A publication of Sacred Heart University. All opinions are solely those of the authors.
On Fratelli Tutti and Hurricanes
Hungry Hearts

Is Francis About to be Undone by His Greatest Creation?

The Second Session of the Synod on Synodality will formally open in the Vatican this October and it promises to be a deciding—perhaps the deciding—moment in the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis.

Synodality in the Francis lexicon defines a new way of being an ecclesia or assembly of believers. It involves, as he said in Quebec City, a “restructuring of the spiritual life with ‘new ways of seeing.’” To that end, he convoked a synod or assembly of representatives drawn from across the Catholic landscape—bishops and laity alike—with the intention of creating an inclusive, free and dialogue-friendly gathering where delegates speak their minds without fear of a punitive response from the senior authorities when they go off script. 

As he said in his encyclical Fratelli tutti, “a healthy openness never threatens one’s own identity.” This papal maxim was tested to the limit at the First Session of the Synod on Synodality held in October 2023. Certain hot-button issues were either shelved or referred to a specific study group charged with the responsibility of exploring in greater depth the multi-dimensional aspects of a controverted matter in the church. This is especially true of debates around women in ministry. Two commissions created by Francis to study the ordination of women to the diaconate have the status of a suspended life in the musty corridors of Roman bureaucracy.

The words of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn can serve as a cautionary warning for Francis and his church: “a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who live in it.” The women who live in the Catholic Church are by every measure the largest and most productive component of its life and outreach; the men who run the church must get to know them in ways that don’t reduce them to a holy mystery in need of their own justificatory theology, to an abstraction rather than an encounter, to a principle rather than an enfleshed reality.

Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland, a civil law professor and a canon lawyer as well, is unsparing in her view of the synod: “it got uplift from a posse of hagiographers and Pollyannas [but] the kite trails the ground and is likely to be in ribbons by the end of October 2024.” Tina Beattie, a leading British Catholic theologian, is even more blistering in her assessment: “delays, deferrals, further reflections, unpublished reports—while the platitudinous waffle about women’s charisms and gifts drone on year after year … I no longer have the slightest interest in the chunterings of a celibate male hierarchy when it comes to women.”

Ouch.

In addition, originating on the other side of the Catholic spectrum, Francis has yet to win over the majority of the current episcopate. Most are not overly resistant to his idea of a synodal church, the product of a paradigm shift that inverts the normative model of distributed power, but they are cautious and worried. After all, it involves some significant adjustment to how they as bishops govern a church that moves beyond a univocally hierarchical mode of operating. For these bishops, and for many traditionalist Catholics, the Jesuit pope as disruptor is not a consolation but a desolation. One Francis critic, Thomas Weinandy, a Capuchin friar with the disposition of an inquisitor, accuses the pope of “using high-sounding words that are very ambiguous. … There can be no authentic paradigm shift without being faithful to upholding and promoting what the church has authentically taught through the centuries.”

But the disruptor pope has done precisely that: inaugurate a paradigm shift by being faithful to the organic tradition. He has disrupted the established pattern of doing things as the premier occupant of the Vatican; he has disrupted the protocols that are the mainstay of institutional life on the Tiber; he has disrupted the way we see the church operating in the world; he has disrupted the pattern of church priorities by centering the believing community on and with the poor; he had disrupted the settled questions by introducing a new perspective, replacing a magisterial with a synodal way of being church.

And he has managed to hold to the tradition he has sworn to protect as the Successor of Peter and as the Bishop of Rome by refusing to alter church teaching by either papal fiat or parliamentary consensus; by refusing to disregard forms of devotion or expressions of popular religiosity; by refusing to dismiss the work of his predecessors and instead building on their scaffolding.


Michael W. Higgins is a senior fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. His book on the Bergoglio papacy, “The Jesuit Disruptor: Francis Takes on His Church” is available in bookstores and his book on the Synod, “The 60 Days that Shook the Church: The Synod on Synodality,” will be published in 2025.

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