The Challenge of Race and Place for Local Synodality

At the heart of the Church’s ongoing synodal reform lies Vatican II’s theology of the sense of the faithful. This conciliar teaching locates the Church’s capacity to identify and know the Gospel truth in the entire people of God. For this reason, synodal reform at the local level (diocesan level) has primarily involved broadening lay participation through listening sessions, communal discernment and online surveys.

Yet, only focusing on this type of reform overlooks the movement required to overcome the challenges of race and place for synodality in the U.S. For example, in the segregated city of St. Louis, the archdiocese (my local church) took a more centralized approach to its one and only listening session with racial minorities. Rather than holding this single listening session in Black St. Louis north of the segregating line (known by locals as “the Delmar Divide”), the diocese held this listening session in midtown – an area that boasts a burgeoning cornucopia of restaurants, access to expensive, organic grocers and two Catholic institutions of higher education.

Although the synthesis report demonstrates that the listening session involved authentic sharing, surfaced real challenges and was by many measures a genuine experience of synodality, the diocese’s approach required the periphery of the local church to move toward the center instead of the center moving toward the periphery. This approach discouraged participation of those at the racial margins wary of diocesan intentions and in the end, only 25 out of approximately 477,000 non-white Catholics participated in this diocesan-wide listening session. At the same time, the preference for a non-peripheral place prevented diocesan leaders entrusted with discerning insights from this listening session from sharing in the racially unfamiliar lifeworld of St. Louis’ periphery. Indeed, there is a difference between listening to Black Catholics in a white space and listening to Black Catholics in their space.

Although one can certainly scrutinize the mechanics of event planning to find reasons for low participation, a more fundamental, theological problem lies in this centralized approach to synodality itself. Indeed, Pope Francis has repeatedly urged those who are ecclesially centered as pastoral leaders to move to the peripheries: “Pastors must have the smell of the sheep… Go down among your faithful, even into the margins of your dioceses and into all those ‘peripheries of existence.’” This is not simply a metaphorical mandate, but a missionary demand to move to unfamiliar spaces of the periphery. There, we can find the “smell of the sheep” that is the sense of the faithful. As Pope Francis puts it in Let Us Dream: “You have to go to the edges of existence if you want to see the world as it is. I’ve always thought that the world looks clearer from the periphery.” In other words, we cannot make for the margins in the abstract, but rather we must go close and touch the marginalized as Jesus did.

Like most local churches, race and place are not small obstacles to synodality for the Archdiocese of St. Louis. I have found that many white residents disordered by the sin of racism—Catholics included—are hesitant to make the 20-minute drive from the suburb to the city. Yet, what if we actually lived the preferential option for the poor as the Church itself teaches? What if we as a Church understood Pope Francis’ exhortation to go to the periphery with the literality that he intends? What if we left the 99 sheep for the one as Jesus did? Doing this in the abstract is easy; doing this concretely—especially in the context of race—is hard.

So let me ask again in concrete terms. What if we as a Church centered the margins by locating our listening sessions among the marginalized in the places that are the margins? As a synodal Church, we should have a multitude of listening sessions, but if we can only have one, why not hold that at the racial periphery north of the Delmar Divide? When holding listening sessions about parish and school closures, what if we primarily (but not exclusively) held these in the racial peripheries north of Delmar? Why not ask those who are racially centered to drive the 20 minutes to the margins? Why not use listening sessions and communal discernment to begin a process of racial conversion through which the racially centered can begin to see the world through the eyes of the racially marginalized? Why not enable those unfamiliar with the racialized peripheries to hear the faith, witness and challenges of Black Catholics in the place that gives their witness context—the place that is the racialized periphery?

Indeed, synodality is a “journey together” and requires widespread consultation and increased lay participation. Yet, the end of synodality is not consultation or even decentralization but rather attentiveness to the Spirit corporately at work through the sense of the faithful.

Consequently, local synodality requires missionary movement that can overcome the movement of race and place. If the church of St. Louis’ approach to synodality typifies the approach taken by other local churches in the U.S., this indicates how much further local churches need to go to become truly synodal. Only when those of us who are ecclesially and socially centered move north of Delmar can we “hear the Spirit of God speaking to [us] from the margins."

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Deepan Rajaratnam is a doctoral candidate in Christian theology at Saint Louis University.