed in the exercise of their prudential
judgment by an encroaching labyrinth of bureaucratic protocols.
More bureaucracy—not more sanctity—is the proposal of many
advocates of synodality. This has the “advantage” that one does
not require any of the dispositions mentioned by the ITC to
formulate and proliferate bureaucratic protocols.
Two of the leading theologians who stood opposed to calls
to democratize decision-making within the Church were Joseph
Ratzinger and Hans Maier. A collection of their critical essays
was published under the title Demokratie in der Kirche:
Möglichen und Grenzen.
In this work and in his replies to reviews of his best-selling
book Introduction to Christianity, published in 1968, Ratzinger
argued that the enthusiasm for synods and the democratization
of ecclesial governance was a way of avoiding the really
important tasks the Church is called to perform. He wrote:
For me, the properly practical task of theology lies in teaching men to believe,
to hope and to love and thereby opens up meaning which helps him to live. It
does not lie in inventing new costumes for clerics, new forms of ecclesial
organization and new forms of liturgical celebration. . . . Its proper praxis
consists in giving man something which other “organizations” are not in a
position to give. It seems to me a dangerous instance of diminution if one
thereby loses sight of that which is truly “practical” with regard to faith and in
exchange one escapes into introspective activity that soon devolves into
idleness.18

The Church, in other words, operates differently from other
institutions because its foundation and mission are completely

18

Joseph Ratzinger, “Glaube, Geschichte und Philosophie: Zum Echo auf meine
‘Einführung in das Christentum’,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Freiburg: Herder &
Herder, 2014), 323-39, at 330.

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different. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church,
paragraph 1558:
“Episcopal consecration confers, together with the office of sanctifying, also
the offices of teaching and ruling. . . . In fact . . . by the imposition of hands
and through the words of the consecration, the grace of the Holy Spirit is
given, and a sacred character is impressed in such wise that bishops, in an
eminent and visible manner, take the place of Christ himself, teacher,
shepherd, and priest, and act as his representative (in Eius persona
agant).” “By virtue, therefore, of the Holy Spirit who has been given to them,
bishops have been constituted true and authentic teachers of the faith and
have been made pontiffs and pastors.”

Many other paragraphs could be quoted from the Catechism
which, like this one, make it clear that the Church as an
institution is completely sui generis. She is not just another
provider of philanthropy, health care, and education. Thus,
Ratzinger wrote:
The Church is not about distributing shares in common products fairly and
protecting or exercising the corresponding rights of individuals and the whole,
but about keeping the irreducible Word of God present as a claim on people
and as a hope for them. This in turn means that the ecclesiastical government
does not have the same structural position in the structure of the Church as
state institutions have in the political community.19

In Demokratie in der Kirche Ratzinger also noticed that not all
lay Catholics were enthusiastic about synods. Some lay
Catholics argue that the two classes in the Church today are not
the clerics and the laity, but the bureaucrats (lay and clerical)
and the nonbureaucrats. The latter group includes faithful
leaders of families and parish priests and priests in religious
orders focused on pastoral and intellectual work. Priests who
are not in bureaucratic roles often feel as marginalized as the
laity who are not in bureaucratic roles. Speaking of the 1999
European Synod of Bishops, Ratzinger wrote:
There are complaints that the majority of believers generally show little
interest in dealing with the synod. I have to admit that this reluctance seems to
me to be more of a sign of health. From a Christian point of view, i.e. for
19

Joseph Ratzinger, Demokratie in der Kirche (Regensburg: Lahn Verlag, 2000), 19.

BETWEEN THEORY AND PRAXIS

247

what is actually meant by the New Testament, little is gained by people
passionately grappling with the problems of the synod—just as little does
anyone become a sportsman as a result of being deeply involved in the
structure of the Olympic Committee.20

Ratzinger was also critical of the idea that lay participants in
synods should have the same voting rights as bishops. Referring
to Karl Rahner’s idea of an all-German (or a national) synod of
bishops, priests, and lay people, which would be the supreme
governing body of the individual national churches, to which
the bishops should also be subject, Ratzinger remarked:
Such an idea is as alien to the New Testament as it is to Church-wide
tradition, and this is not as valid for the Church, which is based on tradition,
as it may be for draft constitutions. The assertion that the early church
councils were made up of lay people and bishops and that only Trent or even
Vatican I completed the transition to a pure bishops’ council is, from a
historical perspective, quite simply wrong: It also does not apply to the
concept according to which in Acts 15 the assembly in Jerusalem is drawn,
which decided on the question of the relationship between Jewish and Gentile
Christians. Rather, Luke represents this meeting according to the model of the
ancient people's assembly. The property of the ancient assemblies consisted
(sounding quite modern) in their fundamental public nature, which of course
presupposes the distinction between the decision-making body and the public
present. The public is by no means condemned to passivity: through its
(positive and negative) “acclamations” it has often decisively influenced events
without directly taking part in the suffragium (vote).21

In this passage Ratzinger is drawing a distinction between what
Newman would call “consulting the faithful in matters of
doctrine” and the special charisms of the episcopacy, the
“ecclesia docens” in Newman’s terms, who enjoy the privilege
of voting.
In the following passage Ratzinger underscores this point
and then makes another argument about the medieval period
when monarchs and other nobles were sometimes invited to
church councils. He makes a distinction between these medieval
councils and the notion of consulting the faithful in matters of
doctrine. He observes:
20
21

Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 30.

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TRACEY ROWLAND

According to Acts 15, the Council of the Apostles met according to this
model: It took place in front of the public of the whole “ekklesia”, but only
“apostles and presbyters” are designated as its decision-makers (15.6 and
15.22). The early church adhered to this form in its councils from beginning
to end, and any assertion to the contrary is simply without historical basis. Of
course, the medieval councils were not only church councils, but also general
assemblies of Latin Christianity, which attempted to use them to regulate their
foreign affairs in a uniform manner. To interpret the representation of the
members of the Corpus Christianum at these meetings as lay people
participating in the council means misjudging the historical perspectives. The
basic concept that the council is an assembly of bishops (which as such can of
course also grant voting rights to non-bishops) remained unchanged during
the Middle Ages. The naturalness with which Trent, which only had to work
as a council and not as a political-economic assembly, met again as a pure
bishops’ assembly would remain incomprehensible in any other case.22

Ratzinger concluded his discussion on the alleged historical
precedents for including the laity in the “ecclesia docens” (not
merely consulting the laity on matters of doctrine, but raising
their judgments to magisterial levels), with the following
declaration:
The idea of the mixed synod as a permanent supreme governing body of the
national Churches is a chimerical idea in terms of the tradition of the Church
as well as its sacramental structure and its specific goal. Such a synod would
lack any legitimacy and therefore obedience to it has to be decisively and
unequivocally denied.23

As if this declaration were not the end of the matter, Ratzinger
further argued that “the so-called synodal idea . . . seems
strangely obsolete against the background of general social and
political developments.”24 Whereas in the world at large the
movement is against increasingly high levels of bureaucratization, the call for the democratization of the Church will lead,
as the concomitant bureaucratization inevitably does, to more
uniformity and less real freedom, as some of the Catholic student experiments at the German universities demonstrated. He
concluded:
22

Ibid., 31.
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
23

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249

In the Church today, the exact opposite is being proposed to us: Total
integration of all initiatives into an all-encompassing synodal regime, which
regulates everything in the fully integrated congregation, from worship to
political mandate, which in turn seems to overshadow all other tasks. This
program, which is being heralded to us as the prospect of future reforms at the
national level, has meanwhile been zealously exercised in the nuclei of such
ideas, in the student communities: active minorities who, to the silence of
their fellow students who are disinterested in such experiments, present
themselves as a “General Assembly” and thus as “democratically legitimized”
representatives of the whole, who have worked out “synodal” constitutions
for the congregations, in which the totalitarian consequences of this
conception became frighteningly clear: the Church at the university no longer
meant the free offer of word and sacrament, but the unrequested confiscation
of all Christians in the university by a group of “committed people” defined
completely independently of belief. Because of the synodal constitution, it is
always the congregation as a whole that expresses itself, and this congregation
also expresses itself about the whole, i.e. about everything.25

Ratzinger noted that in Cologne Catholic students “resolutely
rejected” the “synodal conspiracy” (synodale Komplott) since
they wanted their community to be bound together by the one
thing they had in common—“the gospel of Jesus Christ, as the
faith of the Church professes.”26
SUMMARY
One might argue that under the banner of synodality three
completely different reasons are found for consulting the laity.
The first reason, Newman’s, is that sometimes the ecclesia
docens fails in its duty. This plank in the barque of Peter
becomes weak or rotten or broken and the sensus fidelium
needs to be found among the lay saints. The second reason—
that of the generation of 1968 Germans—is war guilt and a
corresponding faith in democracy as the highest or only
legitimate form of governance in any context. This is notwithstanding the fact that the ascendency of National Socialism
was enabled by a democratic vote of the German people. The
worst thing about Nazism was not that it was lacking in

25
26

Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 33.

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TRACEY ROWLAND

democratic elements, but that it elevated itself beyond the Ten
Commandments, that is, above divine law and above truth.
Throughout his many publications Ratzinger was consistently
hostile to the idea that the truth could be subjected to the
majority principle. In this context he wrote:
Indeed, by its very nature, faith is suspended where it is subjected to the
majority principle: Why should Mr. Muller or Mrs. Huber be able to oblige
me to believe this or that which they more or less happen to think is right?
Why should I be obliged to believe what a majority passes today that might
tomorrow be replaced by an opposing majority? Either there is a different
authorization in the faith of the Church than that of human opinion, or there
is not. If not, then there is no belief, but everyone thinks up whatever he
thinks is right.27

On the contrary, “if God has really told us something and also
created the organs that stand for fidelity to his word, then this
or that random majority does not count.”28 Ratzinger further
noted that “the crisis in the Anglican Church was not triggered
by the ordination of women as such, but by the fact that,
contrary to the previous tradition, questions of faith were also
subjected to a majority vote.”29 He suggested that “where this
prevails, faith is actually at an end.”30
A third reason promoting the inclusion of the laity in synodal
meetings is the idea that the episcopacy has not only failed to
exercise its teaching responsibilities, but has also failed to
shoulder its pastoral responsibilities, most notoriously in the
context of the care of children in its educational and welfare
institutions. Here, the argument is that lay leadership is needed,
not so much at the level of doctrinal development, but at the
level of the provision of boards of overview and general
protocol compliance. As mentioned above, the general attitude
is that more bureaucracy, not more sanctity, is the solution to

27

Ibid., 88.
Ibid., 89.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
28

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251

this problem. In Ratzinger’s words, “the apostolic element
disappears behind the structural.”31
While Ratzinger’s arguments address the problems latent in
the various calls for the democratization of ecclesial decisionmaking, Hans Meier’s publications have focused more on the
genealogy of these arguments, on their theological sources and
modes of unfolding within the culture of the Church. Like
Davis and Ratzinger, he too has noticed that a central issue is
what he calls “a new relationship between theory and practice”:
Theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann or Johann Baptist Metz discuss the
problem of democracy today primarily in the context of a modern history of
freedom and emancipation. For Metz it begins with the Enlightenment, in
which the old unity of religion and society is destroyed, and it continues in the
political attempt to create the social prerequisites for the public use of reason
and the mobilization of all institutions—including the Church—towards a
“second reflection” on human freedom. A new relationship between theory
and practice, knowledge and morality, reflection and revolution is effective,
which must also determine theological consciousness if it is not to fall back to
an earlier, pre-critical level of consciousness. In the future, practical and—in
the broadest sense of the word—political reason, must be involved in all
critical reflections on theology.32

Given all that has been outlined above, we may conclude that
the meaning of “synodality” is not settled Church teaching. It is
a concept that is given different content by different theologians. For Mőhler, Newman, St. John Paul II, and Ratzinger/
Benedict, there is a clear distinction between the ecclesia docens,
the magisterium, and the sensus fidelium of the lay faithful.
While in times of crisis it may be valuable to consult the laity on
matters of doctrine, as Newman argued, it is not suggested by
these authorities that the lay faithful themselves should be
regarded as members of the ecclesia docens.
Moreover, not just any baptized person is regarded by these
authors as worthy of consultation. In order to manifest the
sensus fidei persons need to have at least the dispositions

31

Ibid., 86.
Hans Maier, “Vom Getto der Emanzipation: Kritik der ‘demokratisierten’
Kirche,” Hochland (1970): 385-99, at 387.
32

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TRACEY ROWLAND

mentioned by the International Theological Commission, not
omitting the disposition of fidelity to magisterial teaching.
It is worth considering the dispositions of those lay saints in
the fourth century who proved faithful when many of the episcopacy did not. They had a radically un-worldly faith. In an atmosphere of conforming oneself to prevailing imperial/political,
social and intellectual norms, they knew where “the sword
piercing to the division of soul and spirit” (Heb 4:12) fell, and
they were prepared to pay the cost, they and the minority of
pastors and bishops who stood firm. “You are the children of
martyrs,” said St. Basil to such faithful. Their faith had what
Ratzinger has called “the eschatological edge,” inherited from
their forebears.
If, however, one follows the trajectory of theologians who
have flipped the relationship between logos and ethos, giving
priority to ethos or praxis, or those who have been otherwise
influenced by social theories with a Marxian pedigree, including
contemporary proponents of gender fluidity, then one reaches
the conclusion that the entire theological tradition of the
Church requires a revolution, especially in the fields of moral
theology and ecclesiology, and the revolution in ecclesiology
should eliminate the idea that only bishops are the bearers of
magisterial authority. Why any man would present himself as a
candidate for holy orders if it meant being reduced to the status
of a chief executive officer of a vast welfare institution—at
best—is a practical question yet to be addressed. Its “practicality” may however explain why seminaries in some dioceses
that are maintaining the priority of logos are still attracting
candidates, if not in large numbers, while seminaries in dioceses
where priority of praxis theologies dominate are often empty or
closed.
In the fifth century the importance of the ecclesia docens was
addressed by St. Cyril of Alexandria in his Commentary on the
Gospel of St John. There, he wrote:
Our Lord Jesus Christ has appointed certain men to be guides and teachers of
the world and stewards of his divine mysteries. Now he bids them to shine out
like lamps and to cast out their light not only over the land of the Jews but
over every country under the sun and over people scattered in all directions

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and settled in distant lands. That man has spoken truly who said: No one
takes honor upon himself, except the one who is called by God, for it was our
Lord Jesus Christ who called his own disciples before all others to a most glorious apostolate. These holy men became the pillar and mainstay of the truth,
and Jesus said that he was sending them just as the Father had sent him.33

Perhaps one question for aspiring synod delegates, one criterion
of suitability for participation in a synod, could be something
along the lines of: “Do you agree with this statement from St.
Cyril?” The question would at least be a quick way to discern
the drum of the version of “synodality” to which a proposed
delegate is marching.
In his comments on “The Orthodoxy of the Body of the
Faithful during the Supremacy of Arianism,” Newman quoted
St. Jerome as saying that by A.D. 361 “nearly all the churches in
the whole world, under the pretence of peace and the emperor,
are polluted with the communion of the Arians.”34 One is
tempted to suggest that today the Arians have been replaced by
two dominant groups. The first group is comprised of an
assortment of people Görres would describe as wanting to
“Hinduize” Christianity in the sense of leaving behind the
Church’s doctrinal tradition and who are going about this by
adopting Marxian notions of truth and anthropology, above all
by insisting upon the priority of praxis. These types speak a lot
about “listening to the Spirit” but ignore the teachings of Christ
or read them down as only relevant for a particular time and
culture. This disjunction between the second and third persons
of the Trinity is a contemporary form of Joachimism, the idea
that the era of Christ is superseded by the era of the Holy Spirit.
This first group is mostly concerned to overturn millennia of
teaching in the fields of moral and sacramental theology and its
proponents are often found in academies of theology. The
second dominant group is comprised of people who wish to
base ecclesial governance upon the latest fashionable practices
in business management schools. Many in this group would also
33

Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of St John 12.1 (PG 74:707-10).
John Henry Newman, “The Orthodoxy of the Body of the Faithful during the
Supremacy
of
Arianism,”
found
in
Oxford’s
Newman
Reader
at
https://www.newmanreader.org/works/arians/note5.html, historical point 17.
34

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TRACEY ROWLAND

agree with members of the first group about issues of moral and
sacramental theology, but their primary focus is ecclesiology,
not moral or sacramental theology. The members of this group
want to overturn millennia of teaching in the field of ecclesiology because they believe that the current “business model,”
conferring a sacred authority upon bishops, has clearly failed.
Those in this category are often members of the laity who occupy senior management positions in Catholic educational,
health, and social welfare institutions. While some theologians
in the tradition of Hans Küng would strongly agree with them,
the agenda of this group is largely driven by management theory, not theology. For both groups synodality becomes a means
to effect revolutionary change in Catholic teaching and practice.
There are many lay faithful, however, who wholly concur
with the assessments of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and who
simply want bishops to see to it that the apostolic teaching is
passed on uncorrupted to the next generation and that
institutions falling under the governance of bishops are run
according to Christian principles. Those in this camp are far
from happy with the current state of affairs. They would agree
with those in the other two groups that we are living through a
great crisis and that the episcopacy is in the center of that crisis.
Their solution however is not to trash the tradition, not to buy
a new “boat,” but to do something about the “splintered
planks,” to throw their support behind those they perceive to be
the saintly bishops of our time, the contemporary confessors of
the faith. They have no opposition to synods undertaken
according to something like the Newmanian model described
above, since synods of this nature presuppose that magisterial
teaching can be developed but not trashed. They also
presuppose that the second and third persons of the Trinity
work together in the economy of salvation. In the words of
Archbishop Charles Chaput, “our one unique responsibility as
bishops is to proclaim and protect the apostolic tradition of the
Church.”35

35

Charles Chaput, “Only Worthy Agenda for Synod Is One Given to Us by Jesus in
the Gospels,” Catholic News Agency, February 10, 2023.

The Thomist 87 (2023): 255-70

CHRIST AS THE WAY OF SYNODALITY
ANGELA FRANKS
St. John’s Seminary
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

I

F CONFIRMATION IS, as the wag has it, a sacrament in
search of a theology, even more so is synodality a movement
in search of a theology. Not all movements deserve a theology; and movements that do are not always supported by
theologies that make the grade. Given that synodality has been
supported by many theologically dubious claims, is it a movement
that does not deserve a theology? Or is it a sound movement that
has not found a theology that makes the grade?
I do not claim to have read comprehensively in the theology
of synodality, so perhaps the ecclesiologically superficial accounts
that I have encountered are not representative of its theology as
a whole.1 Rather than pursue further that question, I will here
propose my own response: Synodality can be a movement that
deserves a theology. I will argue that synodality points to the Way
who is Christ (syn-hodos as a meeting of the way) and can be
conceived in terms of the dynamics of ecclesial communio, itself
a theological transposition of the one-many question. Understood this way, synodality expresses a symphony of pneumatic
charisms and missions discerned within the Church.

1
I share Michael Hanby’s judgment of the sociological and historicist commitments
behind many theologies of synodality, in “Synodality, Sociologism, and the Judgment of
History,” Communio 48 (2021): 686-726.

255

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I. THE ONE-MANY QUESTION WITHIN ECCLESIOLOGY
The two major Pauline images of the Church’s relation to
Christ, as body and as bride, both speak to the dynamic between
unity and multiplicity in ecclesiology. The image of body
emphasizes the unity-in-diversity of Christ with his Church,
mystically united as a quasi-person.2 As Christ’s body, the Church
can only be understood out of the unity of its “I,” who is Christ.
All the aspects of the Church “are in reality modes of existence
of Christ, who is at work in the world through his living Holy
Spirit.”3 Yet the Church is also his bride, the one who stands faceto-face with Christ. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts
it, “The unity of Christ and the Church, head and members of
one Body, also implies the distinction of the two within a
personal relationship” (CCC 796). Benoît Dominique de la
Soujeole gives the example of agency: Just as the one-flesh union
of husband and wife does not mean that a husband’s acts are
attributable to his wife or vice versa, so “every act performed by
the Church is not identically an act of Christ.”4 Yet, despite this
distinction, the unity of Christ and the Church is more than the
moral union between two spouses, while less than a simple
physical or hypostatic identity. It is, rather, a “mystical” identity
rooted in the Eucharistic sharing of divine sonship through
grace.5
Ecclesiology here perfects the foundational metaphysical
question of the one and the many. The early alternatives between
Parmenides and Heraclitus can be read this way: Is being
essentially monolithic or essentially diverse? If the former, then
2

STh III, q. 48, a. 2. See Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Mystici Corporis on the Mystical
Body of Christ (June 29, 1943), 14-16: The Church is the mystical body of Christ because
of its sensibly perceptible unity, within a multiplicity of members, structured in a due
order.
3
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans.
Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 35.
4
Benoît-Dominique de la Soujeole, O.P., Introduction to the Mystery of the Church,
trans. Michael J. Miller, Thomistic Ressourcement Series 3 (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 76.
5
See La Soujeole, Introduction, 77-78; beyond Mystici Corporis, see further texts in
La Soujeole, Introduction, 381-82.

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being’s simultaneity with unity means that all is one, and
appearance and difference are only illusions. If the latter, then all
unity is an illusion amidst an essential multiplicity. Ironically,
both approaches end in the same place, by calling into question
the ordinary world of sense perception and political life, in which
both unity and multiplicity are evident. Plato and Aristotle took
issue with the influential Parmenidean way of thinking about
being, in which being and nothing are strictly opposed and
univocal.6 Both philosophers noted that being (and nonbeing) can
be said “in many ways,” bequeathing a nuanced approach to the
one-many question to their successors.7
The analogical balance between unity and multiplicity is
difficult to maintain, and the history of philosophy can be
understood as the history of competing extremes on the onemany question. Likewise, the tension within ecclesiology can
slacken. The Church as one quasi-person with Christ can be
misunderstood in an almost Parmenidean way, in which what
“is” the Church does not admit of varying levels of ecclesial
existence.8 One would be simply “in” or “out” of the Church
(being or nonbeing), in this understanding. Lumen Gentium 8
corrects this by positing (without saying in so many words) that
being can be said in many ways, from the subsistence of the
Catholic Church to the analogous ecclesial existence of other
communities.9 Conversely, one can so hypostasize the Church as
6
Of course, Plato and Aristotle were not Heracliteans, either, but Parmenides
remained the more tempting option to their contemporaries, such as the Sophists, and so
earned more attention; see C. J. Wolfe, “Plato's and Aristotle's Answers to the Parmenides
Problem,” Review of Metaphysics 65 (2012): 747-64.
7
Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.2.1003a33. For Plato, see his embrace of both unity and
multiplicity in the Philebus: “All things . . . that are ever said to be consist of a one and a
many, and have in their nature a conjunction of limit and unlimitedness” (Philebus 16c-d;
cf. Sophist 249d; translation taken from Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1961]). Thomas Aquinas picks up the baton: contra Parmenides, being is not a
genus but “said in different ways about diverse things” (I Metaphys., lect. 9); see John F.
Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated
Being, Monographs of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy 1
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 65-93.
8
See Mystici Corporis, 86.
9
See also Unitatis Redintegratio, 4.

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separate from Christ—as, perhaps, a “people of God” made
transparent through sociological analysis—that she degrades into
a voluntary and even purely human association with a merely
historical connection to a putative founder.10
A way out of this dialectic is found in Trinitarian theology,
which provides the divine origin and end of worldly unity and
distinction.11 This path has been taken by many recent ecclesiologists seeking to find in the reality of Trinitarian communio the
source and model for ecclesial communio.12 With fewer Trinitarian resonances, synodality is arguably an updated attempt to
come to terms with the same unity-multiplicity dynamic within
the Church. As a term, and unlike communio, synodality refers
primarily to the Church, not to the Trinity nor to union with God
as the end of the Church’s labors. Yet a deeper exploration
reveals a Christological and ecclesial foundation for synodality.
II. SYNODALITY AND THE WAY
The etymology of synod, as a way (hodos) that comes together
(syn)—think, perhaps, of “intersection”—points us in a helpful
direction. First, and primarily, synod points us to the One who is
the Way (John 14:6). This Christological center focuses the
mind: The Way for Christians cannot be simply any path that we
happen to take but must be a road within the Way who is Christ,
leading through the narrow gate of salvation. Here the antetype
for Christ as the Way is God’s way of righteousness, given to
10
The Church as Christ’s mystical body is “far superior to all other human societies,”
as grace surpasses nature (Mystici Corporis, 63).
11
See my “Trinitarian analogia entis in Hans Urs von Balthasar,” The Thomist 62
(1998): 533-59.
12
Attempted, with varying degrees of success, by Jean-Marie Tillard; see the summary
in Aidan Nichols, O.P., Figuring out the Church: Her Marks, and Her Masters (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013), 109-31. For magisterial statements, see the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some
Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion” (May 28, 1992); and John Paul
II, “Address to the Bishops of the United States of America” (Sept. 16, 1987), 1; see also
the International Theological Commission, Select Themes of Ecclesiology on the Occasion
of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Closing of the Second Vatican Council (1984),
6.1: “Communion, Structure, and Organization.”

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Israel in his law (Ps 1:6; Isa 26:7; see Matt 21:32 and 2 Pet 2:22).
The exhortations to follow God’s way in the Hebrew Scriptures
are taken up and personalized in the Gospels. “Enter through the
narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way [hodos] is easy that
leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate
is narrow and the way [hodos] is hard that leads to life, and there
are few who find it” (Matt 7:13-14).13 But Christ is not merely a
teacher of God’s way, as the Pharisees allowed (Matt 22:16), but
the Way himself (John 14:6). Christ as the incarnate Word of the
Father reveals that he is the Way to life, which is gained in a
garden on a tree that the angel hitherto guarded with a flaming
sword (Gen 3:24; cf. Exod 23:20).
Let us explore this more deeply by looking closely at the
passage in John 14 in which Jesus asserts his identity as the Way.
Two points emerge from this study: first, that Jesus as the Way is
a personal, Trinitarian reality; second, that his unity as the one
Way is capacious enough to allow for a multiplicity of
participation (the many rooms in his Father’s house).
The passage reads:
“Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my
Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I
go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will
come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And
you know the way [hodon] where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we
do not know where you are going; how can we know the way [hodon]?” Jesus
said to him, “I am the way [Egō eimi hē hodos], and the truth, and the life; no
one comes to the Father, but by me. If you had known me, you would have
known my Father also; henceforth you know him and have seen him.” Philip
said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.” Jesus said to
him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He
who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words
that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells
in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me;
or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves. Truly, truly, I say to
you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works
than these will he do, because I go to the Father.” (John 14:1-12)

13

NRSV-CE, translation modified.

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At different points during this passage, Jesus identifies himself
not only as the way for us—as a paradigm or instrument of our
going to the Father—but as the going itself. John 14:6 is Christ’s
response to Thomas’s question: What is this way where Jesus is
going? Verse 6 clarifies that Jesus himself—Egō eimi hē hodos—
is “the way [hodon] where I am going” (John 14:4). The greater
works of the believer come from the truth that Jesus goes to the
Father (v. 12)—indeed, that he is perpetually the going-to the
Father, who eternally dwells in him (v. 10), because the Son
himself is the way-where-he-is-going.
Joseph Ratzinger calls this Jesus’s exodus-being; I have called
it Christ’s vector-nature.14 It is only possible as an ontological
truth, and not as a mere metaphor, because Christ is not a human
person but a divine one. His vector-nature reflects his eternal
person as generated by the Father and sent into the world, and
this person is not really distinct from his being-generated.15 He
subsists as filial relation to the Father and as co-spirating relation
to the Spirit. As the One sent by the Father into the world and
who is going back to the Father (John 14:28), he is both the One
sent and the Way itself of the sending-and-going. The phrase
“subsisting relation” captures these truths.
All of this underscores the significance of the Way that the
incarnate Son is. He is not merely a teacher of an ethical program
to which his followers should align themselves in order to be on
the same page as he. More significantly, he himself, his very filial
person, is the Way for us; he is the One in whom we should move
(Acts 17:28) on our life’s way. Conformity to Christ is a distant,
creaturely participation in his coming-and-going from and to the
Father: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21);
and in his spirating of the Spirit: “[Jesus said,] ‘As the scripture
14
Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd ed., trans. J. R. Foster and
Michael Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 230. I develop this exegesis in
“Liquidity: Man, the Triune God, and the Eucharistic Christ,” Communio 46 (2019):
585-619.
15
I expand on this point in “The Mission and Person of Christ and the Christian in
Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in The Center Is Jesus Christ Himself: Essays on Revelation,
Salvation, and Evangelization in Honor of Robert P. Imbelli, ed. Andrew Meszaros
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 272-99.

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has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living
water.”’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him
were to receive” (John 7:38-39). As Ratzinger notes, “Being a
Christian means being like the Son, becoming a son; that is, not
standing on one’s own and in oneself, but living completely open
in the ‘from’ and ‘toward.’”16
Perhaps for this reason, Christianity itself began to be called
the Way in the apostolic era (e.g., Acts 9:2). The Church is, in
this sense, the way to the Way. Here the unity of the Church
comes to the forefront, as the means of safeguarding the way to
the One who alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Not all
ways conform to God’s way, and the ways that are opposed to
him lead to death (Jer 17:10): “Thus says the LORD: See, I am
setting before you the way of life and the way of death” (Jer 21:8;
cf. Deut 30:19). Only God’s way is the way to peace (Isa 59:8,
quoted in Rom 3:17). Yet all have fallen short of that way and
must be redeemed by the blood of Christ (Rom 3:9-26). In him
alone is salvation (Acts 4:12). Thus, when the Church proclaims
her moral teachings, they derive not from human authority but
from God, who declares through her the way to life in Christ (1
Thess 4:7-8). Living the way that the Church proclaims unites
one’s embodied person to Christ the Way (1 Cor 6:17-20).
We have seen, however, that even while the Christian is united
to the person of Christ, that union is not hypostatic but mystical.
The union of each Christian to Christ the Way happens through
the unifying action of the Holy Spirit: “Anyone united to the
Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17). Aidan Nichols
writes, “The Father’s predisposing plan is to render a world
created and saved a unity in the human species precisely by
sending the Holy Spirit to be one single Person in the Word
incarnate and ourselves. We—Christ and each other in the
Church—form una mystica persona, ‘one mystical person.’”17 In
16

Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 187. Of course, our metaphysical
composition as substance and accidents rules out any simple identity between our
substance and our relation to the triune God, unlike the Son’s relation to the Father and
to the Spirit. The same point applies to our persons and missions, in comparison to the
Son’s hypostatic sending, as discussed below; see Franks, “Mission and Person.”
17
Nichols, Figuring out the Church, 29, drawing on Heribert Mühlen.

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baptism, our incorporation into Christ by the Spirit transforms
our sinful division from God into a gracious unity-in-difference.
Our analogical distinction is not obliterated but turned into the
distinction necessary for spousal communion, in which the
otherness of the beloved is deepened and preserved.
The Church as the Way transmits the unifying and yet
preserving grace of the Holy Spirit. As body, the Church incorporates us into the totus Christus, rooted in his processional
person. As bride, the Church receives his life poured out to make
her a spotless companion (Eph 5:25-27; see Gen 2:18) and
communicates it through the sacraments. Paul experienced this
with deep symbolism. Shortly after receiving letters to persecute
those “of the Way” (tēs Hodou [Acts 9:2]), he himself is, as
Ananias points out, the recipient of the Lord’s appearance to him
“on the way” (en tē hodō [Acts 9:17]) to Damascus. What was
intended to be a journey to the death of the Church becomes a
journey to life for Paul and for the nations, within the bosom of
the ecclesial way as represented by Ananias his healer and
baptizer and by Barnabas his advocate (Acts 9:27).
The syn-hodos of synodality, if it is to rise to the level of
Christianity, must be grounded on these truths of Christ the Way
as a Trinitarian reality and the Church as the way to the Way.
But what of listening, diversity, and accompaniment, the various
emphases of synodality as a current movement? Do these have
any place in this theological framework of the Way?
Here the Heraclitean elements of synodality can be given their
due, within the overarching unity of Jesus as the one Way.18 Let
us return to John 14, and in particular to verse 2, in which Jesus
speaks of the many mansions in his Father’s house. If the oneness
of the Way that is Christ (and more distantly the Church) is
expressed by unity, the resonances of the Father’s “many rooms”
have been captured by another traditional mark of the Church,
catholicity. As Aidan Nichols observes, the universality of the
18
See Joseph Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today,
trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 75-103; Nichols, Figuring out
the Church, 12-15; and CDF, “Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion,”
8, against the idea that the universal Church is a mere federation of particular Churches,
the latter of which are self-sufficient.

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Church can be understood qualitatively or quantitatively. As
qualitative (or “intensive”) catholicity, the Church encompasses
the totality of the truth of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, as well
as the means to salvation. As quantitative (or “extensive”) catholicity, the Church embraces all the missions, that is, the ways that
Christians are sent out into the whole world (Matt 28:19-20).19
Christianity is not an ethnic or regional religion but rather for
“all the nations” (panta ta ethnē [Matt 28:19]), and Christ remains with us for “all the days” (pasas tas hēmeras [Matt 28:20]).
Within these “alls” is the promise that every human being can
find his or her place within Christ.20 This “place” is, as Hans Urs
von Balthasar says, a particular participation in the unique and
universal mission of the incarnate Son: “While the personal
mission of Jesus is unique, it is also capable of ‘imitation’ by those
who are called, in him, to participate in his drama.”21 Each
Christian, through his baptism, receives a “task and mission that
belong to him and to no one else.”22 Just as Christ’s being sent by
the Father is personal, so too, analogously, do Christians receive
their missions as something personalizing, as revelatory of each
person’s very identity. In receiving one’s measure, one receives
“that most intimate idea of his own self—which otherwise would
remain undiscoverable.”23
While this point is particularly representative of Balthasar’s
thought, it has been grasped by other theological schools. Nichols
calls attention to the neo-Scholastic apologetical claim that only
within the Catholic Church do we find all the ways to holiness,
expressed in all the states of life and in the wide variety of

19

Nichols, Figuring out the Church, 57-72.
Lumen Gentium, 13.
21
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 3: The Dramatis Personae: The Person in
Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 162.
22
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Charis and Charisma,” trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V., in
Explorations in Theology, vol. 2, Spouse of the Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991),
301-14, at 303. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, trans. Graham Harrison (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 58-60.
23
Balthasar, Theo-Drama 3:263. These points are developed in Franks, “Mission and
Person.”
20

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ANGELA FRANKS

Catholic religious orders.24 Lay, clerical, and religious, monastic,
mendicant, and missionary: All possible ways to holiness are
given or can be given space within the Church’s catholicity. As
Ratzinger says of Pentecost,
The Spirit overcomes the Babylonian world spirit. Man’s will to power,
symbolized in Babel, aims at the goal of uniformity, because its interest is
domination and subjection; it is precisely in this way that it brings forth hatred
and division. God’s Spirit, on the other hand, is love; for this reason he brings
about recognition and creates unity in the acceptance of the otherness of the
other: the many languages are mutually comprehensible.25

The otherness engendered by the Spirit will include novel forms
and charisms, as the Spirit guides the Church through history.
These new forms “are the Holy Spirit’s answer to the changing
circumstances in which the Church is living.” These new forms
bubble up from below rather than being administratively imposed
from above.26 “They have to be given to us, and they are given.
We simply have to pay attention to them: by the gift of
discernment.”27 What keeps this multiplicity of ways to holiness
truly catholic is union with the Way who is the incarnate Son sent
by the Father in the Spirit. We must, therefore, discern the
authenticity of a mission via a God-given measure. Does it really
lead to holiness, to union with Christ, or does it lead away from
him?
In Scripture, this measure is Christological and ecclesial. The
Christological measure for an individual’s way is his or her
personal conformity to Christ in the Spirit, a conformity that
24
Nichols, Figuring out the Church, 42-47. See also CDF, “Some Aspects of the
Church Understood as Communion,” 15: The Church contains a “diversity of ministries,
charisms, and forms of life and apostolate within each particular Church” as well as a
diversity “of traditions in liturgy and culture among the various particular Churches”
(citing Lumen Gentium, 23).
25
Ratzinger, Called to Communion, 43. See also Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic, 58:
Pentecost is “a positive counterstroke to the Tower of Babel’s confusion of languages,”
which resulted from the hubristic human attempt to reach the divine unity.
26
The petering-out of the hierarchically imposed Catholic Action lay movement is an
example.
27
Joseph Ratzinger, New Outpourings of the Spirit, trans. Michael J. Miller and Henry
Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 53.

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before death is marked by cruciformity. We are to complete the
sufferings of Christ (Col 1:24) in our own flesh (Gal 6:17), as a
down-payment for the resurrection of that flesh in imitation of
Christ (1 Cor 15:20).28 The ecclesial measure of a mission is its
building up of the body of Christ. “Now there are varieties of
gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but
the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the
same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given
the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor
12:4-7; see also 1 Cor 14:4, 12). These charisms must be tested
by the Church (1 Thess 5:21).
The dogmatic criterion of true teaching encompasses both the
cruciform and the ecclesial. The “unity of the faith and of the
knowledge of the Son of God” (Eph 4:13) is essential in order
for the whole to “grow up in every way into him who is the head,
into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together
by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is
working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself
up in love” (Eph 4:15-16). Heresy, as a selective cherry-picking
out of the whole truth of God, damages the unity of the body of
Christ. When this damage occurs, it simultaneously harms the
true diversity of ecclesial missions. Without the unity, the body
would lack diversity as well. “There would be no living body but
only sheer disparity,” individual organs and parts of the body cut
off from the whole. Cut off from the living unity of Christ in his
Holy Spirit, these individual pieces are lifeless and ultimately
decomposing parts that lack any function and coherence. Hence,
office in the Church is necessary as “pure service” to this unity.29
III. A SYMPHONY OF CHARISMS
Let us now build on the theological foundation of Christ as
the hypostatic Way and the Church as the way to the Way. I
propose that we supplement synodality with another metaphor:
28

See also Mystici Corporis, 2, concerning the Church’s unity with Christ in suffering,
for the sake of present and future joy.
29
Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic, 70.

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Synodality can be understood as a symphony of charisms or
missions given by the Holy Spirit and flowing from the unique
and universal mission of Christ the personal Way to the Father.
Here I am using the language of Balthasar, who speaks of
Christian pluralism in terms of a symphony. A symphony, as a
“sounding together,” brings together all the instruments
together, “integrated into a whole sound.”30 This symphony is a
parallel image to that of synodality, a coming-together of ways.
The different instruments and their melodies are called into
being by the Creator Spiritus as the agent of the Incarnation,
hypostatically in Mary’s womb and mystically within the Church
as body of Christ. Ratzinger argues that the necessary localization
of the bishop in his diocese was supplemented first by
monasticism and then by other ecclesial movements with an
inherently universal outlook.
Waves of movements are always sweeping through her that reinstate and
reapply the universalist aspect of the apostolic mission and the radical dimension
of the gospel. . . . There must always be in the Church ministries and missions
that do not belong purely to the local Church but serve the task given the whole
Church, the task of spreading the gospel.31

These movements do not simply recycle a few, historically
approved forms but are “ever new—necessarily so because they
are the Holy Spirit’s answer to the changing circumstances in
which the Church is living.” They cannot be created by committee or out of human ingenuity. Again: “They have to be given
to us, and they are given.”32
30
Ibid., 7. One could argue that, even more than symphonic, the unity is polyphonic.
Unlike classical symphony, in which the supporting instruments often do not have a
coherent melody without the major melodic line that they are supporting, in polyphony
each instrument plays a melody with an audible coherence. This experience matches
(ideally) the experience of a life as narrated by an individual; each life seems to have its
own narrative coherence: a beginning, a middle, and an end. One can only guess at the
narrative of other lives. But when combined polyphonically, the surpassingly transcendent
tune of divine providence is heard, as the unity of narrated melodies, a unity that could
never be guessed but yet somehow makes perfect and even inevitable sense.
31
Ratzinger, New Outpourings, 42, 52.
32
Ibid., 53. See Peter Casarella, “The Pneumatology of the Synodal Church,” The
Thomist 87 (2023): esp. 283-87.

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The givenness of such ecclesial charisms means that they,
especially in the aggregate, cannot be deciphered through purely
human means. The symphony is transcendent, because of its
divine origin and goal. Hence, discernment of one’s mission and
identity in Christ, in service of the Church, is a basic Christian
activity. Office within the Church is given to be in service of this
discernment.
To reject these forms simply because of their novelty or their
sudden arrival on the scene, perhaps within a group with no
ecclesial authority, is to misunderstand how the Spirit works.
Members of the hierarchy who do this are not attuned to the
music of the Holy Spirit. But this does not mean that acceptance
of ecclesial movements and missions should be pro forma; they
must be scrutinized, and a true calling by the Spirit will withstand
the scrutiny. The movements must be submitted to the ultimate
test, that of their faithfulness to the Way who is Christ, who is
truth and love.
It is Church office that wrests the individual’s own criteria from him and hands
them over to the Lord of the Church, guaranteeing that the Church’s experience
of love shall transcend itself in the direction of the love of Christ (as Head of
the Church) and shall overcome all its subjectivisms and attain the objectivity of
that love that “believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor
13:7).33

Thus, office within the Church must be attentive to the true
diversity of missions within the body, as surprises of the Holy
Spirit who blows where he will, and it must stretch all Christians
out of their limited horizons to a truly universal, ecclesial plane.
The unity of creation’s symphony cannot be heard through
listening only to one instrument or even to several of them. If the
unity is transcendent, rooted in the divine plan of salvation, the
melody can only be “heard” eschatologically.34 Attentive listening
is always primarily an attempt to perceive the symphonic tune of
God’s plan; it is attention to the Father’s providence rather than
a mere dialectical recognition of the other. The latter, when done
33
34

Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic, 102.
Ibid., 9.

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through worldly means, has a place, but it does not rise to the
level of truly spiritual (i.e., in the Holy Spirit) discernment; it
remains on a purely horizontal level. Office within the Church is
equipped for much more, namely, for preserving the catholic
unity of Christ’s bridal body. Attentive listening is the Church’s
discernment of whether this charism is truly a gift of the Spirit
for the building up of the Church in love or rather an assertion
of subjective experience contrary to the unity of the Church.
The ecclesial task of fostering unity belongs fundamentally to
the pope, who serves as the sign and instrument of this unity.35
This unity is a unity of doctrine, of worship, and of community.36
In addition, each bishop is the principle and foundation of the
unity of his diocese. The bishop shares the common duty of proclaiming the Gospel and of supporting the missions of Christians.37 This episcopal task, rooted in a third mark, apostolicity,
unites his local church with the universal Church. Ratzinger
teaches, “The bishop is the ligature of catholicity. He keeps his
church connected with the others and thus embodies the
apostolic and, therefore, the catholic element of the Church.”38
Even so, the charism of unity belongs to the bishop of Rome in a
particular way. “We could even say that the primacy of the
successor of Peter is there to guarantee the presence of these
essential components of ecclesial life,” Ratzinger writes, “and to
bring them into an ordered relationship with the structures of the
local Church.”39
In reflecting on these institutional roles, we must remember
that they are also charisms, gifts of the Spirit.40 They are not
human impositions upon the freedom of the Church’s members,
although they can appear or even be performed in that way; there
is no guarantee that members of the hierarchy, even the pope,
will not err in their activity of confirming or suppressing ecclesial
35

Lumen Gentium, 13, 18.
See the triplex vincula of unity as presented in Nichols, Figuring out the Church,
17-24.
37
Lumen Gentium, 23-24.
38
Ratzinger, Called to Communion, 88.
39
Ratzinger, New Outpourings of the Spirit, 53.
40
See ibid., 22-27.
36

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269

movements and charisms. This possibility is an inevitable result
of the human aspect of the Church. But the reaction to this
possibility of prudential error cannot be a rejection of the whole
dominically given structure. The Christian can only respond with
an obedient trust in God’s providence, that the Father will ensure
that the mission will be completed, hopefully by the Christian
who received the mission, but perhaps in another way, by another
person, maybe in another age. The mission is more important
than the individual achievements of the person given it.
Indeed, it is conceivable that the invisible suffering of the
Christian unjustly restricted in his or her ecclesial activity will be
the source of the mission’s ultimate fruitfulness. The Apostle Paul
writes, “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the
growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who
waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one
who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and
each will receive wages according to the labor of each” (1 Cor
3:6-8). This attitude is contrary to any self-assertion, although a
parrhēsia on behalf of one’s mission may be necessary. Still, even
Paul (who excels at this kind of parrhēsia) senses that “boastful
confidence” goes beyond what one can say “with the Lord’s
authority” (2 Cor 11:17). The mission does not serve me; I serve
the mission.
CONCLUSION
The Eucharist as the body of Christ shared out is the
sacramental conveyance of the reality of Christ as the Waywhere-he-is-going. “Corresponding to its goal, therefore, Church
only exists in the dynamic mode, on all the roads of the world.”
This dynamism is maintained and expressed in its Eucharistic
nature, which is not reducible to sociology. The Church is “a
eucharistic process involved in the law of Christ’s life—which is
given to be shared out.”41 Synodality as a symphony of charisms
has its place here. Christ the Way, in whom we “move,”
incorporates us so that the Father can send us on our way of self41

Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic, 95-96.

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giving mission. There is no room here for clinging to one’s
authenticity apart from the individualizing mission given by
Christ. The Eucharist is the gracious secret behind the Church’s
supernatural resolution to the one-many problem.
Only in retrospect will we know if synodality as concretely
practiced now does justice to the Christological, Trinitarian, and
ecclesiological reality of Christ as the incarnate and hypostatic
Way-to-the-Father and of the Eucharistic Church as the
guarantor of the ways of mission in the Son. Anyone discerning
the signs of the times can see the warnings—subjectivism,
antinomianism, and psychological reductionism among them.
Such sub-Christian counter-signs flourish outside the Church and
too often within her. But we do know the way forward. Christ
responds, Egō eimi hē hodos. The Holy Spirit will give us the
means, if we accept them, to find our being and to “move” within
that Way.

The Thomist 87 (2023): 271-88

THE PNEUMATOLOGY OF THE SYNODAL CHURCH
PETER CASARELLA
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina

I. THE VOICE FROM THE EMPTY CHAIR

T

HE GIFT AND AGENCY of the Holy Spirit are necessary for and central to a Church that aims to embark
on a synodal path. The Holy Spirit guides the entire
people of God, and the ecclesial discernment that allows the
people to follow in the footsteps of Christ is also a product of
the work of the Spirit. This recognition of a profoundly pneumatological presence of God on the path to synodality marks
Pope Francis’s thought: “Synodality is an ecclesial journey
whose soul is the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit there is
no synodality.”1 Even before becoming pope, he emphasized the
metaphor of the Holy Spirit at work in a symphony and
suggested that the harmonizing (but not homogenizing) of
difference would be the mark of the Spirit in this new ecclesial
mode of discernment. More recently, synod participants and
even Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod of
Bishops, have symbolized openness to the Spirit by maintaining
an empty chair at synodal gatherings.2
The Spirit lends harmony to differences that are often
discordant, if not in opposition to one another. The Spirit
1

Pope Francis, “Address to Members of the International Theological
Commission,” November 29, 2019.
2
Heidi Schlumpf, “The Holy Spirit Is Guiding the Synodal Process. But
How?” National Catholic Reporter, October 7, 2022, https://www.ncronline.
org/ opinion/ncr-connections/holy-spirit-guiding-synodal-process-how.
271

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connects these diverse viewpoints because the Spirit is connection itself. The Trinitarian revelation of the Spirit is thus
equally relevant: “Without the Holy Spirit who is the bond of
both, one cannot understand the connecting unity between the
Father and the Son.”3 The Holy Father makes the same point
about the reliance of the synod itself on the unifying work of
the Spirit:
May this Synod be a true season of the Spirit! For we need the Spirit, the evernew breath of God, who sets us free from every form of self-absorption,
revives what is moribund, loosens shackles and spreads joy. The Holy Spirit
guides us where God wants us to be, not to where our own ideas and personal
tastes would lead us. Father Congar once said: “There is no need to
create another Church, but to create a different Church” (True and False
Reform in the Church). For a “different Church”, a Church open to the
newness that God wants to suggest, let us with greater fervour and frequency
invoke the Holy Spirit and humbly listen to him, journeying together as he,
the source of communion and mission, desires: with docility and courage.4

Listening to the Spirit is what prompts members of the Church,
including the bishop of Rome, to chart out a new synodal path.
The report on synodality of the International Theological Commission refers to this prompting as “the parrhesia (‘boldness’) of
the Spirit.”5 But the work of the Spirit in a synodal Church does
not end with the initial impulse to embark on a new path. The
Spirit is invoked and needed also in the process of discernment
itself and in the culminating stage of the enactment of the fruits
of discernment. In short, the Spirit participates in the beginning,
middle, and end of the synodal process (and even, pivotally, in

3
STh I, q. 39, a. 8; cf. STh I, q. 37, a. 1, ad 3, as cited in Evangelii
Gaudium, 117 n. 93.
4
Pope Francis, “Address for the Opening of the Synod,” October 9, 2021,
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/october/
documents/20211009-apertura-camminosinodale.html.
5
International Theological Commission, “Synodality in the Life and
Mission of the Church” (March 2, 2018), 120-21, https://www.vatican.va/
roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20180302_sinodalita_
en.html.

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the reiteration of the process). This essay examines the
development of this thought in the pontificate of Francis.
At the center of this development is an ongoing question
concerning the “when” and “how” of the Spirit. Is synodality
altogether new? If synodality is not new, why do we need it
now? How will we know the difference between genuinely
synodal and false reform, particularly given the strife for the
global Church that has attended the German Synodal Way?
Francis has much to say about the “when” and the “how,” even
though most reporting of his call for a synodal Church has not
focused on this fact. The kairós of this Spirit is likewise frequently invoked but not always grasped, especially since kairós
is a qualitative and not merely a quantitative category.6 The
Spirit of a synodal Church unfolds as a breath of God’s Spirit
and as a guide for the Church, and the timing and mode of the
unfolding must first be laid out on its own terms. In short, one
cannot limit the action of the Spirit to pure linearity (modern
secular progress) nor to pure circularity (Friedrich Nietzsche’s
fate-driven “eternal return of the Same”). The time and way
that the Spirit of a synodal Church unfolds as a breath of God’s
Spirit and as a guide for the Church needs first to be laid out on
its own terms. At the end of this essay, we will return to the
question of the kairós of the Spirit as a mark of a synodal
Church.
II. EVANGELII GAUDIUM: THE CHURCH THAT GOES FORTH
The apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which was
promulgated on November 24, 2013, is the magna carta of
Francis’s pontificate. The leading edge of the Church in Evangelii Gaudium is encapsulated in the statement: “The Church
which ‘goes forth’ is a community of missionary disciples who
take the first step, who are involved and supportive, who bear

6
Massimo Faggioli, “Synodality as Kairos in the Present Ecclesial and
Global Situation,” Perspectiva Teológica (Belo Horizonte) 54 n. 1
(January/April 2022): 89-104, DOI:10.20911/21768757v54n1p89/2022.

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fruit and rejoice.”7 To be frank, the key phrase “the Church
which ‘goes forth’” limps in English. If we imagine the Church
as a dynamic entity, where else would it go except forward?
What alternatives exist to “going forth” except passive introspection or a reactionary stance that turns its back as a dismissal
of the present? These questions assume that the phrase is future
oriented and activist and miss altogether the point of the
original formulation, la iglesia en salida. La iglesia en salida is
poised at the departure gate of mission and has received a
boarding pass for this effort through el primerear de Dios, God’s
prior act of engagement with the missionaries that God has
chosen to work in the vineyard.8
The role of the Spirit in this impulse towards missionary
discipleship is critical. The Spirit exposes “spiritual worldliness”
as a pretentious but widespread sham and replaces it with the
capacity of the “spirit-filled evangelizer” to evangelize oneself
through the constant inner working of the Spirit.9 The pneumatological key to Evangelii Gaudium is the placing of all
charisms of those evangelizers who profess to proclaim the
Gospel at the service of communion.10 Charisms are gifts that
build up the Church as Church and their ecclesial character is a
mark of their authenticity, but not all charisms are immediately
received in the Church with open arms:
To the extent that a charism is better directed to the heart of the Gospel, its
exercise will be more ecclesial. It is in communion, even when this proves
painful, that a charism is seen to be authentic and mysteriously fruitful. On the
basis of her response to this challenge, the Church can be a model of peace in
our world.11

7
Pope Francis, apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (November 24,
2013), 24.
8
El primerear de Dios is based on a neologism used in the original Spanish
of EG, 24. It is translated as “God’s taking the initiative” but in the original
text it has the connotation of God’s surprising or surreptitious presence even
in everyday contexts where we think God is nowhere to be found.
9
EG, 139, 259. On spiritual worldliness, see EG, 93-97.
10
EG, 130-31.
11
EG, 130.

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The pope warns both of the stifling that homogenizes the
distinct gifts of the Spirit and of the danger of self-indulgent
fantasies that fragment the communion of the Church. The
Spirit pervades Evangelii Gaudium as a way of maintaining
unity in diversity (the “polyhedron”) but not yet as an invitation
to synodality.12
III. “QUOD OMNES TANGIT AB OMNIBUS TRACTARI DEBET:”
A KEY MOMENT IN THE PONTIFICATE13
On October 17, 2015, Francis celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the institution of the Synod of Bishops during the
Synod on the Family. This address was important for our theme
because in it the Holy Father shows the continuity of synodality
with the post-Vatican II theology of a synod of Bishops. Moreover, he underscores the discernment in and of the Spirit in the
integration of the ecclesia discens (“a learning Church”) into the
ecclesia docens (“a teaching Church”).14
He demarcates the revival of the “journeying together” in a
synod as “one of the precious legacies of the Second Vatican
Council”:
From the beginning of my ministry as Bishop of Rome, I sought to enhance
the Synod, which is one of the most precious legacies of the Second Vatican
Council. For Blessed Paul VI, the Synod of Bishops was meant to reproduce
the image of the Ecumenical Council and reflect its spirit and method. Pope
Paul foresaw that the organization of the Synod could “be improved upon
with the passing of time.” Twenty years later, Saint John Paul II echoed that
thought when he stated that “this instrument might be further improved.
12
On the polyhedron, see EG, 236 and Peter Casarella, “Whole and Parts:
Ecumenism and Interreligious Encounters in Pope Francis’s Teología del
Pueblo,” in The Whole Is Greater Than Its Parts: Ecumenism and InterReligious Encounters in the Age of Pope Francis, ed. Peter Casarella and
Gabriel Said Reynolds (New York: Crossroad, 2020), 31-70.
13
This Latin phrase translates as: “What touches all must be approved by
all.”
14
On this distinction and its place in the history of theology, see
International Theological Commission, “Sensus fidei in the Life of the
Church” (2014), passim.

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Perhaps collegial pastoral responsibility could be more fully expressed in the
Synod.” . . . We must continue along this path. The world in which we live,
and which we are called to love and serve, even with its contradictions,
demands that the Church strengthen cooperation in all areas of her mission. It
is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the
third millennium.15

The bishops of Rome who preceded him sought to improve the
“instrument” of the synod. Francis thus promotes the path of
synodality as a way to strengthen the mission of the Church for
the third millennium. The opening of this path had already been
prepared for by his immediate predecessors.
This new path involves journeying together in the Spirit.
Why does the Holy Father so frequently have recourse to the
metaphor of walking with the people? In a meeting with clergy
and consecrated people in the diocesan cathedral of Assisi on
October 4, 2013, he addressed this issue:
What could be more beautiful for us than walking with our people? It is
beautiful! When I think of the parish priests who knew the names of their
parishioners, who went to visit them; even as one of them told me: “I know
the name of each family's dog.” They even knew the dog's name! How nice it
was! What could be more beautiful than this? I repeat it often: walking with
our people, sometimes in front, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes
behind: in front in order to guide the community, in the middle in order to
encourage and support; and at the back in order to keep it united and so that
no one lags too, too far behind, to keep them united. There is another reason
too: because the people have a “nose”! The people scent out, discover, new
ways to walk, it has the “sensus fidei,” as theologians call it. What could be
more beautiful than this? During the Synod, it will be very important to
consider what the Holy Spirit is saying to the laity, to the People of God, to
everyone.16

15
Pope Francis, “Address Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the
Institution of the Synod of Bishops” (Oct. 17, 2015), https://
www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/october/documents/papafrancesco_ 20151017_50-anniversario-sinodo.html.
16
Pope Francis, Cathedral of San Rufino, Assisi, “Meeting with the Clergy,
Consecrated People, and Members of Diocesan Pastoral Councils,” October 4,
2013,
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/october/
documents/papa-francesco_20131004_clero-assisi.html; translation slightly
altered.

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“Walking” refers to the active engagement of accompaniment—
listening and paying attention to what is happening in the lives
of the ordinary people of God. Walking does not involve
relinquishing a role for the ordained priest or consecrated
religious or descending into pure activism. It requires the
pastoral agility and prudential wisdom to know when one is
supposed to be in front, in the middle, or at the back of the
flock. Walking is not “walking” in a biblical and pneumatological key without the spiritual discernment of the path that
one is called to tread.
Synodality depends on the ability of the whole Church to
listen to the Spirit of truth:
A synodal Church is a Church which listens, which realizes that listening “is
more than simply hearing.” It is a mutual listening in which everyone has
something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of
Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the
“Spirit of truth” (Jn 14:17), in order to know what he “says to the Churches”
(Rev 2:7). The Synod of Bishops is the point of convergence of this listening
process conducted at every level of the Church’s life. The Synod process
begins by listening to the people of God, which “shares also in Christ’s
prophetic office”, according to a principle dear to the Church of the first
millennium: “Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari debet.” The Synod
process then continues by listening to the pastors. Through the Synod Fathers,
the bishops act as authentic guardians, interpreters and witnesses of the faith
of the whole Church, which they need to discern carefully from the [often]
changing currents of public opinion [che devono saper attentamente
distinguere dai flussi spesso mutevoli dell'opinione pubblica].17

The ancient principle of quod omnes tangit, which had been
revived in the Middle Ages by the canonist Gratian and then
again in the twentieth century by the Dominican theologian
Yves Congar, also signifies a path of discernment.18 The role of
the bishops as authentic guardians includes the discernment of
the difference between the prophetic share of the people of God

17

Pope Francis, “Address Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the
Institution of the Synod of Bishops.”
18
Yves Congar, “Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus tractari et approbari
debet,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 35 (1958): 210-59.

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in the office of Christ and fads. The original Italian read by the
Holy Father to the assembly includes the adverb spesso, “often,”
which shows that the bishops are not necessarily called at each
juncture to oppose eternal truths of the Gospel to issues and
positions that are presented in headlines of daily news. The
bishops too must prudentially discern in and through the Spirit.
Synodality puts discernment in the hands of the whole
Church and also allows the local Church to have an enhanced
voice in this communion of dialogue. Does this opening to a
new form of communion undermine hierarchy? The pope
maintains that a synodal Church will realize “a sound decentralization” of the institution cum et sub petro.19 The bishop
of Rome can speak in and through his office and not just to
voice personal opinions. As such, he acts as “supreme witness to
the fides totius Ecclesiae, ‘the guarantor of the obedience and
the conformity of the Church to the will of God, to the Gospel
of Christ, and to the Tradition of the Church.’”20 The synod
therefore cannot be realized as an ecclesial body without this
witness:
The fact that the Synod always acts cum Petro et sub Petro—indeed, not only
cum Petro, but also sub Petro—is not a limitation of freedom, but a guarantee
of unity. For the Pope is, by will of the Lord, “the perpetual and visible source
and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of
the faithful.” Closely related to this is the concept of hierarchica communio as
employed by the Second Vatican Council: the Bishops are linked to the Bishop
of Rome by the bond of episcopal communion (cum Petro) while, at the same
time, hierarchically subject to him as head of the college (sub Petro).21

Francis is reinforcing what Lumen Gentium 22 said regarding
the bishop’s constitution as a member of the episcopal body in
virtue of sacramental consecration and hierarchical communion
(vi sacramentalis consecrationis et hierarchica comunione) with
the head and members of the body. To be united in head and
19

Pope Francis, “Address Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the
Institution of the Synod of Bishops.”
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.

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members, Lumen Gentium continues, this unity requires
communion with the bishop of Rome. Maintaining a Church
that acts and is sub Petro is thus an essential part of the synodal
process.
IV. TWO TEACHING DOCUMENTS ON SENSUS FIDEI FIDELIUM
In the first five years of Francis’s pontificate, the International Theological Commission produced two documents that
spoke to the theological foundations of synodality: “Sensus fidei
in the life of the Church” (2014) and “Synodality in the Life
and Mission of the Church” (2018). Both documents explore
the rich historical precedents for the turn in Lumen Gentium to
a more dialogical understanding of the Church as communion.22
Here we can highlight only a few key elements that speak to
the role of the Spirit as the moderator of this dialogue.
Trinitarian pneumatology is the starting point for thinking
about the Church as a synod:
The Church is de Trinitate plebs adunata, called and qualified as the People of
God to set out on her mission “to God, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.”
In this way, in Christ and through the Holy Spirit, the Church shares in the
life of communion of the Blessed Trinity, which is destined to embrace the
whole of humanity. In the gift and commitment of communion can be found
the source, the form and the scope of synodality, inasmuch as it expresses the
specific modus vivendi et operandi of the People of God in the responsible and
ordered participation of all its members in discerning and putting into practice
ways of fulfilling its mission. Exercising synodality makes real the human
person’s call to live communion, which comes about through sincere selfgiving, union with God and unity with our brothers and sisters in Christ.23

The vertical relationship between the people assembled by God
(plebs adunata) and the self-giving of persons in the triune God
can never be lost from view. Synodality is nothing more than a
specific way of living and acting of this people in and through

22
The encyclical Ecclesiam Suam (1964) of Pope Paul VI is also a key part
of this general development.
23
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 45.

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their participation in the divine communion. Any attempt to
turn the theology of the people of God into something less than
a specification of the Second Vatican Council’s ecclesiology of
communion will therefore go awry.
The life given ex Trinitate exists as a real, intermingled
communion in the life of the whole Church. “Sensus fidei in the
life of the Church” affirms that the teaching of Lumen Gentium
12 on the manifestation of a supernaturalis sensus fidei totius
populi (“the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters
of faith”) has a context both in the history of scriptural exegesis
and theology as well as in the prehistory and development of
the council. In Lumen Gentium 12 itself this notion of ecclesial
discernment is linked to the Spirit of truth. With that connection in mind, two points are worth noting.
First, the faith that has within it a supernatural instinct
(sensus) is itself a virtue that has been nurtured by God within
each member of the people. It is not a poll-tested result of a
survey of opinions or a least common denominator.24 The Spirit
of truth elevates the sensus fidei beyond what is mere common
opinion. Listening to the sensus fidei is a pneumatological discipline performed in concert with a community of believers.
Scripture already prepares for this path. In John 16:13, for
example, we are told, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will
guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own
but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the
things that are to come.” Aquinas interpreted this verse to mean
that the Church as a congregatio fidelium cannot err in matters
of faith because she is taught by God, united with Christ her
head, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit.25 He “takes this as a
premise on the grounds that the universal Church is governed
by the Holy Spirit who, as the Lord Jesus promised, would
teach her ‘all truth.’” As the International Theological Com24
On sensus fidei and its relationship to public opinion, see ITC, “Sensus
fidei in the Life of the Church,” 113-19.
25
STh II-II, q. 1, a. 9, s.c.; III, q. 83, a. 5, s.c. (with regard to the liturgy of
the Mass); Quodl. IX, q. 8 (with regard to canonization), as cited in ITC,
“Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church,” 21.

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mission document on sensus fidei states: “He knew that the
faith of the universal Church is authoritatively expressed by her
prelates, but he was also particularly interested in each believer’s personal instinct of faith, which he explored in relation
to the theological virtue of faith.”26 This last point is easily
ignored but at the peril of reducing sensus fidei to a sociological
construct rather than an outright gift.
Second, being guided by the Spirit en tē alētheia pasē (“into
all truth”) likewise opens up the eschatological dimension of attending to the sensus fidei.27 The Spirit of truth becomes whole
and complete against this open-ended and future-oriented
horizon that is found in God. The metaphor of the empty chair
that is being used in synodal sessions already makes it clear that
the process must be radically open-ended without being purely
circular.
V. DE-COLONIAL PROMPTINGS: QUERIDA AMAZONIA
In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis states, “The Spirit adorns the
Church, showing her new aspects of revelation and giving her a
new face.”28 The issue here is not a mere adornment from some
esoteric source but the beauty of the Gospel itself as it is refracted in distinct and diverse cultures. The distinction between
idolatry and an authentic inculturation of the Gospel rests on
the agency of the Holy Spirit because the Spirit draws out what
is good and holy from new cultures that receive the Gospel of
Jesus Christ for the first time, according to Francis’s apostolic
exhortation Querida Amazonia. Without an acknowledgement
of this role for the Spirit and the need to discern goodness and
holiness as cultural forms in diverse contexts through the Spirit,
26

ITC, “Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church,” 28.
See also “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 109e: “The
unity of the community is not real without this inner télos which guides it
along the paths of time towards its eschatological goal, ‘that God may be all in
all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28).”
28
EG, 116, as cited in Pope Francis, post-synodal exhortation Querida
Amazonia (Feb. 2, 2020), 68.
27

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the preoccupation that can be raised about cultural relativism
cannot be adequately addressed.29
The Holy Spirit is thus very active in the emergence of the
Amazonian holiness and Amazonian spiritual inculturation that
the Holy Father evokes in the exhortation.
Let us not be quick to describe as superstition or paganism certain religious
practices that arise spontaneously from the life of peoples. Rather, we ought
to know how to distinguish the wheat growing alongside the tares, for
“popular piety can enable us to see how the faith, once received, becomes
embodied in a culture and is constantly passed on.”30

Discernment in the Spirit is the key to distinguishing the wheat
from the chaff. The decolonial turn expressed here with the
recognition of the gifts found in the cultures of the first peoples
is not separate from a Christocentric filter that allows for
distinctions. They are in fact one and the same. The recognition
of Latin American popular piety as a resource for evangelization
is not a new insight for Francis. It reflects ruminations from the
Southern Cone of Latin America generated by the Chilean priest
Fr. Joaquín Alliende and his collaborators at the Medellín
General Conference of 1979, which were then strengthened at
Aparecida and again in the pontificate of Francis. This wellestablished itinerary of theological aesthetics that has recently
been illuminated with fresh eyes by Emily Normand.31

29

On the problem of cultural relativism and its dilution of the diverse
expressions of the one Gospel, see Peter Casarella, “Culture and Conscience
in the Thought of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI,” in Christianity and
the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction, ed. Helen Alvaré and Jeffrey
Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 265-84.
30
Querida Amazonia, 78.
31
Emily Normand, “The Beautiful Road to Puebla: Joaquín Alliende,
Mariology, and the Flowering of Popular Piety,” Teología y vida 63 (2022):
515-37. On the larger itinerary, one may consult Alejandro García-Rivera, The
Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics (Collegeville, Minn.:
The Liturgical Press, 1999).

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VI. THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT IN THE SYNOD
The unity of the Father and Son that is the Spirit lends itself
to both the process and the outcome of synodality. This
harmonizing that preserves difference is given to God’s people
when they de-privatize themselves of their own interests and
agendas and open themselves to the Spirit’s gift of unity. How
does this gift manifest itself in the synodal Church? In order to
shed some light on this question, let me conclude with a synthesis drawn from four final reflections: (1) the need to attend
to the promptings of the Spirit, (2) the connection between
ecclesial discernment and the Holy Spirit, (3) the new face of
Spirit and institution in the synodal Church, and (4) the central
role of the Spirit in tethering the synodal process to God.
Francis frequently admonishes the people of God to be led
by the promptings of the Spirit.32 He also admonishes the entire
flock to overcome resistance to the Spirit and sees the Council
of Jerusalem (Acts 15) as a paradigmatic instance of the
spontaneous work of the Spirit. He underscores that we are
often afraid of the surprise that God has in store for us. If we
are led by the Spirit, then we recognize that God always brings
newness:
Often we follow him, we accept him, but only up to a certain point. It is hard
to abandon ourselves to him with complete trust, allowing the Holy Spirit to
be the soul and guide of our lives in our every decision. We fear that God may
force us to strike out on new paths and leave behind our all too narrow,
closed and selfish horizons in order to become open to his own. . . . Are we
open to “God’s surprises”? Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of
the Holy Spirit? Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths
which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient
structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new? We
would do well to ask ourselves these questions all through the day.33

32

Cf. Luke 2:27; 4:1.
Pope Francis, “Homily for the Solemnity of Pentecost,” May 19, 2013,
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papafrancesco_20130519_omelia-pentecoste.html.
33

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The process of synodality begins with the daily self-examination
of openness to the promptings of the Spirit. One might object
that pastoral planning could become chaotic in the process.
What if a parish or diocese has a five-year plan and the program
managers arrive daily with a new version? Prompting must also
therefore include being called to have the fortitude to bring a
plan to completion and to maintain a coalition of coworkers in
the vineyard. If the structures that were erected for the pastoral
plan have not lost their capacity for openness to what is new,
they should remain in place. Danger arises when finishing the
project becomes an end in itself, to be pursued solely for the
sake of self-satisfaction. God’s newness overcomes barricades
but should not be a barrier to completion.
Second, the Church is called to ecclesial discernment, a
process that centers on “listening to the ‘groans’ of the
Spirit.’”34 Ecclesial discernment is not the same as personal
discernment. It is also not personal discernment writ large or
multiplied infinitely. It is a form of discernment nourished by
the image of the Trinity in the Church. Ecclesial discernment
hence grows out of “the ecclesiology of communion and the
specific spirituality and praxis that follow on from it involve the
mission of the entire People of God, so that it becomes
‘necessary today more than ever (...) to be formed in the principles and methods of a way of discernment that is not only
personal but also communitarian.’”35
There is no single and universal blueprint for engaging this
process. By the same token, the process is hardly arbitrary.
Ecclesial discernment unfolds under the specific conditions in
which the people of God find themselves. This communal
discernment also involves reading the signs of the times under
the guidance of the Holy Spirit and discovering God’s plan in a
particular historical situation.36 The image of the Trinity in each

34

Rom 8:26, as cited in ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the
Church,” 114.
35
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 113.
36
Ibid.

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distinct culture as nourished by distinct peoples is elicited in
prayer and through prayerful reflection:
Discernment must be carried out in a space of prayer, meditation, reflection
and study, which we need to hear the voice of the Spirit; by means of sincere,
serene and objective dialogue with our brothers and sisters; by paying
attention to the real experiences and challenges of every community and every
situation; in the exchange of gifts and in the convergence of all energies in
view of building up the Body of Christ and proclaiming the Gospel; in the
melting-pot of feelings and thoughts that enable us to understand the Lord’s
will; by searching to be set free by the Gospel from any obstacle that might
weaken our openness to the Spirit.37

Trinitarian pneumatology is thus the key to ecclesial
discernment. A discernment of spirits that is somehow uprooted
from the Trinitarian communion found in the Church will fail
to meet the challenge of reading the signs of the times.
A third issue concerns the relationship between Spirit and
institution. What is the fundamental principle under the banner
of synodality to guarantee the presence of the Spirit in the institution? Von Balthasar was preoccupied with this issue, for he
thought that contemporary spirituality was riddled with utopian
social programs and self-made plans for spiritual advancement.
He writes:
As a general rule we can say that the Holy Spirit always lives in the Church as
objective as well as subjective Spirit: as institution, or rule, or disciplina, and
as inspiration and loving obedience to the Father in this spirit of adoption.
Neither one can be separated from the other, since we stand under the law of
Christ who should assume form in us, and not just as the servant of God
exerting himself with his labors on earth but also as the Risen One hidden in
God.38

In this view, processes such as the synodal path of listening
threaten to reduce the presence of the Spirit in the Church
strictly to the subjective side of the equation. Francis clarifies

37

Ibid., 114.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Spirit and Institution,” in Explorations in
Theology, vol. 4, Spirit and Institution (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 239.
38

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PETER CASARELLA

that four elements must be present to invite the presence of the
Holy Spirit into a synodal gathering: listening to the apostles’
teaching; safeguarding mutual communion; the breaking of the
bread or Eucharist; and prayer.39 Francis’s critique of spiritual
worldliness is particularly effective in the context of priests,
religious, and laity who propose secular schemes for gathering
people without attending to all four of these elements and
represents a common front with von Balthasar. Von Balthasar
takes the Eucharistic form of self-giving to be regulative because
it allows the Spirit of Christ to conform the body of the believer
directly to the death and resurrection of Christ, a prioritizing
that is more properly associated in Francis’s theology with the
sacrament of baptism and the renewal of baptismal vows by an
adult.40 It is possible to exaggerate the subjective side of synodal
discernment to the detriment of the sacramental mediation of
the Spirit. Francis’s preaching on the necessity of the four
elements mentioned above guards against that misinterpretation
of his thought.

39
Pope Francis, General Audience, November 25, 2020: “At times, I feel
tremendous sadness when I see a community that has good will but takes the
wrong path because it thinks that the Church is built up in meetings, as if it
were a political party: the majority, the minority, what does this one think,
that one, the other. . . . ‘This is like a Synod, the synodal path that we must
take.’ I ask myself: where is the Holy Spirit there? Where is prayer? Where is
communitarian love? Where is the Eucharist?”, https://www.vatican.va/
content/francesco/en/audiences/2020/documents/papa-francesco_20201125_
udienza-generale.html.
40
On von Balthasar’s understanding of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit’s
relationship to the Eucharistic form of the Church, see Jonathan Martin
Ciraulo, The Eucharistic Form of God: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Sacramental
Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 71-75.
Francis, on the other hand, says that baptism is rebirth in Christ and should be
celebrated like one’s birthday. See, for example, Pope Francis, Angelus,
January 8, 2023, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2023/
documents/20230108-angelus.html. On this point, see also ITC, “Synodality
in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 46.

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The Spirit tethers to God the entire process of listening to,
evangelizing, and shepherding the people of God.41 One indispensable function of this tethering is to help the people of
God to guard against heresy and schism. Other threats to this
tethering in a synodal Church are well-intentioned programs of
personal self-improvement or utopian social planning that
individual managers or ecclesial bodies impose upon the surprising activity of the Spirit. The Spirit of Christ will not submit
to a management program even with highest pedigree of academic certification. Good practices from that domain can indeed enhance and fortify ecclesial discernment. The synodal
path is a conscious departure from the dead ends of the past,
including the dead end of clericalism and the dead end of
spiritual worldliness that can afflict clergy and laity alike.
CONCLUSION
Synodality is both a process and an outcome. In both cases,
the harmony that allows for synodality to be in any way productive is a product of the agency of the Holy Spirit understood
in a Trinitarian framework. It is quite revealing that “Synodality
on the Life and Mission of the Church” uses the term kairós
only two times: as the section heading of the introduction (“The
Kairós of Synodality”) and in a paragraph on the communal
discernment that has been exercised in every epoch in the
history of the Church.42 The product of synodality is thus never
finished but is also other than an unending and meaningless
cycle. It is directed to the coming of God’s kingdom. Likewise,
“the Kairós of Synodality” refers not just to the present
timeliness of the process for the Church. It also recalls processes
of ecclesial discernment that have served the mission of Christ
in the world in the past but have been largely forgotten.
41
On the Spirit as “tether,” a poetic term coined in a nineteenth-century
Anglican hymn, see the illuminating ethnography of the late Catholic
sociologist Mary Ellen Konieczny, The Spirit's Tether: Family, Work, and
Religion among American Catholics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
42
ITC, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” 1, 113.

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Synodality thus
embraces both aggiornamento
and
ressourcement.
How does the Spirit participate in this synodal process? The
prompt of the Spirit is the believer’s first conscious encounter
with the process. As a conductor of the orchestra, the Spirit
guides the entire process. The Spirit leads from behind and in
front. But the outcome is not to be sought in the headlines of
news reports that speak about exciting or even fruitful
exchanges. The Spirit who guides “into all truth” (John 16:13)
is also always guiding the Church to her heavenly homeland
(Phil 3:20). Fruitful exchanges are themselves a way of
achieving synodality and not the end in itself of the synodal
mode of being a Church. If the synodal Church is guided by the
Spirit, then being guided into the truth is the true end of the
synodal process.

The Thomist 87 (2023): 289-309

COULD “SYNODALITY” DEFEAT “CO-RESPONSIBILITY”?
JOHN C. CAVADINI
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

A

LTHOUGH THE Preparatory Document for the sixteenth
Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops,1 and,
even more, the Working Document for the Continental
Stage of the “synodal journey” both feature the idea of “coresponsibility” in the Church, could it be the case that the notion
of “synodality” as “the form, the style and the structure of the
Church” (PD 2) tends in actuality to the erasure of “coresponsibility” as having any meaning independent of “synodality”? And, since the possibilities of genuine lay leadership in
the Church derive from the idea of “co-responsibility,” could it
be that “synodality,” though intending the contrary, actually
tends towards the erasure of authentic lay leadership in the
Church? That is the question that motivates this essay, which
presents itself as an exercise in theology, that is, in “faith seeking
understanding,” where the mystery of faith of which we are
seeking deeper understanding is the mystery of the Church.
I. THE HISTORY OF CO-RESPONSIBILITY
The idea of “Coresponsibility in the Church” emerged on the
postconciliar scene in 1968 with the publication of the
monograph of the same name written by Léon-Joseph Cardinal

1

Accessed at https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2021/
09/07/210907a.html.
289

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JOHN C. CAVADINI

Suenens.2 (We will return to a consideration of this book
momentarily.) The term re-emerged in the twenty-first century
with remarks of Pope Benedict XVI, which largely went
unnoticed until they were brought back into prominence by a few
scattered voices, perhaps most prominent among them the Most
Rev. Charles J. Chaput as archbishop of Denver and, later, of
Philadelphia.3 Benedict’s remarks are found, primarily, in two of
his allocutions. The first and most substantial was his May 26,
2009 “Address to the Pastoral Convention of the Diocese of
Rome,” speaking as the local bishop in his cathedral, the Lateran
Basilica of St. John, with the title “Co-responsible for the
Church’s Being and Action,” and the subtitle “Church Membership and Pastoral Co-responsibility.”4 The context of the speech
is the Diocese of Rome’s renewed commitment to the priority of
pastoral work in the local parishes. The second, much briefer,
allocution was the 2012 “Message on the Occasion of the Sixth
Ordinary Assembly of the International Forum of Catholic
Action.”5
As I attempted to describe in an earlier essay,6 Benedict’s idea
of co-responsibility flows from the mystery of the Church as
expressed by the “twin images” featured as descriptions of the
mystery of communion in the Church by Vatican II. This
communion ultimately originates in the Trinity and is effected by
the Eucharist:

2
Léon-Joseph Cardinal Suenens, Coresponsibility in the Church, trans. Francis Martin
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), originally published as Co-responsabilité dans
l’église d’aujourd’hui (Bruges: Desclée De Brouwer, 1968).
3
For example, in an undated post from the Pontifical Council on the Laity
(http://www.laici.va/content/laici/en/blog/Chaput.html) or an 2019 address on vocations
(http://www.laici.va/content/laici/en/blog/Chaput.html).
4
https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2009/may/documents/
hf_ben-xvi_spe_20090526_convegno-diocesi-rm.html.
5
https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/messages/pont-messages/2012/
documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20120810_fiac.html.
6
John C. Cavadini, “Co-Responsibility: An Antidote to Clericalizing the Laity?” in
Church Life Journal, March 26, 2020, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/
co-responsibility-is-the-remedy-for-lay-clericalism/.

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The Church, which originates in the Trinitarian God, is a mystery of
communion. . . . This communion is captured under the twin images of the
“People of God” and the “Body of Christ,” where “People of God” expresses
the continuity of the Church’s history, [and] “Body of Christ” expresses the
universality inaugurated in the Cross and in the Lord’s Resurrection.

By the “continuity of the Church’s history,” Benedict has in mind
continuity with Israel, chosen with an orientation to a salvation
with universal extension, an orientation to the Cross, for “in the
Cross, St. Paul says, Christ broke down the wall of separation.”
It is in Christ, as his body, that “we really become the People of
God”:
In giving us his Body, he reunites us in this Body of his to make us one. In the
communion of the “Body of Christ” we all become one people, the People of
God, in which to cite St Paul again all are one and there are no longer
distinctions or differences between Greek and Jew, the circumcised and the
uncircumcised, the barbarian, the Scythian, the slave, the Jew, but Christ is all
in all. He has broken down the wall of distinction.

This is why it is “in Christ” that we really become the people
of God: “For us Christians, therefore, ‘Body of Christ’ is not only
an image, but a true concept, because Christ makes us the gift of
his real Body, not only an image of it. Risen, Christ unites us all
in the Sacrament to make us one Body.”
II. CO-RESPONSIBILITY:
THE RELATION OF HIERARCHY AND LAY FAITHFUL
It is therefore the mystery of the Church as constitutively a
Eucharistic communion that Benedict is contemplating as he
moves to a discussion of co-responsibility. That is why he goes
on to note how the First Eucharistic Prayer makes a distinction
within this one people:
The First Eucharistic Prayer . . . distinguished between servants “we your
servants” and “plebs tua sancta”; therefore should one wish to make a
distinction, one should speak of servants and plebs sancta, while the term
“People of God” expresses the Church all together in their common being.

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As I noted in my earlier article, the discussion of co-responsibility
that follows is thus set up as a discussion about the relationship
of two categories of people to the mission of the Church and to
each other. Specifically, the hierarchy (“we your servants”) is
ordered towards serving the “holy people,” the plebs sancta.
Benedict warns against two false interpretations of Catholic
ecclesiology. The first would be to ignore the emphases that
emerged in Lumen Gentium, and thus to equate “the Church”
with the hierarchy: “On the one hand,” he says, “there is still a
tendency to identify the Church unilaterally with the hierarchy,
forgetting the common responsibility, the common mission of the
People of God, which, in Christ we all share.” On the other hand,
he observes, a tendency in the opposite direction still persists,
namely, to ignore the distinction between “we your servants” (the
hierarchy), and the plebs sancta, “at times even crossing the very
boundaries that exist objectively between the hierarchical
ministry and the responsibilities of the lay faithful in the Church.”
This would defeat co-responsibility almost as much as the first
tendency, which ignores the laity and thinks of “the Church” as
equivalent to the hierarchy, because it removes any particular
charism or “responsibility” as lay. Co-responsibility does not do
away with the distinction between hierarchy and lay, but
presupposes it, and implies a co-responsibility across this distinction which is co-responsible in relation to the other group.
It is within the context of having made this distinction that the
idea of co-responsibility is raised: “Dear brothers and sisters, it is
now time to ask ourselves what point our Diocese of Rome has
reached. To what extent is the pastoral co-responsibility of all,
and particularly of the laity, recognized and encouraged?” The
pope recalls past centuries, in which “thanks to the generous
witness of all the baptized who spent their life educating the new
generations in the faith, healing the sick and going to the aid of
the poor, the Christian community proclaimed the Gospel to the
inhabitants of Rome.” It is this same mission of proclamation and
evangelization that Benedict highlights as the object of coresponsibility for the being and acting of the Church.
One of the fruits of the Diocese of Rome’s heightened attention to the pastoral work of the parishes, he says, was that it

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“helped to develop in the parishes, religious communities,
associations and movements a consciousness of belonging to the
one People of God which, as the Apostle Peter said, God made
his own: that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him (1 Pet
2:9).”
To cite this verse is to invoke the people of God as a royal
priesthood, with each member sharing, on the basis of his or her
baptism, in the priesthood of Christ: “But you are a chosen race,
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you
may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of
darkness into his marvelous light.” The theology of coresponsibility begins by invoking Vatican II’s rediscovery of the
priesthood of the baptized, the mystery of the people of God as
a royal priesthood, with each member ordered towards the
prophetic, royal, and priestly vocation to “declare the wonderful
deeds of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous
light,” that is, to mission, to evangelization.
Pope Francis echoes Benedict’s emphasis on the baptismal
vocation to evangelization: “Every Christian is challenged, here
and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed,
anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not
need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that
love.” Further echoing Benedict’s “Address,” Francis pays particular attention to lay people, who, he says, “are, put simply, the
vast majority of the People of God. The minority—ordained
ministers—are at their service.”7 This is almost a direct echo of
the “servant”/“plebs” distinction Benedict invokes, though
“plebs” includes more than lay people (e.g., religious), even if the
laity are a kind of synecdoche for the nonordained. Francis calls
attention to the “responsibility of the laity, grounded in their
baptism and confirmation”; echoing Benedict, he says that this
responsibility has been very unevenly received and unevenly
formed, “in some cases,” again echoing Benedict, “because lay
persons have not been given the formation needed to take on
7

Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 120; 122. These points follow closely the
development of these same points in the Church Life Journal article mentioned above,
where I also trace the further development of these same ideas by Francis.

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important responsibilities,” while in others, it is “due to an
excessive clericalism” (EG, 102). An “excessive clericalism” is, I
take it, a description of a situation Benedict had described, where,
in people’s minds, both in and outside of the Church, “the
Church” means the hierarchy and so there is no room for “coresponsibility.”
This articulation of co-responsibility seems to move the center
of gravity in the Church away from the hierarchy (as the
Church par excellence) to the baptized, called to evangelize. It
recognizes a sphere of genuine leadership in the mission of the
Church to evangelize, to which the laity are called not by the
hierarchy but by their own baptism. This is not a leadership
independent of the hierarchy, as though the laity are setting up
their own Church—for that would not be evangelization—but
they are inviting people into an encounter with Jesus Christ
precisely in and through ecclesial communion. It is probably
better, then, to say that this articulation of co-responsibility seems
to move the center of gravity of the Church away from the
hierarchy as the Church par excellence to the communio that is
the Church, formed ultimately by the Eucharist. For the grace of
baptism is not an absolute, stand-alone, self-referential gift, nor
is the baptismal priesthood. Both entail a configuration to the
paschal mystery and hence to the sacrifice of Christ that
constitutes his priesthood, and which is also what constitutes the
communion of the Church. Baptism is therefore intrinsically
ordered towards Eucharistic communion.
III. TWO PRIESTHOODS, TWO TYPES OF LEADERSHIP
Lumen Gentium, in the chapter on the people of God,
describes the two priesthoods in the Church:
Though they differ from one another in essence and not merely in degree, the
common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical
priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is
a participation in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest, by the
sacred power he enjoys, teaches and rules the priestly people; acting in the
person of Christ, he makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God
in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood,

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join in the offering of the Eucharist. They likewise exercise that priesthood by
receiving the sacraments, by prayer and thanksgiving, by the witness of a holy
life, and by self-denial and active charity.8

The theology of co-responsibility, when it concerns the laity, is a
theology of the co-responsible relation between the exercise of
these two priesthoods. The baptismal co-responsibility is always
exercised with, or “in relation to,” or “co-”, the responsibility
unique to the ordained. This carves out two distinct, though related, spheres of leadership. There is a leadership associated with
the hierarchical priesthood, that of pastoral governance, authoritative teaching, and sanctification; this is clearly stated in the
passage from Lumen Gentium. But it is important to note what
is not stated. The hierarchical priesthood is not “more” of the
same priesthood that the baptized have. It is not a superpriesthood, somehow completing, displacing or superseding the
common priesthood. There cannot be something “more” priestly
than the priesthood that marks the whole Church, for that would
imply that there is an inner Church of super-Christians, the hierarchy. This, it seems, is the essence of clericalism, and in that case
those denied ordination on the grounds of sex or some other
innate characteristic would be legitimately aggrieved. To say,
then, that the two participations in the priesthood of Christ differ
in essence, that the difference is not a mere difference of degree,
is important.9
8

LG, 10 (The Basic Sixteen Documents Vatican II, ed. Austin Flannery, O.P.
[Northport, N.Y.: Costello Publishing Company, 1996]).
9
See the analysis of Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., A Priestly People, trans. Peter Heinegg
(New York: Paulist Press, 2013). To liken the effect of holy orders to the effect of baptism,
such that it would “transmit a new sanctifying grace, which perfects that of baptism and
thus makes the priest a super-Christian” is not the intention of the council (168). In this
sense, “there is nothing greater than baptism, which gives the baptized their dignity as
children of God” (134). The difference “in essence and not merely in degree,” “essentia
et non gradu tantum” of LG 10, does not mean that they differ in essence as well as in
degree: “there is nothing of that here. The difference between them is not a simple one
of more or less,” rather, they are related by analogy, as a comment by the drafting
committee made clear (138). “Essentia does not mean an essential superiority of the
ministerial priesthood, but rather the opposite,” because “the royal priesthood is a reality
from the order of the life of grace, while the ministerial priesthood is a charism in the
service of the life of grace” (138-39).

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Ironically, it may be the council’s decree on the priesthood
that offers the most promising resources for grounding and
articulating a theory of co-responsibility. Presbyterorum Ordinis
begins with inviting the reader to consider the mystery of the
whole Church as a priestly body:
The Lord Jesus, “whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world” (John
10.36) gave his whole mystical body a share in the anointing of the Spirit with
which he was anointed. In that body, all the faithful are made a holy and kingly
priesthood. They offer spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ, and they
proclaim the mighty acts of him who has called them out of darkness into his
admirable light (see: 1 Peter 2:5, 9).

Among other things, this justifies the priority that Benedict and
Francis give to evangelization as the first task of the Church in
which all have a share. Both popes have carried this vision
forward.
But to support and indeed to build up the royal, priestly
people and all of its members in their mission, such that its
spiritual sacrifices are indeed made “through Christ,” another
participation in the one priesthood of Christ, differing not in
degree but in type from that conferred in baptism, is conferred
by its own sacrament, the document continues, echoing but also
amplifying Lumen Gentium:
The priesthood of presbyters, while presupposing the sacraments of initiation,
is conferred by a special sacrament which, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit,
puts a special stamp on them and so conforms them to Christ the priest in such
a way that they are able to act in the person of Christ the head (PO, 2).

This is, among other reasons, because “no Christian community
is built up which does not grow from and hinge on the celebration
of the most holy Eucharist” (PO, 6). In perhaps the most sublime
passage of Presbyterorum Ordinis, the Eucharist is described as
the “source and summit of all preaching of the Gospel” (PO, 5).
In fact,
the other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the
apostolate are bound up with the Eucharist and are directed towards it. For in

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the most blessed Eucharist is contained the entire spiritual wealth of the Church,
namely Christ himself our Pasch and our living bread.

The building up of the Church is not just adding numbers to a
humanly formed merely sociological grouping through
preaching—that is, bare group proselytizing. Instead, preaching
is directed towards incorporating people into the one body—
Christ’s body, not a body of our invention or agency—into the
one people of God—not our self-designed people—through their
reception of the sacraments of initiation, ordered toward the
Eucharist, by which people are fully incorporated (see
CCC, 1396) into the body of Christ and his royal priesthood.
In other words, the ordained ministry is ordered not towards
itself, but rather towards the priestly people, and ordained
priesthood retains its fundamental character as the share in
Christ’s priesthood, which constitutes the Church. On the other
hand, when the baptized exercise their royal priesthood in
evangelization, it is not just to spread knowledge of the Word of
God dislocated from its ecclesial home, for then it is not really
a priesthood, since the communion of the Church is communion
in Christ’s sacrifice. Evangelization is intended to bring people to
the encounter with the risen Lord which is incorporation into the
Eucharistic body through configuration to Christ’s sacrifice.
The priesthood of the baptized, as a priesthood, flows from
the one sacrifice of Christ and its exercise is thus intrinsically
ordered towards that sacrifice. That means it cannot be exercised
fully apart from the ministry of the ordained, nor is it truly
exercised if it tends toward the rupture of communion instead of
toward building communion. This would include evangelizing
activity that rejected the authoritative teaching of the magisterium, or was undertaken in defiance of legitimate hierarchical
authority. At the same time, it does not mean permission is
necessary: “there is no need of a supplementary mandate from
the hierarchy” to exercise the duty to proclaim Christ which
comes “by virtue of the grace of baptism.”10 The two priesthoods

10

Ibid., 130.

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are mutually interrelated, and thus we have co-responsibility for
the being and acting of the Church.
On the one hand:
The best way to situate the priestly ministry within [the Church] as the wholly
priestly people is . . . to emphasize that its service consists in making the royal
or spiritual priesthood grow in such a way that, to speak like St. Augustine, the
entire holy City of God may become a spiritual sacrifice agreeable to God
through Jesus Christ.11

The royal priesthood remains primary as the end towards which
the ministerial priesthood is ordered: “The Christian minister is
not defined uniquely in relation to the Eucharistic body, but
also, by this very fact, to its mystical Body, of which he is put in
charge at his own level of responsibility.”12 On the other hand,
the exercise of the baptismal priesthood is always to promote the
spiritual sacrifice to which all people are called, and thus is
ordered towards the communion of the Church, effected only
through the sacramental ministry of priests. Jean-Pierre Torrell
points out that “The Eucharist is presented not only as the center
of the whole sacramental organism, but also as ‘the source and
apex of all the work of preaching the gospel,’” as we have seen.
“What this means,” he comments later, “is that evangelization is
not only ‘launched’ from the celebration of Eucharistic worship,
whence it has its fecundity, but that it ‘lands’ there, because it is
only by the Eucharist that the full insertion of believers into the
Body of Christ is achieved.”13
IV. CO-RESPONSIBILITY AND THE EUCHARIST
This means that a theology of co-responsibility, one that is
able to distinguish a legitimate sphere of true leadership in the
Church for the laity, distinct from that of the hierarchy though
related to it, cannot be developed simply from reflection on
baptism, but must be developed from that towards which baptism
11

Ibid., 126.
Ibid.
13
Ibid., 181.
12

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itself is ordered, namely, the Eucharist and the communion of the
mystical body of Christ which it efficaciously signifies. This
means that, although it is true that all the members of the Church
are “co-responsible” for the being and mission of the Church
because of their baptism, this “co-responsibility” is exhibited in
relationships that depend on one’s position in the mystical body
constituted by the Eucharist. The hierarchy are “co-responsible,”
since without them there is no Church, no Eucharistic communion, possible, and their co-responsibility exists as a function
of their service to the priesthood of the baptized.
Cardinal Suenens’s 1968 treatment of co-responsibility
strongly emphasizes its source in baptism:
If we were to be asked what we consider to be that seed of life deriving from
the council which is most fruitful in pastoral consequences, we would answer
without any hesitation: it is the rediscovery of the people of God as a whole, as
a single reality; and then by way of consequence, the coresponsibility thus
implied for every member of the Church. (Coresponsibility in the Church, 30)

In fact, the cardinal comes close to overemphasizing it:
In presenting the Church as the people of God, the council immediately took a
stand, more fundamental than the organic and functional distinction between
hierarchy and laity, and considered that which is common to all – baptism. . . .
Whether they be members of the hierarchy or not, all Christians are first and
foremost “the faithful” in the deepest meaning of this word, that is, “the
believers.” We can never meditate enough on the baptismal foundation of the
church, this primal mystery of Christian existence. (Ibid.)

V. BAPTISM ORDERED TOWARD THE EUCHARIST
The reason I say Suenens comes close to overemphasizing
baptism as a source for the theology of co-responsibility is that
he seems completely to ignore the way in which both Lumen
Gentium and Presbyterorum Ordinis locate communion in the
Church as ultimately the fruit of the Eucharist, with baptism itself
ordered towards the Eucharist. He seems almost to override this
perspective:

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The sacrament of baptism is the gateway to Christian life. The other sacraments
suppose that we have already “entered.” Their perspective is different. Baptism
is the root of all Christian life, and of all religious life. . . . It is that point from
which all vocations, functions and charisms derive their life. In the church of
God, this fundamental equality of all is the primary fact.

It is true that, as I have mentioned above and as he goes on to
say, “there is no superbaptism,” and thus, he says, “there are no
castes, no privileges” (Gal 3:28 [Suenens, Coresponsibility in the
Church, 30-31]). But his development of this point is worrying:
“The greatest day in the life of a pope,” or “a bishop or priest”
as mentioned in the previous sentence in the text, “is not that of
his election or coronation,” or, it is implied, his ordination, “but
the day on which he receives that which the Greek fathers call
the holy and unbreakable seal of baptismal regeneration,” which
may certainly be true enough, in its own way, as would be the
next sentence, “His first duty, like that of all of us, is to live the
Christian life in obedience to the gospel.” But the exposition
seems to pass into overemphasis when he says, next, that “His
own proper mission derives from this duty” (ibid., 31). Yes, the
ordained minister is called to holiness in that universal call
received in baptism, but his ordination does not “derive” from
baptism, and therefore his own proper mission, as ordained, and
thus his “co-responsibility,” as ordained, derives from holy
orders. If not, we revert to a Reformation doctrine of ministry in
the Church. What follows seems to be a fundamental misreading
of Lumen Gentium, Presbyterorum Ordinis, and related conciliar
literature:
The decision to include within the Constitution of the Church a chapter on the
people of God sanctioned the desire of the council to derive all that ought to be
said concerning the mission, functions and tasks of the faithful from the
“common” or universal Christian condition. (Suenens, Coresponsibility in the
Church, 32)

Even worse, at least as an attentive reading of the conciliar
ecclesiology as contained in the documents referenced, “The
primacy of baptism entails as an immediate corollary the primacy
of community” (ibid.). I say “worse,” because this derives the
communion of the Church ultimately from baptism, and not from

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the Eucharist. The logic of this would drive towards a version of
“co-responsibility” in which not only the specific nature of the
“co-responsibility” of the ordained priesthood disappears, but
with it the specific nature of the “co-responsibility” of the laity
deriving directly from baptism. There is erased the distinction
across which we are “co-responsible.”
However, Suenens does not follow this logic to its conclusion,
though the basis on which he avoids it is unclear. He never
articulates the communio of the Church as ultimately Eucharistic,
or, as Benedict later put it, that it is only in and as the body of
Christ, Eucharistically constituted, that we truly become the
people of God. And yet, without providing the proper theological, ecclesiological source for his reflections, his idea of coresponsibility is therefore liable to come unraveled: “It is
possible,” he says, “to differentiate individuals and groups within
the people of God on the basis of divinely conferred function or
charism, and to discuss coresponsibility in terms of these groups.”
Since the sacrament of orders is not mentioned, the theology here
is unstable.
He continues, “But, in regard to all these distinctions”—
without distinguishing those that come from holy orders and
those that do not, thus reflecting the instability of the particular
theology of co-responsibility he has articulated—“we must bear
in mind the fundamental principle enunciated by St. Paul, that all
these gifts conspire toward the building up of the perfect man
(Eph. 4.13).” It is on this unstable foundation that he goes on to
say, “This principle is applied to the distinction between laity and
hierarchy, and is beautifully expressed in the Constitution on the
Church when it says, ‘For the distinction which the Lord made
between the sacred ministers and the rest of the people of
God’”—anticipating Benedict’s distinction between “we your
servants” and the “plebs sancta”—“‘entails a unifying purpose,
since pastors and the other faithful are bound to each other by a
mutual need’ (art. 32)” (Suenens, Coresponsibility in the Church,
32-33).
He then provides a long list of differentiated coresponsibilities, including those of the papacy, the bishops, the
priests, theologians, deacons, religious, and “laymen.” He very

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carefully distinguishes two senses of “co-responsibility,” one
pertaining without differentiation to the “people of God as a
whole,” and one that articulates “also how this coresponsibility
is operative in and between the various groups established on the
basis of function or charism within the church” (ibid., 33). He
follows with chapters on each “level” of co-responsibility, partly
based on distinctions within holy orders themselves. For
example, the co-responsibility that bishops owe each other in
collegiality, and, in a different way, to their presbyterate in
governance, given “the profound dogmatic reality of episcopal
authority” which nevertheless “while remaining unchanged in
itself, has been obliged to assume new aspects within the
contemporary context” (ibid., 98), presupposing “a systematic
convergence of effort, a mutual collaboration in an atmosphere
of confidence” (ibid., 99)—even though bishops are primarily
“responsible” in what we have been calling governance.
The distinction of the “coresponsibility of theologians” (ibid.,
136-51) muddies the waters in terms of what element constitutive
of the Eucharistic communio is determining these levels of coresponsibility—thus contributing to the inherent instability of the
scheme—but nevertheless, when it comes to the “coresponsibility
of priests” he mentions the collaboration they owe to each other
in the presbyterate of a diocese and also beyond. The chapter on
the priest closes with co-reponsibility with regard to the laity:
“Yet, the priest has an incomparable mission to fulfill within the
church because he shares in a particular way in the role of Christ
as head of the mystical body. It is in this context that his function
is situated” (ibid., 134). This is properly balanced and very
precise. He goes on: “He is the head and heart giving life to the
body”—a little imbalanced, since it is the Holy Spirit that gives
this life. Finally, the image of the body of Christ is invoked,
perhaps for the first time in the book: “His role is to give life to
the community of believers, feeding them with the word of God
and the eucharist, making them aware of their mission to
evangelize and humanize the world” (ibid., 134-35). This is
beautiful, even though the use of the sociological word
“community,” instead of the theological word “communion,”
tends to the erosion of the basis on which the distinctions the

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cardinal is making rest. But the conclusion is flawless: “We must
understand that there is no ‘hierarchical priesthood which is not
ordered to the priesthood of the people of God’” (ibid., 134,
quoting Henri Denis but without giving any reference).
Correspondingly, in the chapter on the “Coresponsibility of
Laymen” (ibid., 187-213), he notes it as a positive gain that,
though it is “a role reserved to the magisterium” to be “judges in
matters of faith,” nevertheless laypeople were invited as auditors
and experts in the work of the council, assuming “real complementary functions” (188). And Suenens is careful to carve out a
sphere that is not simply “collaboration,” to use Benedict’s term,
in the ministry and role proper to the hierarchy at any level, but
a sphere that is proper to the laity and therefore a sphere of
genuine leadership. “The laity have a twofold task which is
proper to them: to christianize the temporal sphere, and to evangelize the world” (ibid., 200). Suenens offers extensive citations
from the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity to illustrate the
twofold task (ibid., 201-2). He emphasizes the second part of the
mission, that is, evangelization:
Thus the council [citing section 6 of the Decree] earnestly invites laymen to
assume fully the prophetic mission which is theirs as witnesses of the faith in
the world. If the task of preaching the gospel was confided to the people of God
as a whole, then certainly the laity, by far the greater number of this people,
have a great part of the coresponsibility implied in maintaining, spreading and
increasing the faith which they are called to live and preach. (Ibid., 202)

VI. A MUDDYING OF CO-RESPONSIBILITY?
At this point, we can think of the work of Benedict XVI on
co-responsibility as an attempt to put the idea of Suenens on a
more theologically consistent foundation so that it would not
come unraveled by the conceptual instability that I have proposed
is at its heart.14 What we find in the Working Document for the
Continental Stage of the Synod on Synodality is, I would suggest,
the opposite. Here the instability at the heart of Suenens’s vision
14

It does not matter, in this connection, whether Benedict in any way based his
thought on a reading of Suenens.

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predominates, and therefore the concept of co-responsibility,
though frequently mentioned in the text, tends to be evacuated
of any specific meaning. This is because the document bases its
notion of co-responsibility exclusively on baptism. There is no
reference whatsoever to the communion of the Church as constitutively and definitively Eucharistic. In fact, when the Eucharist is finally mentioned, very late in the document, it is styled
as the “‘source and summit’” not of “all preaching of the Gospel”
(PO, 5), that is, of all evangelization, nor “of the Christian life”
(LG, 11, cf. CCC, 1324),15 but “of the Church’s synodal
dynamism” (WD, 89). This is a far cry from the Eucharist as that
which “makes the Church” (CCC, 1396), as the Catechism sums
up the constitutive role of the Eucharist in ecclesial communion.
In the Working Document, this communion fragments into a
series of roles unrelated to an ecclesiology of the relationship
between two participations in the priesthood of Christ. It is
hoped that these roles, which seem to drift into mere functional
differentiation, will become more “synodal”: “Many reports
strongly encourage the implementation of a synodal style of
liturgical celebration that allows for the active participation of all
the faithful in welcoming all differences, valuing all ministries,
and recognizing all charisms,” including “rethinking a liturgy too
concentrated on the celebrant” (WD, 91). Reported as “the main
shortcomings of the actual celebratory praxis, which obscure its
synodal effectiveness,” include “the liturgical protagonism of the
priest,” as though there were no basis for that “protagonism” but
a refusal of “synodality.”
It is hard to pin down, but the term “synodality” in this
document seems to connote the radical equality of all members
of the Church based on their baptism. The document says it will
not provide a definition of synodality (see WD, 9). Instead, it
15

To be fair, this is mentioned briefly in section 5: the fifth of five “generative
tensions” is “the liturgy, especially the Eucharistic liturgy, the source and summit of
Christian life, which brings the community together, making communion tangible.” But
this is a much diminished, and fuzzy, account of the Eucharist relative to the Eucharist as
“the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity
of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being” (CCC, 1325, citing
Eucharisticum mysterium, 6).

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“expresses the shared sense of the experience of synodality lived
by those who took part. What emerges is a profound reappropriation of the common dignity of all the baptized” (ibid.).
Further, this is “the [emphasis added] authentic pillar of a synodal
Church and the theological foundation of a unity which is
capable of resisting the push toward homogenization” (ibid.).
Ironically, it seems to be based on homogenization. The flattening out of the Church based on baptism is pervasive in the
text. For example, “Practices of lived synodality have constituted
‘a pivotal and precious moment to realize how we all share a
common dignity and vocation through our Baptism to
participants [sic] in the life of the Church’” (citing “EC
Ethiopia”). The authorial voice of the Working Document
construes this as a “foundational reference to baptism” (WD, 22),
foundational for the Church as synodal and thus as “’walking
together’” (here citing “EC Japan”; WD, 22).
The Working Document’s idea of co-responsibility is easily
assimilated to its idea of synodality because it is also based on the
same foundational reference to baptism. It is easy for a discussion
of “responsibility for the synodal life of the Church” (WD, 66) to
merge immediately into a discussion of the difficulty “in actually
practicing co-responsibility” as though these were the same (or at
least ambiguous). At the outset of the Working Document we read
that “carrying out the mission requires assuming a style based on
participation, this corresponds to the full assumption of coresponsibility of all the baptized for the one mission of the
Church arising from the common baptismal dignity” (WD, 11).
Later, under the heading “Communion, Participation, and Coresponsibility,” the text begins, “The mission of the Church is
realized through the lives of all the baptized. The reports express
a deep desire to recognize and reaffirm this common dignity as
the basis for the renewal of life and ministries in the Church”
(WD, 57). Still later we read that “this desire for co-responsibility
becomes grounded first of all in the key of service to the common
mission, that is, with the language of ministeriality” (WD, 67).
The vague new term “ministeriality” seems to be another
“flattening” device, such that any service to the mission derives

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ultimately from baptism which invests one with “ministeriality.”
The Working Document continues,
As the Italian report says, “The experience [of synodal consultation?] . . . has
helped to rediscover the co-responsibility that comes from baptismal dignity
and has let emerge the possibility of overcoming a vision of Church built around
ordained ministry in order to move toward a Church that is ‘all ministerial’,
which is a communion of different charisms and ministries.” (Ibid.)

Again,
As bishops we recognize that the “baptismal theology” promoted by the Second
Vatican Council, the basis of co-responsibility in mission, has not been
sufficiently developed, and therefore the majority of the baptized do not feel a
full identification with the Church and even less a missionary co-responsibility.
(WD, 66)

This is a point well taken, as is the comment that “Moreover, the
leadership of current pastoral structures, as well as the mentality
of many priests, do not foster this co-responsibility” (ibid.).16
But short of the proper Eucharistic ecclesiology of communion, co-responsibility can only be based on an unstable
amalgamation of “ministries” stemming from baptism, synodality
reduces co-responsibility to a vague idea of shared “ministeriality” which recognizes distinctions but has no theological
foundation for those distinctions: “When it enters into the
concrete life of the Church, the theme of ministeriality inevitably
meets with the question of its institutionalization” (WD, 69). The
question here is not one of communio hierarchically constituted,
but of institutionalization of an abstractly conceived, homogenized function derived from baptism called “ministeriality.”
This tends to reduce both communion and ministry, synodality
16
Also along these same lines is the text at WD, 66, which emphasizes the need for
pastoral structures that foster co-responsibility for mission. This seems to be an echo of
Pope Benedict, and is one of the passages that tends to pull in the opposite direction of
many other passages, which would conflate co-responsibility with synodality. But the fact
that the theological basis for this kind of co-responsibility, in the distinction between the
baptismal vocation of the common priesthood, and its relation to the vocation of the
ordained priesthood (“we your servants,” in Benedict’s vocabulary), means that the
theoretical underpinning of an authentic sphere of lay leadership is lost.

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and co-responsibility, simply to sociological categories of
function and institution. But this is to flatten and even to
secularize the mystery of the Church as Eucharistic communion.
At very least, this flattening tends to erode the ecclesiology of
Lumen Gentium as articulated both by Pope Benedict and by
Pope Francis. It also leaves behind, or at least muddies, the idea
of “co-responsibility,” as evolved in the theology of Cardinal
Suenens and Pope Benedict XVI as a term reciprocally locating
the roles and identities of those differently located in the
communio of the Church conceived Eucharistically. In their
ideas, as we have seen above, the co-responsibility of the laity
indeed arises from baptism, but that of the ordained, vis-à-vis the
laity, arises from holy orders (and arises thence even within the
degrees of holy orders vis-à-vis each other). It is hard to know
what precise value to place on the expressions of the various
regional inputs to the process that are quoted in the Working
Document, but they seem to homogenize the sense of coresponsibility to the first sense we mentioned above when
discussing Suenens’s ecclesiology (i.e., as stemming from baptism)
at the expense of the second sense (i.e., as stemming from the
relationship between the priesthood of the baptized and the
priesthood of the ordained and their mutual interrelation). This,
in effect, uses the first meaning of co-responsibility noted above
in the discussion of Suenens to defeat the second meaning, with
its finer resolution of the idea of co-responsibility based on the
Eucharistic ecclesiology of Vatican II.
But this, in turn, defeats the theological basis for discerning a
true sphere of lay leadership that expresses their “coresponsibility” for the being and acting of the Church in a way
that is uniquely theirs. Ironically, in the name of synodality, it
tends to re-clericalize the Church. This is especially the case since
“synodality” is properly a word expressing a mode of governance
in the Church, and governance is the form of leadership that
belongs, by virtue of holy orders, to the ordained and the bishops
in particular. In Episcopalis Communio, Francis is clear that the
Synod of Bishops belongs properly to the sphere of governance
in the Church insofar as it is intended to “normally exercise a
consultative role, offering information and counsel to the Roman

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Pontiff on various ecclesial questions,” though “at the same time,
the Synod might also enjoy deliberative power, should the
Roman Pontiff wish to grant this” (EC, 3). Francis thinks that the
Synod of Bishops will be more useful to the pope as a consultative
or deliberative body if the bishops are aware of what the faithful
under their care think because they have consulted them:
Although structurally it is essentially configured as an episcopal body, this does
not mean that the Synod exists separately from the rest of the faithful. On the
contrary it is a suitable instrument to give voice to the entire People of God,
specifically via the Bishops, established by God as “authentic guardians,
interpreters and witnesses of the faith of the whole Church,” demonstrating
from one Assembly to another, that it is an eloquent expression of synodality as
a “constitutive element of the Church.” (EC, 6, citing the “Address
Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Synod of Bishops” [Oct. 17,
2015]).

Clearly the participation of the nonordained, the plebs sancta, to
use Benedict’s phrase, in listening sessions and consultations
organized by the bishop with a view to an upcoming session of
the Synod of Bishops, is a participation in governance, in a form
of leadership in the Church that is one of the three munera of
holy orders. It is a participation in a responsibility that is
essentially that of the bishop, a “collaboration” with the
hierarchy, to use Benedict’s phrase, as distinct, again if we use
Benedict’s language, from “co-responsibility” for the being and
acting of the Church. In Francis’s articulation, the bishops
consult because they are established by God as “authentic
guardians,” part of the third munus of governance.
The Working Document also associates synodality with a style
of governance, but at the same time the association of governance
with the munera of the ordained is obscured or even omitted.
Under the heading “Synodality Takes Shape” we read, “This is
why the Church also needs to give a synodal form and way of
proceeding to its own institutions and structures, particularly
with regard to governance” (WD, 71). But this use of the word
“synodal” has left behind the connection to the Synod of Bishops
to which Pope Francis had anchored it in Episcopalis Communio,
as though it were a style of governance where governance
belonged essentially to all, as part of the baptismal birthright. Co-

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responsibility, considered exclusively as founded in baptism,
tends to be “heard” as a name for the same style of governance,
a kind of synonym for synodality: “The dynamic of coresponsibility, with a view to and in service of the common
mission and not as an organizational way of allocating roles and
powers, runs through all levels of Church life” (WD, 78). The rest
of the paragraph is on consultative processes of governance on
the local level such as pastoral councils, “called to be increasingly
institutional places of inclusion, dialogue, transparency,
discernment, evaluation and empowerment of all.” “Empowerment” means here yielding a role in governance. The next section
takes up “transparency” as part of “authentic synodality.” It is
part of a synodal style of “leadership,” where “leadership” clearly
means “governance.” The word “leadership” tends to be
conflated with governance. But the connection to the Synod of
Bishops, and thus the specific and actual ecclesial location of
governance, is occluded. “Formation in synodality” means
formation of the faithful “to exercise real co-responsibility in the
governance of the Church” (WD, 82, citing “EC Spain”).
Therefore, for me the question arises: Can “synodality” defeat
“co-responsibility” despite the way in which the Working
Document insists that the two ideas are closely related? The
possibility is there. To the extent that “co-responsibility” is not
thematized in Eucharistic communio, where the priesthood of the
baptized and the priesthood of the ordained give rise to spheres
of leadership that are truly distinct, though truly mutually
related, the question must be answered affirmatively. To the extent that “co-responsibility” is just another way of talking about
participatory governance (“synodality”), only one form of leadership, the governance intrinsic to holy orders, takes center stage,
with the laity therefore participating in a leadership that is not
and never will be truly their own. But this is just a new form of
clericalism—precisely what the idea of co-responsibility was
meant to leave behind.

The Thomist 87 (2023): 311-38

THE SENSUS FIDEI AND SYNODALITY:
THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE
MUNUS PROPHETICUM
BERNHARD BLANKENHORN, O.P.
University of Fribourg
Fribourg, Switzerland

I

N THE YEARS before and after the Second Vatican Council, Yves Congar famously called for a renewed ecclesiology
that integrated both Christological and pneumatological
approaches to the Church. The French Dominican sought a synthetic vision in which the themes of the Church’s apostolicity
and the hierarchical powers transmitted by Christ would be
framed within a rich understanding of the Church as a communion of grace, in which the Church’s perennity would not
exclude her historicity or the Spirit’s work today.1 One can
approach the overall program of advancing synodality as a way
better to accentuate the pneumatological element of ecclesial
life.
Congar’s vast corpus of ecclesiological writings remains a
treasure for the Church today, partly because of his astounding
grasp of the theological tradition, and partly because his
systematics remained animated by the properly theological task
of faith seeking understanding. In this way, from his early
writings on the theology of the laity forward, Congar
exemplified a way of thinking about synodality and its pneumatological potential: to draw widely from the Church’s long
1
Yves Congar, “Les implications christologiques et pneumatologiques de
l’ecclésiologie de Vatican II,” in Le concile de Vatican II: Son eglise, peuple de Dieu et
corps du Christ, Théologie Historique 71 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 163-77. See also
idem, Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat, Unam Sanctam 23 (Paris: Cerf, 1953).

311

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BERNHARD BLANKENHORN, O.P

tradition, to acknowledge the historicity of the Church’s
structures while refusing to give strictly sociological or political
categories the last word, and to avoid one-sided theological
solutions (such as a return to early modern Christo-monist
ecclesiologies that reduce the laity to passive listeners of a
teaching Church, or Pneuma-monist approaches that evacuate
the apostolic tradition or ecclesial hierarchy altogether).
The present article adopts a Congarian approach to believers’ supernatural sense of the faith (sensus fidei), specifically,
by a modest proposal as to how we can best articulate the way
in which this supernatural mode of cognition comes about. This
article proposes the outline of a subchapter of theological
epistemology in view of today’s ecclesial and theological debate
on the true meaning of synodality.
The theological payoff for seeking such an epistemology is
manifold. Much confusion reigns around the question of how
exactly the sensus fidei can be identified. Should we especially
consult practicing Catholics, such as the laity most engaged in
parochial life and evangelization, or faithful members of religious orders? What about fallen-away or barely practicing
Catholics? What are we to make of voices on the margins,
among so-called progressives or traditionalists? Do charismatic
gifts inform the sensus fidei? And more broadly, how are we to
interpret the sensus fidei in light of Scripture, Tradition, and
magisterial teaching? The questions surrounding the role of the
sensus fidei and its noetic character touch on numerous core
ecclesiological issues.
I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
The link between the sensus fidei and synodality has emerged
with some frequency in recent magisterial documents and
theological literature. Pope Francis’s apostolic constitution on
the Synod of Bishops, Episcopalis Communio (2018) makes this
connection explicit, and we find it several times in the
International Theological Commission’s document Synodality in

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the Life and Mission of the Church (2018).2 The same
commission’s other recent text, Sensus fidei in the Life of the
Church (2014) offers the most extensive teaching to date on the
sensus fidei by a body of the Roman curia.3 Several recent
collections of theological essays and monographs also take up
this link, directly or indirectly.4 Still, much work remains to be
done on the sensus fidei in general, and on its noetic aspects in
particular.5
An epistemological lacuna remains in the theology of the
sensus fidei, though part of its foundation has been laid. The
work of John Henry Newman on the need to consult the lay
faithful and Yves Congar’s preconciliar writings on the place of
the laity in the Church helped to inspire the fathers of Vatican
II to overcome the premodern dichotomy between the teaching
and the listening Church.6 Newman’s theology on this question
arose from his historical studies of the Arian crisis, while his
2

Pope Francis, apostolic exhortation Episcopalis Communio (Sept. 15, 2018), in
Documentation catholique (Oct. 10, 2018), n. 7; International Theological Commission,
Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church, 9, 38, 56, 64, 72, 74,
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_201803
02_sinodalita_en.html,.
3
International Theological Commission, Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church
(London: Catholic Truth Society, 2014).
4
In chronological order: Ormond Rush, The Eyes of Faith: Sense of the Faithful and
the Church’s Reception of Revelation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of
America Press, 2009); Bradford Hinze and Peter C. Phan, eds., Learning from All the
Faithful: A Contemporary Theology of the Sensus fidei (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick
Publications, 2016); Thomas Söding, ed., Der Spürsinn des Gottesvolkes: Eine
Diskussion mit der Internationalen Theologischen Kommission, Quaestiones Disputatae
281 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2016); Agnes Slunitschek and Thomas Bermer, eds.,
Der Glaubenssinn der Gläubigen als Ort theologischer Erkenntnis: Praktische und
systematische Theologie im Gespräch, Quaestiones Disputatae 304 (Freiburg im
Breisgau: Herder, 2020).
5
Gunda Werner, “Gewissensfreiheit und Lehrautorität: Spannungsfelder des sensus
fidei fidelis?,” in Söding, Der Spürsinn des Gottesvolkes, 260.
6
John Henry Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (London:
Sheed & Ward, 1961); Congar, Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat, chap. 6. For a
summary of the former, see Ryan Marr, “John Henry Newman on Consulting the
Faithful: An Idea in Need of Development,” in Hinze and Phan, eds., Learning from All
the Faithful, 42-52.

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conviction about the importance of consulting the laity is linked
to his theology of faith as a work of grace in man’s conscience
and the function of the illative sense. The two latter themes can
contribute to an epistemology of the sensus fidei. Congar’s
writings on revelation, faith, the function of Tradition, and the
work of the Spirit in the hearts of believers also contain many
elements for a noetics of the sensus fidei.7 Vatican II’s Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) touches on the
importance and nature of the sensus fidei in the life of the
Church (especially para. 12 and 35), yet, following the practice
of ecumenical councils, it refrains from espousing a single
theological school’s theory of how this supernatural sense is
obtained.
Since the council, Karl Rahner has been credited with having
helped to advance the discussion of the sensus fidei, partly by
his writings on tensions between magisterial teaching and commonly held beliefs among the laity.8 However, he “provided no
systematic treatment of the topic of the sensus fidelium.”9
Perhaps Rahner’s extensive work on transcendental knowledge
would provide the heart of a Rahnerian epistemology of the
sensus fidei. The important 2009 monograph on the sensus fidei
by Ormond Rush largely focuses on hermeneutical issues, but
that presupposes an epistemology.10 Other recent works on this
theme tend to explore ways in which the laity’s sense of the
7
Yves Congar, Tradition and Traditions: The Biblical, Historical, and Theological
Evidence for Catholic Teaching on Tradition (San Diego: Basilica Press, 1966/1997),
p. 2, chap. 4. The theological epistemologies of Newman and Congar have been
explored by Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016).
8
See especially Karl Rahner, “What the Church Officially Teaches and What the
People Actually Believe,” in idem, Theological Investigations, vol. 22 (London: Darton,
Longman and Todd, 1991), 165-75; idem, “The Relation between Theology and
Popular Religion,” in idem, Theological Investigations, 22:140-47.
9
Pamela McCann, “Karl Rahner and the sensus fidelium,” Philosophy and Theology
25 (2013): 313. See also Michael M. Canaris, “A Rahnerian Reading of the sensus fidei
in the Life of the Church,” in Hinze and Phan, eds. Learning from All the Faithful,
196-209.
10
Rush, Eyes of Faith.

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faith can be brought into interaction with the voice of the
bishops, or to explore questions of contextualization, while
leaving the epistemological issues largely unexplored. It is
unclear if a systematic theological noetics undergirds Episcopalis
Communio. Since Vatican II, the most developed noetics of the
sensus fidei is probably that of the ITC’s 2014 document, and
the same commission’s 2018 work on synodality extensively
relies on this when presenting the sensus fidei.
Given the state of the discussion, I begin with an analysis of
Lumen Gentium 12 and 35 on the sensus fidei, along with Dei
Verbum 8. I then offer a summary of the epistemology in the
ITC’s Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church. I will draw four key
themes from these writings: (1) the laity’s share of the prophetic
office, (2) the virtue of faith, (3) connatural knowledge and the
seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and (4) the relation between
sanctity and the sensus fidei. I then turn to Church history and
the pneumatology of Thomas Aquinas to flesh out these themes.
I conclude by bringing this theological epistemology back to a
vision of the episcopate rooted in Vatican II and communio
ecclesiology.
For the sake of clarity, I understand the munus propheticum
given in baptism by analogy to Guy Mansini’s view of the episcopal share in the munera, and thus as a call, a power of grace,
and a promise of divine help.11 The prophetic office of the
baptized entails a mission received from Christ to witness to the
Gospel, the grace to cling to it (especially by faith), along with
the gifts of the Spirit that facilitate growth in faith (especially
the gifts of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge), as well as
the graces to communicate that faith effectively (the gift of
counsel, or charisms of communication such as the word of
wisdom). The sensus fidei constitutes one way in which this
spiritual office is actualized.

11

Guy Mansini, “Episcopal Munera and the Character of Episcopal Orders,” in
idem, The Word Has Dwelt among Us: Explorations in Theology, Faith and Reason:
Studies in Catholic Theology and Philosophy (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2008),
159-79.

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II. VATICAN II, POPE FRANCIS, AND THE ITC
ON THE SENSUS FIDEI

The doctrine of the faithful’s sensus fidei was not absent
from the work of the magisterium before Vatican II, as we can
see in Pius IX’s and Pius XII’s consultations of the bishops
about the faith of their flock, a process carried out before the
dogmatic declarations on the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Immaculate
Conception in 1854 and her Assumption in 1950.12 However,
Lumen Gentium offers the first magisterial teaching on the lay
faithful’s sensus fidei. The key passage comes in paragraph 12,
which is best read together with paragraph 35 of the same
constitution as well as Dei Verbum 8.
Lumen Gentium 12 comes toward the beginning of the long,
crucial second chapter on the people of God, which is preceded
by the opening theme of the Church as a mystery (chap. 1), and
followed by the teaching on the hierarchy (chap. 3). The
significance of this thematic order has been explored extensively
over the past decades, and need not be repeated here. Lumen
Gentium 12 constitutes part of a section dedicated to the
faithful’s share in Christ’s triple anointing as priest, prophet,
and king. The focus is thus the spiritual gifts shared through
baptism, especially the triple munera or office. Lumen Gentium
10-11 offer a teaching on the common priesthood of believers,
with a focus on their sacramental life. Lumen Gentium 12
focuses on the baptized faithful’s share in Christ’s prophetic
office. The paragraph begins thus:
The holy people of God shares also in Christ’s prophetic office (munere); it
spreads abroad a living witness to him, especially by means of a life of faith
and charity and by offering to God a sacrifice of praise, the tribute of lips that
give praise to his name (Heb 13:15). The entire body of the faithful, anointed
as they are by the Holy One (1 Jn 2:20, 27), cannot err in matters of belief.
They manifest this special property by means of the whole people’s
supernatural discernment (supernaturali sensu fidei) when, “from the bishops
down to the last of the faithful” (Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum)
they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. The
12

Werner, “Gewissensfreiheit und Lehrautorität,” 258.

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discernment of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is
exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and
respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just
the word of men but truly the word of God (1 Thess 2:13). Through it, the
people of God adheres unwaveringly to the faith given once and for all to the
saints (Jude 3), penetrates it more deeply with right thinking, and applies it
more fully in its life.13

This definitive version of paragraph 12 stands in fairly close
proximity to the draft prepared during the council by Gerard G.
A. Philips (c. 3, n. 24),14 which first introduced the theme of the
sensus fidei, a draft that received nearly unanimous approval
from the council fathers in October 1963 (with 2231 votes in
favor and 43 against).15
Before considering the hierarchy and its unique role in the
teaching of the Church, therefore, the whole ecclesial body is
considered as a prophetic people receiving and transmitting
God’s word. The opening reference to a holy or consecrated
people recalls that the baptized are the proper subject of the
sensus fidei. The latter is qualified as essentially supernatural,
which follows from the mention of the virtues of faith and
charity, as well as the anointing in the Spirit. The reference to 1
John is new by comparison to the Philips draft, which invoked
John 6:45 instead (all disciples are hearers of God). 1 John
allows for an easier link with Christ’s prophetic anointing.
While John 6 has a Eucharistic setting, 1 John 2 implies a
baptismal anointing.16 Like John 6, 1 John 2 evokes the Spirit as
the interior teacher. The emphasis in Lumen Gentium 12 lies on
13

LG, 12a (Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et
declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Peter Hünermann, Robert Fastiggi, and
Anne Englund Nash, 43rd ed. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012], n. 4130).
14
Gérard Philips, “Die Geschichte der Dogmatischen Konstitution über die Kirche
‘Lumen Gentium’,” in Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil:
Konstitutionen, Dekrete und Erklärungen, vol. 1, 2nd ed., Lexikon für Theologie und
Kirche 1 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1966), 147.
15
Julia Knop, “Sensus und Auftrag der Kirche: Der Glaubenssinn der Gläubigen in
der Ekklesiologie des II. Vatikanischen Konzils,” in Söding, Der Spürsinn des
Gottesvolkes, 239.
16
Ibid., 246.

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BERNHARD BLANKENHORN, O.P

the shared anointing received by the whole ecclesial body, and
that body’s unanimity of faith. We are thus not primarily
dealing with a teaching on the laity’s sensus fidei, but rather
with the cognitive fruits of the anointing given to all the baptized: bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated persons (religious
or secular), and the laity. The text’s sources clearly indicate that
it too is a fruit of the council’s biblical and patristic
ressourcement. The aim of this paragraph is not to resolve the
question of how the laity’s sensus fidei expresses itself in
relation to the hierarchy, since this chapter aims to unfold a
vision of the whole people of God before treating her distinct
members. Still, the distinct roles of the bishops and of other
faithful receives mention, and will be specified later in the
constitution. The object of the sensus fidei is the teaching of
faith given in revelation, and the supernatural sense is
subordinated to that revelation. The aim of the sensus fidei is to
penetrate more deeply into that which pertains to faith and
morals (or the content of revelation, the mysteries not accessible
to reason), and to live that faith more fully. The image of
penetrating into the treasure of revelation brings us to Dei
Verbum 8, and implies both continuity and progress in the
Church’s understanding of revelation. The opening themes of
witness to Christ and the sacrifice of praise show the finality of
the sensus fidei: evangelization by the whole people of God, and
the fuller exercise of her priestly office.
Lumen Gentium 12 continues with a well-known reference
to the charisms in the life of the Church:
It is not only through the sacraments and ministries of the Church that the
Holy Spirit sanctifies and leads the people of God and enriches it with virtues,
but “allotting his gifts to everyone according as he wills” (1 Cor 12:11), he
distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank. By these gifts he
makes them fit and ready to undertake the various tasks and offices that
contribute toward the renewal and building up of the Church, according to
the words of the apostle: “The manifestation of the Spirit is given to everyone
for profit” (1 Cor 12:7). These charisms, whether they be the more
outstanding or the more simple and widely diffused, are to be received with

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thanksgiving and consolation for they are perfectly suited and useful for the
needs of the Church.17

Here, the council fathers prolong their teaching on the spiritual
gifts that pertain to the prophetic office, which is the primary
theme of Lumen Gentium 12b. At the same time, the passage
signals a slight thematic shift. Whereas the anointing in the
Spirit is a sacramental or baptismal grace, the charisms constitute a distinct, complementary set of graces. We thus move
from the Johannine vision of the sensus fidei shared by all the
baptized to a Pauline vision of the Spirit’s gifts that are diffused
in diverse ways: not all believers receive the same charismatic
gift. It should be noted that Paul places prophecy as a charism
(not as one of the three offices of the baptized) at the summit of
the charismatic gifts, while also subordinating it to charity
(1 Cor 13-14). Hence, it makes sense to read the reference to
“the more outstanding” gifts in Lumen Gentium 12b as an
implicit mention of prophecy, which the text then contrasts to
the more widely diffused gifts. The main aim of this passage is
to revalorize the Pauline charisms in the life of the Church, to
acknowledge their wide diffusion among all categories of the
faithful, and to recall that the Church’s edification constitutes
the charism’s finality. Consequently, the charisms stand out as
an important element of Vatican II’s renewal of ecclesiology, yet
their link with the sensus fidei remains unclear at best. In other
words, Lumen Gentium 12a-b calls for an epistemology of the
sensus fidei centered on the virtue of faith and baptismal grace,
but not clearly on the prophetic charism. Taking Lumen
Gentium 12 as a whole, we can see that it is the grace of
baptism that is the essential source of the sensus fidei, not the
noetic charismatic gifts (prophecy or word of wisdom). The
communication of prophetic knowledge to the members of the
Church can contribute to the faithful’s deeper understanding of

17

LG, 12b (Denzinger, Enchiridion, n. 4131).

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BERNHARD BLANKENHORN, O.P

revelation, so that charismatic gifts can contribute to the sensus
fidei, yet their function remains secondary.18
The link between the munus propheticum and the sensus
fidei returns in Lumen Gentium 35, in the dogmatic constitution’s fourth chapter, which is focused on the lay faithful:
Christ, the great prophet, who proclaimed the kingdom of his Father both by
the testimony of his life and the power of his words, continually fulfills his
prophetic office until the complete manifestation of his glory. He does this not
only through the hierarchy, who teach in his name and with his authority, but
also through the laity, whom he made his witnesses and to whom he gave
understanding of the faith (sensu fidei) and attractiveness of speech (Acts
2:17f, Rev 19:10), so that the power of the gospel might shine forth in their
daily social and family life.19

Paragraph 34 expounded on the lay faithful’s share in Christ’s
priestly office, and paragraph 36 will unfold their participation
in his royal office. Thus, in Lumen Gentium 34-36, we find
ourselves at the heart of a munera-centered spirituality of the
laity. Lumen Gentium 12 has made it clear that the laity also
possess the sensus fidei for the sake of the Church’s own
understanding of revelation. Lumen Gentium 35 shifts the focus
more toward mission and evangelization, although these were
already evoked in Lumen Gentium 12. The lay faithful especially exercise their prophetic office in the footsteps of Christ
by witnessing to him in the world through word and deed, a call
that requires both a proper grasp of the faith and gifts to
facilitate its communication. The reference to attractive speech
18

From a biblical perspective, this feature of LG 12 is sound. Albert Vanhoye has
shown the momentary, nonabiding mode of the charisms in St. Paul’s pneumatology.
See his I carismi nel Nuovo Testamento, Analecta Biblica 191 (Rome: Gregorian and
Biblical Press, 2011), 79-84, 94. I have argued that we might envision an abiding
receptivity to certain charismatic acts in some believers, somewhat analogous to the
seven gifts. See my essay, “The Metaphysics of Charisms: Thomas Aquinas, Biblical
Exegesis and Pentecostal Theology,” Angelicum 91 (2014): 373-424. But even if this
approach is sound, it does not fundamentally challenge the implications of LG 12 that I
draw out here. Still, that being said, a fully developed epistemology of the sensus fidei
should integrate the noetics of charisms such as prophecy (especially as inspired
interpretation of Scripture).
19
LG, 35a (Denzinger, Enchiridion, n. 4161).

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likely implies charismatic gifts as well (the gifts of Pentecost,
referenced via Acts 2:17). The finality of lay believers’ share in
the sensus fidei is thus mission and a better exercise of the royal
office. Here too, charismatic gifts are not clearly indicated as a
source of the sensus fidei, since their primary function seems to
be to cause a more effective communication of the faith, and
not its understanding.
The teaching on the sensus fidei in Lumen Gentium 12 and
35 clearly takes us to the heart of Vatican II’s ecclesiology. Both
texts closely link the sensus fidei with the dignity and call of the
baptized, their share in Christ’s triple munera, and the harmonious cooperation of all the faithful (ordained, consecrated,
and lay) in the development of Tradition as a living reality, as
well as the exercise of the Church’s missionary call in the world.
It thus behooves us to discern how the theme of the sensus fidei
is developed today in the documents of the curia, various
synods and episcopal conferences, and the writings of theologians. What is at stake is nothing less than the need for a
homogenous development of Vatican II ecclesiology, rather
than its dilution or reversal.
Lumen Gentium 12 and other parts of the constitution
indicate that authentic expressions of the sensus fidei come
through the harmonious cooperation of the faithful with the
Church’s pastors. Perhaps the most interesting mention of this
cooperative task comes in Dei Verbum 8, which treats the
Church’s progress in her contemplation of the apostolic Tradition. Here, Tradition has a broad sense of all that the apostles
handed down, by writing, oral preaching, institutions, and their
example (DV 8a). Dei Verbum 8b explains the process thus:
This tradition that comes from the apostles develops in the Church with the
help of the Holy Spirit (Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus haereses). For there is
growth in the understanding of the realities and words that have been handed
down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers,
who treasure these things in their hearts (Lk 2:19, 51), through a penetrating
understanding of the spiritual realities they experience, and through the
preaching of those who have received through episcopal succession the sure
gift of truth. For as the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly

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moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God
reach their complete fulfillment in her.20

The text clearly grounds its vision of ecclesial contemplation in
Dei Verbum’s emphasis on revelation as a series of interconnected words and actions (laid out in DV, chap. 1). We also
find the typical conciliar accent on the Church as a historical
subject progressing through time. The revelation handed on by
the apostles constitutes a stable deposit, while the Church grows
in her perception of that treasure (DV 10b brings this out well).
Here too, the council moves away from post-Tridentine ecclesiologies that neatly divided the Church into an active teaching
hierarchy and a passively obeying laity. Dei Verbum 8b identifies
an interdependence of three types of believers: theologians,
contemplatives, and bishops. The first group engages in faith
seeking understanding, in a rational investigation of the realities
believed, with the Blessed Virgin Mary as model. The second
group experiences the spiritual realities believed, though not in
a nonintellectual way. These are contemplatives from various
states of life advancing in holiness, for sanctity makes possible
their intimate experience of the revealed mysteries. Finally, the
bishops penetrate the deposit of faith by the grace proper to
their sacramental office. We can especially link the sensus fidei
to the second of the three groups (which also includes bishops,
specifically, holy bishops), yet Lumen Gentium 12b prevents us
from limiting the actualization of the sensus fidei to this group.
For the theologian’s study is also an exercise of faith, while the
bishops’ teaching is an interpretation of faith by the illumination granted them in virtue of their sacramental ordination.
Dei Verbum 8b leads us to the following conclusion: the mystical experience of the saints living in our midst today constitutes a precious element of the sensus fidei. At the same time,
the noetic fruit of this experience is best attained by bringing it
into conversation with theologians (and specifically, those who
respect the properly supernatural character of their discipline)
as well as the teaching of the bishops. Each of these members of
20

DV, 8b (Denzinger, Enchiridion, n. 4210).

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Christ’s body—theologians, contemplatives and bishops—can
only penetrate well the deposit of faith with the help of the
others. Again, we find ourselves at the center of Vatican II
ecclesiology, and also at the heart of her teaching on divine
revelation.
The ITC’s 2014 document surveys each of the Vatican II
texts just considered.21 The second chapter of Sensus fidei in the
Life of the Church lays out a sketch of a theological
epistemology for this spiritual sense, with a focus on two
themes: the infused virtue of faith and the seven gifts of the
Holy Spirit. Here, the ITC especially draws on the writings of
Thomas Aquinas, while also acknowledging the work of
Johannes Möhler, whose work on tradition as a living reality
inspired the ecclesiologies of Congar and Vatican II.22 The ITC
document indicates several key characteristics of the supernatural mode of cognition given in the sensus fidei. It is (1) a
“spiritual instinct that enables the believer to judge spontaneously” the harmony between a particular teaching and the
Gospel, an instinct that is (2) “intrinsically linked to the virtue
of faith” (49). (3) Such judgment comes “from the connaturality
that the virtue of faith establishes between the believing subject
and the authentic object of faith” (50). The text later describes
this connaturality as a sixth sense or spiritual instinct (52). This
supernatural knowledge is (4) “of a different order than objective knowledge, which proceeds by way of conceptualization
and reasoning” (50), and is “not reflective” (54). (5) As an
attribute of faith qua infused virtue, “the sensus fidei fidelis
develops in proportion to the development of the virtue of
faith,” which growth goes hand-in-hand with progress in charity
(57). Hence, progress in understanding and the practice of the
faith go together (65). Growth in virtue is thus essential for the
operation of the sensus fidei, but it also requires the Spirit’s
21

ITC, Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church, 44-47.
In Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church, chap. 2, we find twelve references to
Aquinas and one to Möhler. No other theologians are referenced, though this chapter
presupposes the historical survey in chapter 1, where numerous Church Fathers and
modern theologians such as Newman and Congar obtain a considerable hearing.
22

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motion, for, (6) the spiritual experience that believers obtain
(DV, 8) comes especially through the Spirit’s gifts, primarily
understanding and knowledge (58). Finally, (7) sensus fidei may
find an “authorized preaching” troubling, or may simply
distinguish between what is essential and accidental to the faith
within a proposed teaching (63-64).
Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church offers a theological
vision that both accounts for the teaching of Vatican II on the
sensus fidei and develops it in a homogenous way. The proper
subject of the sensus fidei is the baptized believer. The supernatural sense becomes stronger in proportion to growth in
holiness. The instinctive mode of cognition can be at work in
believers of all walks of life and varying degrees of catechetical
and theological formation, and can operate even with somewhat
vague or weak conceptualizations of the mysteries of faith. Its
optimal working requires the hidden light of the Spirit, a
theology that accounts for the Johannine theme of the anointing
in the Spirit at Lumen Gentium 12. The charisms are neither
mentioned nor excluded. The theological framework is clearly
that of Aquinas, but the ITC does not claim that a Thomistic
pneumatology is necessary to account for the sensus fidei. The
ITC likely appropriated Aquinas’s vision because his school has
produced the most widespread theology of the seven gifts over
the past seven centuries, and used it to give a theological
explanation of spiritual experience for centuries.23
We find a similar description of the supernatural sense of
believers in the teachings of Pope Francis. The apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium (2013) refers to the sensus fidei
23
The Thomistic school developed a long tradition of theological reflection on
mystical experience via its teaching on the seven gifts (especially starting with the
seventeenth-century Portuguese Dominican John of Saint Thomas). The Carmelites
proceeded similarly, as they integrated the teaching of Teresa of Avila and John of the
Cross with the seven gifts (see, for example, the seventeenth-century author Joseph of
the Holy Spirit). The Franciscan Scotist school did not develop the theology of the
seven gifts. But the Bonaventurean Franciscan school has doctrines of both the seven
gifts and the soul’s spiritual senses. The latter also became popular in monastic theology.
Overall, the ITC’s appropriation of the theology of the seven gifts seems fully
compatible with a classical theology of the soul’s interior senses.

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operative in the baptized, and describes this sense as an
instinctual or intuitive cognition and a connaturality to the
spiritual realities believed.24 The ITC’s Synodality in the Life
and Mission of the Church relies on this very part of Francis’s
teaching for its own presentation of the sensus fidei (56). Unlike
the 2014 document, the ITC’s 2018 work on synodality does
appeal to the charisms as a cause of the laity’s sensus fidei (72,
74). However, these brief passages give no sources for such a
link, other than a brief reference to Lumen Gentium 12
(although some uses of the term “charism” in this context seem
to have a broader sense, such as a religious movement’s
particular call or charism). Overall, the 2018 text on synodality
seems to presuppose the epistemology of the ITC’s earlier
document on the sensus fidei.
Taken together, these teachings of Vatican II, Francis, and
the ITC give us good reasons to pursue an epistemology of the
sensus fidei centered on baptismal grace, the virtue of faith and
the Spirit’s seven gifts. I will confirm this claim by taking a brief
look at some key historical witnesses to the sensus fidei, and
then turn to a Thomistic pneumatology for some epistemological principles.
III. SOME HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF THE SENSUS FIDEI IN ACTU
Beyond the Arian crisis that Newman studied and integrated
into his controversial ecclesiology, the sensus fidei played an
important role at key moments in the history of the Church,
and the mode of its manifestation can instruct us on its
epistemological structure.
Perhaps the better-known example from antiquity is the
birth of the biblical canon, which partly involved the emergence
of a widespread liturgical and catechetical use of disputed books

24
Pope Francis, apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 119 (Acta Apostolicae
Sedis 105 [2013]: 1069-70).

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such as the Wisdom of Solomon.25 In Congar’s study of the
patristic witness to the sensus fidelium, the majority of the
examples recounted approvingly by the Fathers concern liturgy
and popular piety: St. Jerome on the veneration of the saints’
relics, St. Epiphanius on the veneration of Mary as Virgin, St.
Nicephorus on the use of icons, and especially St. Augustine on
the necessity of baptism or the efficacy of infant baptism, but
also the anti-Pelagian implications of the practice of prayer (viz.,
that grace is necessary for salvation).26 In the Middle Ages, the
prime example of the sensus fidei in act likely came in the
controversy surrounding the eschatological ideas of Pope John
XXII. His denial of the saints’ immediate post-mortem entry
into glory and the beatific vision raised widespread critique,
from the simple to the learned, partly because it directly
touched upon the practices of asking the saints’ intercession and
of prayers for the souls in purgatory.27 In modern times, the
consultation of the faithful carried out via correspondence with
the world’s bishops by popes Pius IX and Pius XII before each
declared a Marian dogma pertained to the doctrinal implications of widespread Marian piety and regional liturgical
traditions.
The epistemological consequence seems straightforward: the
sensus fidei often (though not exclusively) speaks through the
Church’s communal prayer, especially as lived over many
generations and in multiple regions. The liturgy constitutes a
primary site where the sensus fidei expresses itself. But this also
means that the cognitive intuition obtained by this supernatural
sense tends to emerge slowly, through ecclesial practices already
bound by previous traditions, and wherein the Church’s pastors
have a regulating function. Finally, the frequently liturgical
25

Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, c. 27; Congar, Jalons pour une
théologie du laïcat, 451; Rush, Eyes of Faith, 130-31; Andrew Salzmann, “The Sensus
fidelium in Augustine,” in Hinze and Phan, Learning from All the Faithful, 5-6.
26
Congar, Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat, 450-51.
27
Manfred Gerwing, “Sensus fidei und consensus fidelium: Bemerkungen zum
Glaubenssinn der Gläubigen in der Theologie des Mittelalters,” in Söding, Der Spürsinn
des Gottesvolkes, 195-96.

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mode of expression for the sensus fidei points to a communal
noetics, meaning that the truths grasped intuitively by the sensus
fidei emerge above all in shared spiritual practices, such as a
particular mode of venerating the saints.
A second site where the Church has looked for reliable
expressions of the sensus fidei since antiquity is the testimony of
saints and martyrs. The early Church gave much weight to the
public confessions of faith given by martyrs just before their
death, including their Trinitarian and Christological formulas.
Holy ascetics, such as Egeria the penitent pilgrim and Gregory
of Nazianzen’s learned sister Macrina, were considered ideal
teachers, thanks to the radical coherence of their manner of life
and faith.28 Augustine was convinced that Monica’s holiness
allowed this simple woman to solve theological puzzles that
learned Christians could not.29 Byzantine Christianity has
developed a long tradition of the holy ascetic as the ideal
teacher of the faith (Simeon the New Theologian, Gregory
Palamas).
These elements of the Church’s history confirm our previous
claim that the sensus fidei becomes intensely active and sharp
through holiness. Consequently, this supernatural sense can
only be identified by a combination of quantitative and qualitative considerations, by asking: Who is expressing their faith?
This renders the use of sociological methods in synodal
processes somewhat problematic.30 We will see how Aquinas’s
pneumatology helps to account for this link between radical
sanctity and super-luminous faith overflowing onto instruction
for the whole Church. Finally, the link between holiness and the
intensity of the sensus fidei entails an important consequence for
the ethical debates raging in the Church today. If the saints are
28

Heike Grieser, “Hören auf das Gottesvolk? Bemerkungen aus kirchenhistorischer
Perspektive zu einer Herausforderung seit frühchristlicher Zeit,” in Söding, Der
Spürsinn des Gottesvolkes, 171-73.
29
Salzmann, “Sensus fidelium in Augustine,” 9.
30
For the limits of sociology in the identification of the sensus fidei, see Neil
Ormerod, “Sensus fidei and Sociology: How Do We Find the Normative in the
Empirical?,” in Hinze and Phan, Learning from All the Faithful, 89-102.

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to continue to give a unique voice to the true sensus fidei, then
revolutions in the Church’s moral teachings are not possible.
This is because we need reliable ethical criteria by which we can
recognize these saints to begin with. If the moral criteria
employed yesterday to judge the exemplarity of a deceased or
living believer’s holiness were to be overturned, then we would
in fact have no reliable method to recognize the true saints, in
the past or today. In other words, appeals to the sensus fidei
made to justify a revolution in the Church’s ethical teaching
destroy that very sensus fidei.31
A third and final site wherein the sensus fidei expresses itself
in history is the consensus of the faithful. This notion has preChristian philosophical and Roman precedents, but our focus is
on its Christian appropriation. Heike Grieser points out that
Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyon and Basil the Great looked for
diachronic and synchronic consensus, that is, consensus over
time and across regions at the same time. As with the liturgical
expression of the sensus fidei, we see a strong link between this
supernatural sense and the voice of tradition.32 Grieser notes
that these patristic voices were not concerned with an exact
verification of universal agreement, but rather seemed to remain
content with a general appeal to the convictions of the mass of
simple believers.33 In his study of the fourteenth-century
controversies around John XXII, Manfred Gerwing emphasizes
the widespread negative reaction to John’s proposal, and its
31
Appeals to previous changes in the Church’s moral teachings on significant issues
do not refute my argument. The Church’s contemporary position on slavery is not a
rejection of any previous established teaching on the rightness of slavery, but a
correction of bad assumptions made in previous centuries. The teaching on religious
freedom was closely bound to historical context (e.g., Pius IX’s reaction to the French
Revolution and its political aftermath). For the issue of slavery, see Avery Dulles,
“Development or Reversal?,” First Things (October, 2005). On religious freedom, the
best historical study remains Basile Valuet, Le droit à la liberté religieuse dans la
Tradition de l’Eglise: Une cas de développement doctrinal homogène par le magistère
authentique (Le Barroux, France: Editions Abbeye Sainte-Madeleine, 2005).
32
See Gregory F. LaNave, “Diachronic Synodality: Synodality within Tradition,”
The Thomist 87 (2023): 173-90.
33
Grieser, “Hören auf das Gottesvolk?,” 174-75.

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swift rebuttal by Pope Benedict XII, on the foundation of the
consensus fidelium. Gerwing explains this response of the
people by invoking Hugh of St. Victor’s and Thomas Aquinas’s
theologies of illumination by faith.34
We can draw three epistemological consequences from this
third point. First, the authentic sensus fidei surfaces not by a
simple majority, but by a much larger agreement among the
faithful, including the simple faithful. Second, the present
consensus needs to be brought into relation with tradition as the
voice of previous generations’ consensus fidelium (or diachronic
consensus). Third, if the true sensus fidei is essentially a consensus fidelium, then we need to invoke a widely shared supernatural illumination as the sufficient cause of this consensus.
This confirms that we should primarily look to the virtue of
faith and the illumination of the Spirit in his seven gifts as the
noetic source of the sensus fidei, and should only appeal to the
charisms as a secondary explanation of how this consensus
emerges.
Looking back, we can see that all three parts of our historical
survey give support to the claim that the sensus fidei needs to be
rooted in the effects of baptismal grace. For the baptized
faithful express their faith in liturgy, the baptismal gifts make
possible their progress in holiness, and baptism is the primary
means by which they receive the virtue of faith and the Spirit’s
seven gifts (the latter being also closely linked with the
sacrament of confirmation, which presupposes baptism). Hence,
the triple historical manifestation of the sensus fidei (in liturgy,
the saints, and the consensus of the faithful) renders problematic recent appeals to the opinions or experiences of nonChristians as a manifestation of the Spirit. Lumen Gentium 12
seems to confirm that observation, since it links the sensus fidei
to the munus propheticum, which is a baptismal gift. The
theological tradition is well-aware of the presence of prophecy
beyond the limits of the Church and Israel (Balaam, Caiaphas,
the oracles of Sybil, etc.), but treats these as exceptions. The
34

Gerwing, “Sensus fidei und consensus fidelium,” 192-212.

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same threefold historical pattern leads one to call into question
appeals to the opinions or experiences of non-practicing
Catholics as a voice of the Spirit. Such Christians can indeed
still have faith, but if the sensus fidei grows stronger
proportionally to the degree of holiness, then the spiritual sense
of those who do not practice the faith is the least reliable among
believers. Circumstances can diminish the culpability of a
decision not to practice the faith, but weak participation in
ecclesial life cannot be a means to growth in holiness.
IV. THOMISTIC PNEUMATOLOGY AND THE SENSUS FIDEI
Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church makes abundant use of
Aquinas’s theology of faith and the Spirit’s seven gifts so as to
present a foundation for an epistemology of the sensus fidei.
This section continues that reflection by offering some complementary remarks on Aquinas’s pneumatology and applies a
few Thomistic principles to the main question at hand: How do
believers know by the sensus fidei?
Aquinas holds that the theological virtues and the seven gifts
of the Spirit qua abiding dispositions to receive the Spirit’s
movement are inseparable from sanctifying grace.35 Furthermore, this grace is normally first given in baptism. It is here that
our anointing in the Spirit takes place, as signified in Christ’s
baptism at the Jordan. Baptism brings about the indwelling of
the Spirit (Rom 8), and our participation in the Messianic
anointing with the seven gifts (Isa 11).36 Baptism sets believers
on the path of gradual growth in the virtues and gifts. The seven
gifts thus belong to all the baptized who remain faithful to their

35

We might note that Aquinas’s vision of the seven gifts as supernatural modes of
receptivity to the Spirit’s guidance fits well with a sound reading of 1 John 2 on the
Spirit’s anointing, which accentuates believers’ passivity before and dependence on the
Holy Spirit. For this reading of 1 John 2, see Agnes Slunitschek, “Der Glaubenssinn und
das Individuum: Die Fähigkeit einzelner Gläubiger zu Glaubenserkenntnis,” in
Slunitschek and Bermer, eds., Der Glaubenssinn der Gläubigen als Ort theologischer
Erkenntnis, 74-75.
36
STh III, q. 39; q. 69, aa. 4-7.

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baptismal promises, and are active in believers in all offices and
states of life, including spiritual beginners; they are hardly
limited to a spiritual elite. Furthermore, Aquinas holds that the
Spirit’s movement in the seven gifts is a normal, frequent
occurrence, without which believers cannot persevere in grace.37
Aquinas’s pneumatology thus helps us to account for the sensus
fidei as a widely shared knowledge rooted in baptismal grace.
Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church describes faith’s
capacity to judge teachings spontaneously (without primarily
relying on rational deliberation) as a property of faith rooted in
faith’s spiritual instinct (49). As Paul Rogers notes, Aquinas
especially speaks of this instinct in relation to conversion, where
an interior impulse allows the convert to receive the Gospel
proclamation, so that a true preaching (the exterior call) can be
received with the help of an interior call.38 The same pattern
continues in the baptized believer’s knowledge by faith: he or
she responds to the evangelical teaching only with the aid of an
interior light of the Spirit. Faith requires an external object—a
preached word, a proposed teaching—without which the light
remains blind, but attachment to an authentic Gospel teaching is
only possible by the Spirit’s illumination. Aquinas’s noetics of
faith integrates a Christological aspect (Tradition, the word of
the preacher, magisterial teaching) with pneumatology (a
personal grace moving mind and heart), both of which must be

37
STh I-II, q. 68, a. 2; II-II, q. 45, a. 5; Servais Pinckaers, “Morality and the Movement of the Holy Spirit: Aquinas’s Doctrine of ‘Instinctus,’” in The Pinckaers Reader:
Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, ed. and trans. John Berkman and Craig Steven
Titus (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 388-91.
38
Paul M. Rogers, “The Dual Aspect of Faith’s Instinct: A Thomistic Introduction to
the Sensus fidei,” in Henk Schoot, Jacco Verburgt, and Jörgen Vijgen, eds., Initiation
and Mystagogy in Thomas Aquinas: Scriptural, Systematic, Sacramental and Moral, and
Pastoral Perspectives, Publications of the Thomistic Instituut te Utrecht, n.s. 19 (Leuven:
Peeters, 2019), 161-62. Rogers references STh II-II, q. 2, a. 9, ad 3. Another key text of
Aquinas is his Super Ioan., c. 6, lect. 4 (Super Evangelium Sancti Ioannis lectura, ed.
Raphael Cai [Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1952], nos. 918-20). This aspect of Aquinas’s
noetics of faith has strong Johannine, Pauline, and Augustinian roots. See Ulrich Horst,
“Wunder und Bekehrung nach dem Johanneskommentar des hl. Thomas von Aquin,” in
Archa Verbi: Yearbook for the Study of Medieval Theology 7 (2010) : 81-85, 93-97.

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operating for faith to be actualized. Thus, the operation of the
sensus fidei stands in smooth continuity with the grace of conversion, though their relation is analogous, since the former
advances with the help of the Spirit’s seven gifts while the latter
leads to those gifts. Still, we can see that an epistemology of
conversion can help to inform an epistemology of the sensus
fidei.
Aquinas insists strongly on the interconnection of the virtues,
such that growth in charity entails growth in the other virtues,
including faith.39 Knowledge of the heart springs forth above all
from friendship with Christ, the primary root of which is
charity.40 For Aquinas, charity is the primary measure of holiness, and the seven gifts as abiding, receptive dispositions to the
Spirit’s movement expand or grow in proportion to progress in
charity.41 He thus helps us to account for the sensus fidei as
most intensely active in the lives of the saints, without sidelining
or excluding the insights and convictions of weaker Christians.
Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church explains that faith as a
virtue brings a connaturality to its proper object (divine truth),
which it also calls a knowledge by empathy or knowledge of the
heart (50). Aquinas also links connaturality with the Spirit’s gift
of wisdom, and the Thomistic tradition has applied this
category to the other gifts of the Spirit as well.42 The movement
of the Spirit in the gifts activates and perfects the virtues. The
gifts of understanding and knowledge are directly at the service
of faith, so that the Spirit’s movement in these two gifts
heightens the connaturality of faith. With Daria Spezzano, one
can also maintain that the gift of wisdom indirectly perfects

39

STh I-II, q. 65; q. 114, a. 8; II-II, q. 24, aa. 4-6.
Serge-Thomas Bonino, “Le rôle des apôtres dans la communication de la
Révélation, selon la ‘Lectura super Ioannem,’” in idem, Études Thomasiennes,
Bibliothèque de la Revue Thomiste (Paris: Parole et silence, 2018), 187-222.
41
This is implied at STh I-II, q. 68, a. 3 ; and III, q. 7, a. 5.
42
STh II-II, q. 45, a. 2; John of Saint-Thomas, The Gifts of the Holy Ghost, trans.
Dominic Hughes (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951).
40

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faith, and thus heightens faith’s connaturality.43 Since, as Servais
Pinckaers rightly insists, the Spirit’s movement in the hearts of
believers constitutes a normal, even daily reality in their spiritual lives, the sensus fidei is constantly being sharpened among
those receptive to the Spirit. Connaturality thus becomes
stronger in a twofold way: by growth in the virtue of faith, and
by the heightening of faith’s act through the Spirit’s motion in
the gifts of understanding, knowledge and wisdom. In each
case, growth in virtue, above all faith and charity, largely determines the power of connatural knowledge. The more believers
advance in holiness, the more the virtue of faith and the Spirit’s
light enable more penetrating truth judgments, even as the
manner of conceiving the faith limps along. The inadequacy of
human conceptualizations of the faith before the infinite divine
mystery and the mystery of God’s saving plan is partly overcome through connatural, intuitive knowledge, which can grasp
hold of the right conclusion without fully being able to explain
why a conclusion must be right.
That being said, I would argue that connatural knowledge
does not leave behind concept-bound cognition derived from
Scripture and Tradition. The ITC holds that connatural
knowledge “is not primarily the result of rational deliberation”
(49). Another passage of Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church
might imply a knowledge no longer dependent on concepts
(“knowledge . . . of a different order than objective knowledge,
which proceeds by way of conceptualization and reasoning”
[50]), and some commentators see connatural knowledge as essentially nonconceptual.44 Yet the citation from paragraph 49
seems to sidestep such a reading of Aquinas, and indeed,
Aquinas himself never affirmed the existence of nonconceptual
cognition in the pilgrim state. Rather, in his theology of the
seven gifts, he signals that the Spirit’s motion in the gifts of
wisdom and understanding sharpens our use of concepts or
43

Daria Spezzano, The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification according to St. Thomas
Aquinas, Faith and Reason: Studies in Catholic Theology and Philosophy (Ave Maria,
Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2015), 289-95.
44
Rogers, “The Dual Aspect of Faith’s Instinct,” 164.

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grants a better vision of their limits, but in fact, connatural
knowledge (and any human cognition in the pilgrim state)
always uses concepts and phantasms, however much these may
limp along.45 This reading of Aquinas fits well with his way of
relating grace and nature. It respects his insistence that divine
action is concretized in human beings according to their proper
(time-bound, embodied) mode of being. Such a vision leads to a
more Christ-centered anthropology, where the body and the
concepts derived from bodily experience need not constitute an
obstacle to growth in grace.46 It also stands in harmony with the
recent theologies of revelation developed by John Lamont, Mats
Wahlberg, and Guy Mansini, who argue convincingly that
proposition-less revelation and concept-free knowledge of
revelation are ultimately incoherent categories (the two notions
are closely linked).47 God speaks to us in and through ideas and
images that we derive from Scripture and Tradition, from daily
experience and (philosophical) reflection on it, or he does not
speak at all.48 Connatural intuition enriches concept-bound
knowledge, but can never replace it.49
45
Bernhard Blankenhorn, The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in
Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Thomistic Ressourcement 4 (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 273-79, 397-411, 428-30.
46
Bernhard Blankenhorn, “Mystical Theology and Christology in Thomas Aquinas,”
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 95 (2019) : 299-315.
47
John R. T. Lamont, Divine Faith, Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion,
Theology and Biblical Studies (Aldershot, Great Britain: Ashgate, 2003); Mats
Wahlberg, Revelation as Testimony: A Philosophical-Theological Study (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2014), chap. 2; Guy Mansini, “The Development of the
Development of Doctrine in the Twentieth Century,” Angelicum 94 (2016): 785-822. It
should be noted that Dei Verbum clearly espouses propositional revelation, but places it
into a richer context than in the typical neo-Scholastic theologies of the early twentieth
century. See Guy Mansini, Fundamental Theology, Sacra Doctrina (Washington, D.C.:
The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 10-21, 129-30, 223-24, 260-61; Leo
Scheffczyk, “Der Neuscholastische Traktat De Revelatione Divina, die Dogmatische
Konstitution De Verbum und die Lehre des hl. Thomas,” Studi Tomistici 37 (Vatican
City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990), 13-26.
48
The incoherence of concept-free cognition points to an important limit of
Rahnerian epistemology. That is, Rahner’s category of transcendental knowledge
ultimately falls apart, which means that we cannot appeal to his noetics better to grasp
the epistemology of the sensus fidei. See Guy Mansini, “Experiential Expressivism in

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Why is this claim about human concepts important for an
epistemology of the sensus fidei? Since this supernatural sense
grants deeper intuitive knowledge of truths derived from
Scripture, Tradition, and sound philosophy, thus stretching our
insight beyond what the work of reason alone can attain, yet
without passing into a realm of concept-free knowing, the work
of the sensus fidei only becomes adequate when it advances in
close conversation with preachers and scholars on the one hand,
and the Church’s pastors on the other. Because the cognition
that the lay faithful can attain by the sensus fidei also and always
depends on right conceptualizations of the faith, as well as the
affirmation (or correction) of those conceptualizations by the
Church’s pastors, the close interdependence of the laity,
theologian, and bishops (already articulated in DV 8) becomes
more evident. Right judgment on matters of faith and morals
depends on right apprehension (the intellect’s second act can
only operate on the material provided by the first act), which in
turn requires sound catechesis and deep theological learning.
Hence, poor catechesis limits the efficacy of the sensus fidei,
while a loss of theological culture among scholars likewise poses
obstacles. Furthermore, if numerous members of the episcopacy
become weak in their knowledge of Scripture and Tradition,
then the sensus fidei suffers again.50 In that case, the Church’s
Christological element (the truth judgment exercised by the
hierarchy, through their charism of office) no longer complements the pneumatological element (the Spirit’s light in the
hearts of all believers). Thus, weak exchange of insights and
Two Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians,” Nova et vetera (Eng. ed.), 8 (2010):
125-41. By contrast, Yves Congar firmly embraced concept-bound knowledge as crucial
for man’s reception of revelation: see Mansini, “The Development of the Development
of Doctrine.”
49
For a theology of the sensus fidei linked to a notion of revelation as nonpropositional, see for example, Slunitschek, “Der Glaubenssinn und das Individuum,” 88.
50
Congar notes: “tradition does not separate a subjective sense, a kind of instinct of
faith, from the objective content; it does not recognize any autonomy in the mystical
and subjective instinct for the things of God as opposed to the means God has chosen
for his self-revelation: revelation, the Church, the doctors and saints” (Tradition and
Traditions, 317).

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convictions between the lay faithful (and their sensus fidei),
theological scholars (especially their articulation of Scripture
and Tradition), and bishops limits the function of the sensus
fidei in the life of the Church.51 Vatican II succeeded in its task
precisely because its bishops brought a rich Catholic culture to
the gathering, they represented the faithful and their supernatural sense well, and they often relied on the advice of the
periti. The same conditions of spiritual fruitfulness remain for
the synods of our time.
V. THE SENSUS FIDEI AND THE BISHOP
Another word on the interdependence between the laity’s
sensus fidei and the bishop’s pastoral charge is needed. Lumen
Gentium 12 does not distinguish between the laity’s and the
episcopate’s sensus fidei; rather, it treats them as one. The same
conciliar text adds: “The discernment of faith is aroused and
sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the
guidance of the sacred teaching authority.” Furthermore, a
balanced synodal vision of the Church advances an ecclesiology
of communion, and this entails the necessity that the various
members of Christ’s body exercise their proper office, within
the local Church and in relation to the Church universal: the
local Church is a communion of members with diverse gifts, and

51

Congar was not naïve about the power of the laity’s sensus fidei: “One should be
careful not to attribute too much to the sensus fidelium: not only because of the
prerogatives of the hierarchy . . . but also in itself. History also teaches us about the
weakness of the faith of large portions of the Christian people: the case of the East in
the 7th century in the face of Islam, the Christianity of England and the Scandinavian
countries in the presence of the Reformation; doubtful fascinations and aberrant
devotions, etc.” (“On se gardera de trop attribuer au sensus fidelium: non seulement au
regard des prérogatives de la hiérarchie . . . mais en soi. L’histoire nous renseigne aussi
sur les faiblesses de la foi dans de larges portions du peuple chrétien : cas de l’Orient du
VIIe siècle en face de l’Islam, des chrétientés d’Angleterre ou des Pays scandinaves en
présence de la Réforme ; engoûments douteux et dévotions aberrantes, etc.”) (Jalons
pour une théologie du laïcat, 399; my translation).

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the universal Church is a communion of local Churches.52 As
Francis notes in Episcopalis Communio, the sensus fidei emerges
through a discernment exercised by the local bishop with his
flock, including presbyters, deacons, lay collaborators, and the
lay faithful in general.53 Hence, the results of local lay gatherings with the aim of discerning their sensus fidei calls for the
local bishop’s active discernment (in the exercise of his own
sensus fidei, and the gifts of his prophetic office), and in turn an
analogous process of discernment and doctrinal judgment at the
higher levels, including that of the worldwide synod. If Vatican
II is indeed to serve as a model and inspiration for synodality,
collegiality, and an ecclesiology of communion, then this
process requires the bishops’ active voice and judgment at the
various levels.54 Here, the stakes are high, and they bear ecumenical consequences, positive or negative.55
CONCLUSION
In his beautiful study of Yves Congar on doctrinal
development, Andrew Meszaros summarizes how a theology of
intuitive cognition rooted in the Spirit’s seven gifts gives insight
into the way in which Tradition and doctrinal development
function:

52
For the link between synodality and ecclesiology, see ITC, Synodality in the Life
and Mission of the Church, 54-66.
53
Francis, Episcopalis Communio, 5.
54
There seems to be a tension between the body of Episcopalis Communio (5, 7)
which implies an active discernment and judgment by the bishops, and some parts of the
attached revision to canon 342. At article 6 of the revision, the local bishop’s role seems
to consist of a passive consultation of the people of God. But article 17, §3 employs a
different vision of the bishop’s role: it calls for the general assembly’s document to be
approved by the members, which implies an active discernment and vote.
55
From an Eastern Orthodox perspective, the people of God participate in a synod
through their bishop, and no synodal decision should be applied in a local Church
whose bishop was not given voice at the synod. See John Zizioulas, “L’institution
synodale: Problèmes historiques, ecclésiologiques et canoniques,” in idem, L’Eglise et ses
institutions (Paris: Cerf, 2011), 200, 206.

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BERNHARD BLANKENHORN, O.P

The affective way or motor of doctrinal development for Congar presupposes
the living of what is called the theological life, formed by sanctifying grace.
According to Congar, the sensus ecclesiae is effective in allowing one to
perceive the homogeneity of development. This sensus is capacitated by a
sanctity that disposes the faithful to carry out and fulfill their Christian
obligations, one of which is to guard and transmit the donné révélé faithfully.56

The sensus ecclesiae is wholly directed to a deeper grasp of the
revelation already received, to a deeper penetration into the
mysteries hidden beneath the veil of Scripture and Tradition.
Our brief sketch of the epistemology of the sensus fidei moves
in a similar direction, especially as we consider the deep
interrelation of the various parts of the Church’s life and
members of her body. The sensus fidei can only become operative by gaining insight into the hidden gems already contained
in Scripture and Tradition (or the diachronic consensus), two
sources best understood with the help of history, theology, and
catechesis. Furthermore, that informed sensus only functions
well in fruitful exchange with the Church’s pastors, who in turn
are called faithfully to live out their office and charism, always
in communion with other bishops and local Churches. A synodal Church is thus best understood within the framework of a
doctrine of the Mystical Body and communio ecclesiology, and
best lived out when we acknowledge the fragility of our timebound and embodied mode of knowing the revealed mysteries.

56

Meszaros, Prophetic Church, 117.

BOOK REVIEWS
Thomas Aquinas and the Crisis of Christology. Edited by MICHAEL A.
DAUPHINAIS, ANDREW HOFER, O.P., and ROGER W. NUTT. Ave Maria,
Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 422 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-93258985-6.
The volume’s attractive cover painting, depicting Thomas Aquinas praying
before the Crucified, encourages readers to assume a more meditative mindset
as they approach the rich collection of essays within its covers. They originate
from a conference held at Ave Maria University in 2020 and proceed from the
conviction that “studying the mystery of Christ in dialogue with Aquinas can
assist us in today’s crisis of Christology” (3).
Thomas thus appears in the essays, not as a repository of answers, but as
exemplary “Magister Sacrae Paginae” and speculative genius who probes the
Tradition to elucidate something of the inexhaustible mystery of the Church’s
Lord who is the Savior of the world. To “dialogue” with him, as several of the
essays contend, is also to enter into prayerful dialogue with the Christ who
summons not merely to intellectual integrity, but especially to affective charity.
What, then, is the nature of the “crisis” that besets us? In many ways it is
both ancient and new. The writers recognize a recrudescent Arianism in its
protean shapes. There is the ongoing project of “liberal Christology” that celebrates the manifestation of God’s mercy in Jesus of Nazareth but strains to
confess this Jesus to be “God Almighty in the Flesh” (the title of Bruce
Marshall’s closely argued essay). There are feminist and liberationist variants
that stress the moral imperatives arising from Christology but scant the crucial
ontological implications.
But, as Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., observes in his short, but
incisive “Foreword”: “Striking at the very core of uniquely Christian
convictions about faith, hope, and salvation, the crisis of Christology is in the
end a crisis of faith” (viii).
This “crisis of faith” receives further delineation in the book’s final two
essays. Marshall marvels at “the remarkable disappearance, in Western Catholic
religious life, of the fear of God,” and suggests that many consider Jesus’ mercy
“virtually unstoppable,” but allow his justice “to disappear, more or less completely, from view” (350). Daria Spezzano echoes the theme in “Is Jesus
Judgmental?” She finds that “one firm tenet of popular Christology is that Jesus
does not judge” (368). In salutary contrast she draws on both the Summa and
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Thomas’s scriptural commentaries to set forth his teaching on Christ as
“eschatological Judge” to show “why we need Christ’s wise judgment, how it
reveals the Father’s love, and therefore why it gives the most profound
reasons—to those who really will in the end be the friends of Jesus—for
gratitude and hope” (369).
What unites the essays is their firm adherence to the fundamental “logic” of
the New Testament: the confession of the uniqueness and universality of Jesus
Christ and the transformative way of life to which he calls. They find in Thomas
a prime proponent and exponent of that “logic” in his own historical context
and a sure guide in our present Christological task. They recognize further that,
though rooted in the New Testament witness (as his biblical commentaries
amply demonstrate), Thomas realizes that the mystery at the heart of the New
Testament Good News also promotes “a distinctively metaphysical mode of
Christological reflection” (88). Particularly suggestive in that regard are the
following essays.
Anthony Giambrone’s rich discussion of “Primitive Christology and Ancient
Philosophy” persuasively shows that Paul’s writings already open upon ontological claims that the conciliar tradition and Thomas will later pursue. He
contends that “No amount of creative agency or even latreia accorded by
Christians to Christ can successfully assert his divinity without some idea of
divine homo-ousia. And that requires some proto-Dionysian grammar of
transcendent being or Thomistic notion of ipsum esse subsistens. Otherwise, the
Logos will remain an Arian Artisan and worshipful super-angel: above all things,
but merely atop and not entirely beyond” (53).
Roger W. Nutt, in “Christus Est Unum Simpliciter,” argues against the
positing of a “numerical second esse” despite the controverted passage in
Thomas’s De unione Verbi incarnati. He finds that “by his appropriation and
development of the post-Chalcedon tradition, St. Thomas understood that Jesus
did not need a second esse to authenticate the truth of his humanity. What he
assumed did not give him a new, second being; it gave him a new human mode
of being, through which he loved and suffered in the single subsistent existence
of the Word.”
John Emery’s essay, “Aquinas’s Christology of Communication,” seeks to
identify an integrative soteriological principle that serves to bring systematic
order to the welter of biblical images of salvation. He finds it in Thomas’s
employment of the notion of “communication.” He suggests that “for Aquinas,
a saving causality based on communication amounts to a saving causality based
on friendship: Christ causes salvation not by coercing others, but by acts of
friendship that give rise to other acts of friendship” (173). Indeed, the agency
of Christ is ongoing, because “Christ as head causes a continuous influx of
communication in his members” (184). One question I would raise is, given the
actual scope of the notion of “communication” as also embracing “the
recipient’s ‘acting’ or ‘living in common’ with the giver” (193), would the

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notion be further enriched by also speaking in the less intellectualist and more
affective language of “communion”?
Given the challenge voiced in both academic and pastoral circles to the
uniqueness of Jesus Christ, I greatly appreciated the article by Michael Dauphinais, “Creation Is Not an Incarnation.” In it he engages, in respectful but
decidedly critical dialogue, with the widely influential Franciscan spiritual
writer Richard Rohr. In Dauphinais’s reading, Rohr provides a salient example
of the contemporary Christological crisis. He writes: “When Rohr reinterprets
creation as incarnation, he flattens out reality in a way that distorts the Christian
message. No longer distinct, the Creator and creation dissolve into one another.
No longer distinct, Jesus and the rest of humanity dissolve into one another.”
The result is that “in Rohr’s reenvisoning, everything is Incarnation; everything
is Eucharist; everything is Crucifixion; everything is Resurrection” (259).
Clearly what is at stake here (and in other contemporary loci) is the uniqueness of Jesus the Christ. In some schools of thought Jesus becomes only a way
station towards the cosmic Christ whose “inclusivity” tolerates no “distinguo”—
undermining any affirmation of particularity’s scandal.
By way of contrast and remedy, Dauphinais contends that “Aquinas allows
us to respond to this contemporary crisis in Christology by articulating God’s
various presences via participation rather than a flattened view. . . . The doctrine
of participation distinguishes pointedly between God’s perfect existence and the
existence of all created realities, which receive their existence from God” (276).
It also enables us to distinguish between God’s presence in Jesus Christ and his
presence in creation at large, for “the Word who is already present in creation
is now present in creation through the Incarnation in a singular manner” (270).
By his Incarnation (which is consummated in his Paschal Mystery), Jesus
Christ enables a newness of life for those who believe in his name. “The newness
of the Incarnation reshapes rational creatures in its image. The unique sonship
of Christ is not kept to himself but is shared with others” (ibid.). Dauphinais
concludes incisively: “The Incarnation is not separate from the reborn creature
but is the reborn creature’s constant source and cause. The distinction between
Creator and creature and between Incarnation and creation are what allow
salvation to take place” (278).
The new supernatural life in Christ is, of course, constitutively corporate and
relational. It entails both ontological and epistemological implications. Gerald
Boersma’s engaging article, “No One Knows Who Does Not First Taste: The
Spiritual Senses in Aquinas’s Christology,” argues that “as natural life is
equipped with sense perception, so supernatural life is equipped with spiritual
senses” (312). Indeed, “the spiritual senses are an extension of St. Thomas’s
Christology” (303). For the new experiential apprehension of the members of
the body of Christ is totally dependent upon the life and agency of its head.
“The spiritual senses of the members of Christ’s mystical Body are a
participation in the sense and movement of the spiritual Head” (312).

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Moreover, such apprehension, the “tasting and seeing that the Lord is good,”
is not reserved to some spiritual elite. It is the unfolding of the new life implanted in baptism: the common vocation to holiness through which one comes
to delight ever more in the beauty of the Lord. Thus, Boersma concludes that
“Aquinas’s theology of the spiritual senses is the outworking of his conception
of the corpus mysticum—of the intimacy between the Head and the members”
(318)—an intimacy of loving union.
However, today, as Benedict XVI wrote in the “Foreword” to the first
volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, that intimacy, that “friendship with Jesus on
which everything depends is in danger of clutching into thin air.” This is because
a unique reliance upon historical-critical studies of the Bible can leave the
impression among many that “we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus.”
Benedict’s persistent endeavor was to offer a Christological hermeneutic of
Scripture that does not spurn the valid fruits of the historical-critical approach
but integrates them into a comprehensive and organic reading of Scripture as a
whole.
Thomas Joseph White’s excellent “The Trinitarian Consciousness of Christ”
provides helpful context for these concerns. Many theologians, like Pannenberg
and Rahner, who seek to combine an appreciation of the value of historicalcritical research with the givens of faith, tend to a certain reserve about our
ability to know the aims and self-understanding of the pre-resurrection Jesus of
Nazareth. With Pope Benedict, White offers a Christological hermeneutic that
“seeks to provide a historically informed theological portrait of the historical
Jesus” (104). While welcoming the contributions of the historical-critical
approach, he nevertheless holds that “the formal object of faith comes first and
is primary” (106). The eyes of faith may indeed discern patterns that are not
read into but read out of the biblical record.
Thus, White ventures in the last section of his article to reflect pointedly
upon “Jesus’s Hebraic Trinitarian Consciousness” (117-24). Here he brings an
appreciation of the cultural-linguistic context of late Second Temple Judaism
into fruitful dialogue with theological insights inspired by Thomas. He argues
convincingly for an intuitive awareness on Jesus’ part of acting “in unity with
the Father and with the Holy Spirit” and that this self-awareness forms “the
backdrop of all of Jesus of Nazareth’s human activity and intentions” (121).
For the most part, the articles in this fine collection remain, perforce, at the
“notional” level (in Newman’s sense of the term). They perform the indispensable service of elucidating the perennial logic of the faith in a contemporary
context often marked by Christological crisis. There remains the crucial pastoral
task of promoting the move from the merely “notional” to the “real.” As
Newman insisted, that enterprise is particularly the province of the imagination
that creates works of art capable of touching the affections of the heart. Here
too Thomas can serve as masterful guide. Not so much the Thomas of the
Summas, but the Thomas of the hymns and prayers—the poetic Thomas who
taught the notional and sang the real: “Adoro te devote, latens veritas// te que

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sub his formis vere latitas// Tibi se cor meum totum subicit// quia te contemplans
totum deficit.”
ROBERT P. IMBELLI
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III. By JOHN F. WIPPEL. Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. Pp. 317. $65.00
(hard). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3555-0.
This volume is the third collection of essays on Aquinas’s metaphysical
thought by John Wippel, an eminent scholar of Aquinas. It consists of nine
substantial essays, which Wippel completed after the publication of his
monumental work, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (2000), and
which were originally published as journal articles or book chapters. In a fortypage Introduction, Wippel offers a detailed outline of each of the essays, which
provides a helpful guide to their reading.
The essays cover topics central to Aquinas’s metaphysical thought: the
subject of metaphysics (chap. 1), the preambles of faith (chaps. 2 and 5), the
distinction of essence and esse (chap. 3), the Fourth Way (chap. 4), the unity of
substantial form (chap. 6), the cognitive status of the separated soul (chap. 7),
the metaphysics of evil (chap. 8), and the composition of angels (chap. 9).
In the essay on the subject of metaphysics Wippel first draws an important
distinction between a prephilosophical notion of being and the metaphysical
notion of being as being, that is, being as the subject of the metaphysics. He
points out that, according to Aquinas, there is a corresponding distinction
between the intellectual processes by which we discover these two notions.
Wippel then devotes special attention to the most difficult side of this distinction: the discovery of the metaphysical notion of being. He argues that the
negative judgement Aquinas refers to as separatio and contrasts with abstractio
is the relevant cognitive process. Wippel is well aware that his interpretation is
not universally accepted, and he takes into account alternative views on this
controversial topic. He offers a convincing defense of his interpretation by
providing an accurate assessment of the textual evidence in support of it.
The general issue addressed in the two essays about the preambles of faith is
that of the harmony between faith and philosophy or reason. Wippel’s crucial
concern in the first essay is to reach an accurate understanding of what Aquinas
means by a preamble of faith. According to Wippel’s careful reconstruction of
Aquinas’s scattered remarks on this topic, a preamble of faith is a truth about

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God that can be discovered by natural reason and is logically presupposed by
articles of faith. In other words, preambles of faith provide the rational
foundation that Aquinas thinks is required for faith. Wippel also points out that,
while Aquinas’s standard examples of preambles of faith are the claims that God
exists and that he is one, there is textual evidence for the inclusion of eleven
other theological truths in this category. In the second essay on this topic
Wippel investigates Aquinas’s view about the preambles of faith as applied to
the specific case of creation. The question addressed here is, which parts of
Aquinas’s account of creation are preambles of faith and which are articles of
faith? This is indeed a question of crucial importance. Wippel points out that in
order to answer this question we need to be clear about what Aquinas means by
creation. Aquinas’s discussion of creation ex nihilo indicates that he distinguishes two meanings of creation. According to both meanings, creation is a
production of something from no preexisting subject and involves the priority
of nonexistence to existence. The difference between the two meanings is in the
notion of priority involved: according to the first meaning, the priority is in
order of nature, not necessarily in the order of time, whereas according to the
second meaning, the priority is in the order of time. The distinction is
approximately that between the possibility of eternal creation and temporal
creation. Aquinas maintains that creation in the first sense can be proved
philosophically, and it is indeed a preamble of faith. And the article of faith of
which it constitutes the immediate rational foundation is temporal creation,
which cannot be proved philosophically. Wippel then turns to the controversial
issue of whether Aquinas attributes a doctrine of (eternal) creation to Aristotle.
His main target here is the view of Mark Johnson, who maintains that there is
textual evidence for this attribution. Wippel convincingly shows that this is not
the case. Important in this context is a distinction that Johnson does not seem
to take into account between receiving being from God and being created from
nothing. There is textual evidence that Aquinas ascribes to Aristotle the view
that things receive being from God but not the view that things are created from
nothing. This essay provides a lucid analysis and great clarification of a notoriously difficult issue of Aquinas’s thought.
The essay on the distinction of essence and esse and that on the Fourth Way
are both devoted to extensive presentation of the views of the Italian scholar
Cornelio Fabro, whose major work La nozione metafisica di partecipazione
secondo San Tommaso was first published in 1939. Wippel recognizes the
scholarly value of Fabro’s works, and Wippel’s essays have the great merit of
making them known to an English-speaking audience. However, he identifies
several points of disagreement with Fabro and weaknesses in Fabro’s interpretations. An important one concerns the interpretation of the famous
argument for the distinction of essence and esse in chapter 4 of De ente et
essentia. Fabro sees the argument as a complex one, consisting of three distinct
arguments, the first of which—the so-called logical argument—infers the real
distinction of essence and existence from the difference between knowing what

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something is and knowing that it is. Wippel remarks that the logical argument
is open to the obvious objection that it is not legitimate to infer a distinction in
the order of reality from a distinction in the order of thought. He proposes a
different interpretation, according to which the argument in De ente is a threestage argument, of which Fabro’s logical argument is only the first stage and not
an independent argument for the real distinction. The great majority of Aquinas
scholars will find Wippel’s interpretation both conceptually and exegetically
superior to that of Fabro, and in absolute terms an ingenious defense of the
validity of Aquinas’s argument.
The essay on the unity of substantial form focuses on the case of human
beings. Wippel presents in some detail and with great clarity Aquinas’s view that
the human soul is the only substantial form in a human being, so that a human
being is composed of prime matter and the soul. Wippel discusses and rejects
an alternative interpretation made by some scholars who maintain that in his
early commentary on the Sentences Aquinas posits a (substantial) form of
corporeity in addition to the soul. Wippel devotes a large part of the essay to
providing an outline of the complex historical reception of Aquinas’s view on
the unity of substantial form. His contemporaries raised many objections to it
on philosophical and theological grounds. Wippel devotes special attention to
the theological objection concerning the body of Christ. The objection is that
by denying the existence of a form of corporeity in addition to the soul Aquinas
cannot account for the persistence of the body of Christ in the passage from life
to death, that is, for the identity of the body of Christ in the tomb with the body
of the living Christ. Wippel offers a close reading and a nuanced assessment of
the different texts in which Aquinas deals with this topic, as well as of a disputed
issue among major Aquinas scholars (Van Steenberghen, Zavalloni, Torrell,
Solère) about a possible development in Aquinas’s position. After a careful
examination of the textual evidence, Wippel concludes (in agreement with
Torrell) that at the time of his Quodlibet IV (Lent 1271) Aquinas had changed
his position on the identity of the body of Christ. In this work he maintains that
the living body and the dead body of Christ are numerically identical simpliciter,
whereas in earlier works (e.g., Quodlibet II) he maintains that the identity is
only secundum quid and not simpliciter. Wippel recognizes that there is still an
important open question in Aquinas’s account of the identity of the body of
Christ concerning the identity of the matter of the body of Christ.
In the essay on the natural knowledge of the human soul in its state of
separation from the body after death, Wippel addresses some important problems raised by recent interpreters who maintain that Aquinas’s account is
affected by serious inconsistencies or that there is a radical evolution in his views
on this issue. Wippel disagrees, and provides a sustained and well-argued
defense of the consistency and stability of Aquinas’s position. His defense is
based on a careful review of the key texts in chronological order, accompanied
by a clear sense of the relevant questions to be asked of the key texts. Wippel
identifies five such questions and gives a detailed presentation of Aquinas’s

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answers to them in his early works (In Sent. III and IV, De veritate, Summa
contra gentiles) and in his later works (Summa theologiae and Quaestiones De
anima). Wippel’s defense offers an excellent methodological model for assessing
these kinds of issues.
In the essay on evil Wippel focusses on the metaphysical aspects of Aquinas’s
view, as distinct from the theological aspects. On the basis of a detailed presentation of the most substantial discussions that Aquinas devotes to this topic in
the Summa theologiae and in De malo, Wippel offers an incisive reconstruction
of the major aspects of Aquinas’s metaphysics of evil, such as the ontological
status of evil as privation but nonetheless as existing, the distinct kinds of evil
(e.g., physical evil and moral evil), and the cause of evil. While Wippel provides
a complete picture of Aquinas’s metaphysics of evil, he also recognizes that
metaphysics is not able to offer an adequate explanation of many horrendous
physical evils suffered by human beings. It is to theology that Aquinas turns for
such explanation.
In the essay on angels Wippel deals with the crucial issue in medieval
metaphysical thought of how to defend the uncontroversial assumption that
God is the only absolutely simple being. Angels too seem to be somehow simple.
The question then is how their simplicity differs from that of God and is
somehow less radical than it. Or in other words, the question is in what sense
angels are not simple compared to God. Wippel presents three different views
on this question: one view posits that angels have a composition of matter and
form; another view posits that angels do not have matter but have a composition
of essence and being; another view attempts to defend the unique simplicity of
God without positing any real composition in angels. Wippel singles out
Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines as the leading representatives
of each of these three views respectively. Wippel offers an incisive and clear
reconstruction of the positions of these three philosophers, supported by an
extensive presentation of the key texts on this topic.
Wippel’s extraordinary expertise in Aquinas, as displayed by his close
reading of the texts, combined with an impressive command of the relevant
philosophical and doxographical issues and of the historical context, makes all
the nine essays collected in this volume essential readings for further works on
their topics. Their great scholarly value will be appreciated by anyone trying to
understand Aquinas.
CECILIA TRIFOGLI
All Souls College
University of Oxford, United Kingdom

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A Companion to the Spanish Scholastics. Edited by HARALD E. BRAUN, ERIK DE
BOM, and PAOLO ASTORRI. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition
Series 102. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Pp. 627. $275.00 (hard). ISBN: 978-9004-29441-7.
Interest in Spanish Scholasticism has been thriving for a number of years
now, but hitherto neither beginner nor seasoned academic had a reliable guide
available to maneuver these difficult waters. This new companion, published in
Brill’s reputable series, provides such an orientation. The editors have wisely
decided to carve up the otherwise unpalatable mass of information into nine
parts, each presenting two or three chapters.
The first two parts of the handbook give, over one hundred pages, a detailed
overview of the contexts of Spanish Scholasticism. It seems that sometimes the
chapter titles do not properly correspond to the text. For example, the chapter
“Theology” by Christophe Grellard does not introduce Spanish Scholasticism
as such but sets out to merely present the “social, cultural and intellectual
context in which the theological doctrines of Salamanca took shape” (32), thus
giving a very narrow window into the cosmos of Scholastic thought. Although
the author skillfully shows how the encounter with Protestant theologies and
Columbian culture animated Domingo de Soto and Domingo de las Cuevas to
reflect on the sufficiency of implicit faith among the colonial natives, he never
delivers the promised “social context,” and at times does not explain important
concepts. For example, it is not enough to state that a “moderate nominalism”
can be compatible with Thomism without giving a hint of how such a
convergence would come about and what it would entail (35). After all, this
seems to be a crucial piece of contextualization and necessary for the chapter to
work as an introduction and guide. Thomas Duve provides in the next chapter
not only an excellent overview of the juridical context, but also corrects
widespread exaggerated views of the Salamancans, especially Vitoria. Research
has demonstrated that Vitoria was “part of a broad intellectual current that had
not started in Salamanca but that he had brought it with him, which means it
started there later than in Paris, perhaps also later than in Cologne or Louvain”
(72). Following Scattola, Duve reminds the reader that Salamanca was less a
“school” and more a “community of discourse” and a “community of practice.”
Consequently, we should not look for its normative results but rather see it as
a network in which the forms of discourse about normative knowledge were
under consideration (76). One of the most original and enlightening chapters is
Mara Vega’s account of how Scholastics managed dissent. Carefully examining
Scholastic taxonomies of dissent and disagreement, she shows how the censurae
became a standard reference point for theologians from the fifteenth century
on. Melchor Cano, for example, articulated how the censures help the theologian to stay clear from error, diagnose errors with precision, and engage productively in controversies (89). If error, however, included stubborn resistance
to the truth, could a heretic’s proposition be considered in abstracto or was it

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also necessary to consider his or her moral status? Suarez suggested that there
were two types of heretical propositions, one of which could be judged
considering the character of the person, while the other comprised propositions
that were “heretical in themselves, absolutely and independently” (95). More
difficult to judge were propositions bordering on heresy (99). A few errors
slipped into Vega’s bibliography: two cited authors were omitted (Antonio
Cordoba and Antonio de Panormo), and some entries do not give the volume
number of rather large sets such as Banez’s Commentaria or the Cursus
Salmanticensis.
The more specialized first part looks at theological questions. Paolo
Broggio’s chapter deals with grace. His claim that “Lutheranism”—not clear
whether he means Luther, Melanchthon, or someone else—places “itself in
close proximity to Peter Lombard and Thomas itself” and thus pushed men like
Erasmus to reflections that could be coined “pre-Molinist” is not only imprecise
and overly simplified, but also anachronistic. Can any theological stance before
the lifetime of Molina that tries to preserve freedom be called “pre-Molinist”?
If so, is the concept then not inflationary? The reader will not find answers to
these questions since the author does not define the use of the term (118).
Unfortunately, this chapter also testifies to some lack of editorial care, since the
same author is not always referred to by the same name (e.g., one finds
“Jansenius” and “Giansenio” on the same page [119]). That the author does not
even mention Dettloff’s groundbreaking studies on Scotus’s doctrine of
justification and instead relies on the summaries given by Jedin in his History of
the Council of Trent is flabbergasting. Outright odd are some phrases, for
example, sufficient grace is defined as “God gives all the means necessary for
man to choose the good but he does not do it” (126), which means that humans
always (!) reject such grace, which contradicts the author’s explanation just a
few lines earlier. Likewise, the explanation of “physical pre-motion” could have
been clearer in order to assist graduate students and those looking for a first
instruction about the topic. Superb, however, is Thomas Marschler’s essay on
the divine attributes, for which he relies heavily on original texts. He argues
successfully that Suarez avoids aligning himself with either the Thomist or the
Scotist side (157). Fernando D. Reboiras in his chapter on biblical criticism
demonstrates that in Baroque Spain scriptural scholarship was often regarded
as “Islamic or Judaizing activity” and was at times infused with a “certain antischolastic spirit” (169). Of particular interest is the juxtaposition of Vitoria and
Cano. Vitoria insisted that theological arguments should have a scriptural
justification, but it was the master de locis theologicis, Cano, who not only laid
out the principles of positive theology but also gave such revelation-based
theology priority over the theologia speculativa (175). In fact, Cano rejected the
deteriorated forms of Scholasticism which “introduce the feces of sophisms”
into the schools (177). Banez, however maintained the independence of the
speculative theologian from the work of biblical philology. A name that deserves
more attention in today’s scholarship is that of Gaspar de Grajal, who as

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professor of biblical exegesis in Salamanca argued that good Catholic theology
should not impose narrow and fixed meanings on the sacred text for the sake
of confessional polemics, but rather try to “keep the holy text open to the
possibility of varying interpretations” (184).
Part 4 deals with philosophical problems such as natural philosophy, logic,
and psychology. Unfortunately, Leen Spruit reiterates—it is telling that he mentions no source—the old falsehood that “in 1561 the Council of Trent had
ratified that Lombard’s Sentences was replaced with Aquinas’s Summa theologiae as the authoritative textbook in Scholastic theology and philosophy” (253).
Nothing of the sort happened, and the editors should have caught this piece of
misinformation, which is especially unfortunate since it appears in a handbook.
Part 5 deals with ethics, and here Thomas Pink’s superb piece on final
causation deserves mention. He refutes the widespread view that Spanish
Scholasticism, in particular Suarez, denied finality in nature through their
restriction of final causation to the world of rational agency (278). Fernanda
Alfieri tackles “Love, Marriage and Sexuality” and demonstrates the
sophisticated views of Spanish Scholastics about “the use of the body.”
Undoubtedly the best expert in the field, Roland Schuessler, authored the
chapter on casuistry and probabilism. He shows that casuistry was, unlike
modern Anglo-American case law, not a process of “inductive case-based
reasoning” but rather a “conscience top down” process that presupposed a
framework of laws that was applied to specific cases (337). Casuistry was highly
flexible and pastorally oriented, and thus does not deserve the derogatory labels
twentieth-century moral theologians pinned on it. It was also not a “instrument
of control,” as some historians surmised (342).
Part 6 deals with questions of politics, part 7 with law, and part 8 with
economics, and thus also with questions of usury and just pricing. In the last
part of the companion, which is dedicated to “Science and the Senses,” Juan
Paris investigates the new emphasis on empirical studies in the scientific
curriculum of the seventeenth century, while Ruth Hill ends the volume with
her reflections on “the New World and the Problem of Race.” This reader
wishes she had said more about Juan de Lugo’s nominalism (599) and how this
philosophical stance influences positions on race.
Due to its systematic structure, this companion is certainly one of the best
and most useful resources for the history of Spanish Scholasticism. My hope is
that theologians and historians of different fields pick it up and learn from it.
Then they will realize that Spanish Scholasticism was colorful and lively.
ULRICH L. LEHNER
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

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Habits and Holiness: Ethics, Theology, and Biopsychology. By EZRA SULLIVAN,
O.P. Foreword by WOJCIECH GIERTYCH, O.P. Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 2021. Pp. xxxii + 575. $34.95
(paper). ISBN 978-0-8132-3329-1.
Habits and Holiness is about the human basis for divinely inspired change
and flourishing in a person and among friends. In this impressive work of
integration, Ezra Sullivan, O.P., addresses the meaning of the ongoing change
involved in the acquisition of habitual readiness to flourish. He argues that the
moral habits are the most important capacities that underlie good moral action
and growth in holiness and that resist evil acts and vices. Placing the neurological, biological, empirical, and psychological sciences in service of philosophical and theological sources, he employs a method and a philosophical
anthropology that focus on a multidimensional and teleological understanding
of habits and holiness.
The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on one aspect of
the importance of habits in the quest of holiness in the Christian life. The first
part is devoted to the biological bases of the habits and dispositions that serve
the human acquisition of both virtues and vices. Sullivan calls upon the different
disciplines involved in biopsychology to address the behavioral momentum of
human habits, using the analysis of what he calls the habit loop (an antecedent
trigger or cue, the behavior itself, and a consequent reward) to help understand
the foundation of voluntary action according to reason. Sullivan calls these
aspects of dispositions “subterranean habits” because they underlie the
involuntary (i.e., prerational and preaffective) aspects of universal human
nature and particular individual nature (second nature). He presents an
extensive study of human nature, dispositions, and instincts, including the
cogitative power, which has a special role in prerational cognition and higherorder perceptions. He builds upon Thomas Aquinas’s thought and the
distinction between general human nature, which is common to all, and a
person’s individual nature, which is a particular expression of human nature.
This distinction gives a further basis to account for individuality, diversity, and
the providential order.
The second part of the book considers habits in the context of a Thomistic
approach to freedom and habituation. Habits are distinguished as positive
(virtues) or negative (vices). According to the nature of their objects, habits are
also distinguished as acquired virtues (both intellectual and moral), or as
supernatural, infused, and theological virtues. Of special interest for the
spiritual life are the promptings involved in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These
gifts are often ignored or neglected in contemporary theology. They are,
however, an important part of Aquinas’s doctrine of dispositions, which interact
with the theological and infused virtues.
The third part of the book focuses on how habits can be changed, formed,
and even “hacked.” Sullivan proposes a model that builds upon self-knowledge

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and the input of scientific, philosophical, psychological, ethical, and theological
sources. He evaluates techniques for acquiring, developing, and correcting
habits. He also discusses how habits become deformed. Of notable interest is
his treatment of the habits that serve the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. This
approach to habit, virtue, and grace also demonstrates how merit is salient to
formed and deformed habits. A full consideration of personal cooperation with
habitual grace and with sanctifying grace and the merits of Christ leads to an
understanding of how human merit influences human participation in the life
of grace. Grace and merit involve work on oneself that is social, that demands
friendship for developing habits, and that prepares one to flourish.
The most original contribution of Sullivan’s work is its integrative approach.
The book provides an engagement of contemporary psychology and personality
theory with Aquinas’s classic understanding of the person (i.e., the soul).
Sullivan uses the multiple conceptual lenses of philosophical ethics, moral
practice, and moral theology, as well as the empirical, biological, and
psychological sciences. This method serves better to support and even to refine
some of Aquinas’s philosophical anthropology and moral theory.
In current scholarship, however, methods that integrate multiple disciplines
sometimes consider true knowledge and science as the result of empirical
methods that are statistical and quantifiable, while excluding other observational methods that are narrative and qualitative. Sullivan resolves this problem
by calling upon Aquinas’s realist metaphysics, his vision of the person, and his
ethics. The book shows positive potential for setting up a dialogue between
ethics, theology, and biopsychology. The uniqueness of its approach is found in
the modality of service that completes the description of integration: each
science is the master of its own competency and contribution, and each serves
the others by enabling us better to understand the person as an object of study
and a subject for action.
An instance of refinement within such a Thomist approach is Sullivan’s
adoption of biopsychology’s conceptualization of a habit loop to serve as a
diagnostic tool for better understanding behavior, virtue, and vice. This enriches
Aquinas’s account of the fonts of moral action with insights about the three
dimensions of movement and change through the habit loop: antecedent
triggers to action, behavior itself, and consequent rewards of behavior. In his
most lucid insight, Sullivan furthermore expands the concept of habit loop to
include such supernatural levels as the ends of the agent and the object of the
act, which are indicative of infused theological virtues understood by
association with the loop of grace. Grace is thus better understood as
transforming the complexity and fullness of human and individual nature. The
place of habits and grace is furthermore also seen in the context of the call to
holiness through growth and participation in the spiritual life of faith, hope,
and charity.
There are several important aspects of Sullivan’s approach to habit and
holiness that can be misunderstood and that might be strengthened. First, a full

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treatment of Aquinas’s approach to habit and holiness is sometimes lacking in
the recent revival of virtue theory, which inappropriately focuses solely on
cognition, volition, behavior, or the passions instead of the whole person and
interpersonal relationships. Sullivan’s philosophical anthropology, however, is
appropriately complex, giving room for the interplay of intellect and sensation,
and of cognition and affect or volition, although it could be more explicitly
rooted in the interpersonal dimensions of the virtues and Christian holiness.
The book addresses the higher sensory perceptions of memory, imagination,
and the cogitative capacity, which make their own contributions to understanding habits and holiness. Aquinas’s discussion of moral habits is not
reducible to these higher internal sensate perceptions and the prerational
judgment of the cogitative capacity. Nonetheless, higher-order sense perceptions and judgments participate in the good of reason. Aristotle and Aquinas,
for instance, would agree that we form virtuous embodied dispositions through
the good use of memory and imagination because of the force of the moral
object, of repeated reflection, and of moral acts. In its own way, as a higherorder sense perception, the cogitative power can also be well-formed by nature
and by acquired disposition to serve a life of virtue and the practice of prudence.
Our interest in the cogitative power and its excellence comes from its own
participation in and proximity to universal reason, which guides the exercise of
this power.
Sullivan explains that the cogitative power also has negative potential when
influenced by a person’s lack of moral development, ignorance about the nature
of moral good and evil, disordered passions, social bias, personal and social sin,
and negative effects of biochemical and developmental factors, as well as
psychosocial pathologies. Such negative influences might, for example, lead one
not to experience an initial pity or friendliness when first seeing a person in
distress. On the other hand, positive influences might lead to a development
from initial pity into mercy and merciful action from reflection and further
contact with the person in need of help.
Of special interest in the culmination of the book is Sullivan’s attention to
habit change and the forging of consistent habits for the good life. This
theoretical and practical extension of the work can be better appreciated with
his summary of his very practical advice for the formation of acquired habits:
1. Identify the new behavior that you want to perform and the habit that produces it.
2. Identify the things that will give you a sense of reward for performing the behavior.
3. Make the desired object attractive by association.
4. Choose a cue within a stable performance context that will effectively initiate the
desired behavior.
5. Devise a reasonable plan for shaping your desired habit loop.
6. Organize the material well.
7. Put your plan into practice.
8. Begin at the beginning.

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9. Frequently meditate on it in an orderly way.
10. Pay attention and be fervent. (471)

Sullivan furthermore applies these elements of habit change to the topic of
growth in the supernatural virtues.
One theme that might be unexpected in the discussion of ethics, theology,
and biopsychology is that of merit and grace. Yet the whole book in effect
prepares for the discussion of the development and effect of merit. Sullivan
follows Aquinas in his understanding of how humans can merit sanctifying grace
(which is nonetheless a divine gift) and how merit is necessary to develop longterm good habits. In short, due to divine wisdom and providence, good acts
have a good end and merit rewards. Sullivan identifies four conditions that must
be met for an act to be supernaturally meritorious. It must be free, rooted in
sanctifying grace, commanded by charity, and done in the present life. In the
context of moral action, grace perfects and transforms nature according to the
manner of nature, including the existence and acts of the habits. Merit is a result
of habitually cooperating with grace toward the final end. With this type of
cooperation, the habit loop is completed by a transformative loop of grace.
Unfortunately, the last section of the book, on the role of friendship in
developing habits, is not as complete and robust as the other sections. It applies
the method to Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ insights on friendship without explicitly
developing how the method must be applied to the insights about the
transformative loop of grace.
The reader should not overlook the insightful foreword contributed by Fr.
Wojciech Giertych, O.P., the Theologian to the Papal Household. The extensive
collection of tables and figures is also of great help to the reader in better
understanding the book’s complex concepts.
Sullivan’s work is of great value, especially in the way it retrieves the wisdom
of Aquinas, while continuing and extending the tradition through dialogue with
the contemporary biological, neurological, and psychosocial sciences. The
greater knowledge of the nature and possibilities of habits and holiness is found
in the fine-tuned observations of these sciences on sensation, perception,
cognition, affect, and volition, which are taken up in Aquinas’s philosophical
anthropology and theological insights, understanding, and knowledge about the
theory and practices related to virtue and vice. The book’s discussion of human
nature, second or individual nature (acquired dispositions and habits), and
natural law addresses the formative nature of flourishing and the deformative
nature of languishing. Importantly, the book also presents a method for
understanding and addressing the lingering effects of disordered thoughts,
choices, actions, passions, and relationships, at their biochemical,
developmental, and psychosocial levels. The theological and practical sides of
the work offer a deep understanding about changing habits and forming
perfective and collaborative habits for life. To this end, the book offers ethical,

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theological, and biopsychological support, conceptual tools, and practical
models that aim at making one habitually ready to flourish in holiness.
CRAIG STEVEN TITUS
Divine Mercy University
Sterling, Virginia