COMMENTARY: Cardinal Robert McElroy’s comments last week, arguing the synod is the correct place to overturn core Catholic teachings, have spotlighted how the Synod on Synodality’s leaders are themselves manipulating the process in pursuit of this same objective.
Newly elevated Cardinal Robert McElroy (c) attends a papal Mass with the new Cardinals and the College of Cardinals, on Aug. 30 at St. Peter’s Basilica. (photo: Andreas Solaro / AFP via Getty Images)
The recent letter to the world’s bishops from Cardinal Mario Grech, head of the Vatican synod secretariat, and Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, relator general of the Synod on Synodality, shows that managing a synod is not as easy as it used to be.
The previous synods under Pope Francis were relatively easy to handle compared to the current synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church. Back then, the synod managers, after hearing everyone, would just insert into the interim or final reports whatever they wished.
Origins of the Synodality Synod
That’s how the synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church got started. It will culminate in not one, but two, planetary synod meetings in Rome, one this fall and the second in October 2024.
But it began in 2018 at the Synod on Youth, when Jesuit Father Giacomo Costa — one of the key synod managers — simply inserted material about synodal processes into that synod’s report.
It would be hard to think of anything less appealing to normal young people than endless meetings under the guidance of group facilitators. Nevertheless, the synod secretariat needed to launch the multistage local-to-planetary synodal process somewhere, and so they “reported” that the synod fathers desired that young Catholics the world over be engaged in synodality.
Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Bombay, a member of the Holy Father’s “council of cardinals” and close papal adviser, let it be known that the synod secretariat had engineered that text and suggested Father Costa himself might have been the engineer.
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