Perspectives, Paradigms, and Catholicity

The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal
As the first full week of the final session of the Synod on Synodality begins today, little is emerging that has not been heard many times before. Some delegates have expressed pleasure at reconnecting with friends they made last year. It's no small thing to make friends, good friends, true friends, anno Domini 2024, even in the Church. And while that may not lead to much as many were hoping for in the synodal way - the new way of "being Church," "listening," "walking together" - at least it may help keep some measure of calm in the synod hall.
News has been so slow that, at a press briefing the other day, there were just a few more journalists than there were panelists. That may change as things unfold. But there's "not much there there" - except for Australian Bishop Anthony Randazzo who, on Friday, deplored the focus on so-called "hot button issues," as if the Church were involved in a political campaign. He dismissed all that as merely being driven by a small number of ideologues. Progressives in the media, however, love to give that small group a big megaphone.
But there was one remark in a previous press briefing that caught my attention. Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas has been the synod point man for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Amid some hard-to-get-a-grip-on meandering in the general direction of synodality, he raised a question that will not go away when the synod ends. Or after. Ever. Because it can't.
He suggested that some people fear that talking about each of our "perspectives" on the faith risks losing the necessary elements of truth and unity. Clearly, the emphasis we've been presented with in these first days about the importance of "experience" rather than dogma seems to confirm those dangers. The good bishop, however, noted that there are four Gospels, four different "perspectives" on the life and death of Our Lord. And that the early Church saw this as a good thing to preserve rather than to reduce the story to a single account.
Fair enough. But it's also true that there was a limited range of authentic perspectives that the Church, as it grew, deemed authoritative. There are various fictitious early texts, Gnostic gospels, etc., so different than the four Gospels we have, that for the Church not to have declared them heretical would have indicated no concern for fact or truth. Even some sound early documents - the Didache, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Epistle of Barnabas, etc. - were disputed (antilegomenon graphon), never regarded as heretical, but still didn't make it into the canon of Scripture.
Which brings up a meta-perspective, if you will, under which all the others must operate. Bishop Flores hinted at as much, but in our postmodern, fragmented world - which paradoxically is becoming ever more uniform even as it emphasizes diversity - Catholicity not diversity is where the real battle lies. It's easy to have perspectives, life experiences, opinions - everyone has those.
For the present writer and many other synod observers, concern arises when we see things like the following, excerpted from the report that "study group 9," the one charged with addressing, "Synodal theological and methodological criteria for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues (SR 15,)," published last week and distributed to the synod delegates:
We have chosen Acts of the Apostles chapter 15 as a biblical paradigm. This text gives witness to the path of discernment experienced by the nascent Church. . . .Thus, the criteria offered to the discernment of an authority that is synodally expressed and structured (Peter and James, with the other apostles, the elders and the whole Church) are: the absolute precedence of God's universal salvific will and the prohibition to hindering God's universal salvific will with anything that no longer has any efficacious meaning. (Emphasis added.)
This "paradigm" aspires to be Biblical and respect Biblical "authorit...