Vatican City, Oct 14, 2023 / 11:55 am (CNA).
Small group reports from the Synod on Synodality won’t be made public — even though the documents have already been accessed by some journalists following an information security oversight.
The decision was communicated Saturday by Paolo Ruffini, president of the Synod’s communication commission, at a press briefing earlier today.
On Friday morning, The Pillar reported that it had accessed table reports and small group assignments via an unsecured server managed by the General Secretariat of the Synod. At the time, the Catholic news outlet said that access to the server could be accessed via a link, without the need to enter any credentials. The Pillar noted that it had notified Vatican officials immediately after its discovery, and access to the sever via the link was closed later that day.
Commenting on the mishap, Ruffini explained that Synod organizers had decided to make files available on the unsecured server after some members had had trouble accessing the secured server which required input of a password.
“The goal consisted in allowing every member to have access to information” necessary for full participation, he shared.
Following The Pillar report, organizers reinstated password-requirements, and will provide direct technical support to members having access issues going forward.
Citing the Pope’s request for “restraint” from media members covering the Synod, The Pillar did not publish the documents it obtained. But it is unclear if other media outlets likewise accessed and now possess the files.
While maintaining that there was nothing “secret” about the table reports, Ruffini described them as “confidential,” and said that making them publicly available would threaten the prayerful spirit of discernment sought by Synod organizers.
“This would turn our encounter to pray for discernment” into a sort of “public conference” or “parliament,” Ruffini said, referring to a characterization of the Synod that Pope Francis has criticized.
Ruffini was responding to a question on whether it was unfair that some media outlets have accessed the reports, while others are still in the dark.
Table reports from the Synod on Synodality, a monthlong assembly to consult Pope Francis on how the Church can better include all its members, have been the subject of intense interest over the past week. In a first for a Synod of Bishops, only certain members will focus on certain topics at their tables, raising concerns that the table reports on a given theme — such as controversial issues like “LGBTQ inclusion” or the possibility admitting women to the diaconate — will not be reflective of the entire assembly.
The table reports, in turn, will serve as a key basis for a summary of the Synod’s proceedings expected at the end of the month. In turn, the summary document will provide the starting point for a second Synod assembly in October 2024, which will provide final recommendations to the pope.
But while table reports from previous Synods have been made publicly available, they are being kept under wraps at the Synod on Synodality as part of the broader “media blackout,” requested by Pope Francis.
Ruffini also addressed other methodological questions surrounding the Synod.
Question about voting process
In response to a question on whether Synod members will be able to vote on individual proposals to be included in a summary document at the end of the month, or instead will simply vote on whether the document as a whole accurately reflects the month-long proceedings, he avoided a direct answer.
He did say, however, that reports of any Synod votes would not include any kind of differentiation between bishops and non-bishops.
“We are part of the same communion and the same Synodal assembly,” said Ruffini, in explaining why votes wouldn’t be distinguished, adding that the “common baptismal priesthood” is the basis for participation in the Synod. … which unites us all.”
In a first for a Synod of Bishops, a significant number of non-bishops, including women, have been given voting rights in the Synod. 27% of the Synod on Synodality’s 365 voting members are non-bishops, a fact that has led some question the legitimacy of whatever recommendations come out of the Synod.
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We read: “password-requirements, nothing ‘secret'” while the German “non-synod” is busy working the synodal tables. Butt, no, there is no secret handshake, or whatever.
Does anyone NOT see that the wheels are coming off?
Agreed, a difficult and precarious moment for the perennial and apostolic Catholic Church to really engage and minister to the disintegrating modern world, but the “confidential” (!)”listening” thing has gone south, well beyond the pay grade of mutated synodalism, and its ringmasters, and their communication bottleneck Ruffini.
The very public (but unread) Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council would make an excellent summary report!
More than one quarter non bishops plus select panels on the primary controversial issues, LGBT inclusion and female ordination effectively discounts the input of the hierarchy, making this Synod radically different from the traditional synod. Furthermore, these structural doctrinal issues subject to evaluation by secretive [confidential?] panels have the character of preset implementation.
The disconcerting but not unexpected presence of Bishop Bätzing, exerting an obviously sanctioned authority to apprise the delegates confirms the opinion of many that the ‘heated’ exchanges between the Synodaler Weg and the Vatican were pure Kabuki theater. As the circus impresario said, The show must go on. Unfortunately to the detriment of justice and truth.
Yours truly humbly proposes a “paradigm shift”—NOT in the meaning of Church, but in subliminal messaging from the Synod on Synodality. A sequence of eight reflections, probably laboring the obvious…
ONE: In the secular world a professional literature demonstrates that communication (“listening”) is often more difficult WITHIN organizations than externally…
TWO: Even while the internal/external (?) Synod involves voting, it arguably “is not a parliament,” because not quite a governance coalition, nor a federation of Continental Assemblies, nor yet in permanent session as manipulated by the Synodal Way.
THREE: Instead, the Church is organizationally different from ANY secular political structure or process—EACH bishop is a direct Successor of the Apostles as “sent” (apostello) by the incarnate Jesus Christ. More than “primarily as facilitators” (the vademecum), or “pioneers” (Hollerich), or a papal franchise (the ghost-writer Fernandez: “the magisterium of the pope”!).
FOUR: The synergy between the bishops and the papacy needs definition—as already supplied (!) by the Second Vatican Council which completed the militarily-disrupted and “suspended” First Vatican Council. That is, the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium, Ch. 3, with the Explanatory Note).
FIVE: The reason for #ONE is the often self-referential pecking order within each organizational pyramid. But, the unique institutional architecture of the Church is neither a “pyramid,” nor now an “inverted pyramid” with the responsibility/authority of a bishop cancelled by, say, the vote of a lay college student. The irreducible difference between, yes, a listening consultation and accountability (Mt 28:19-20)!
SIX: The binding service of the apostolic Church, in season and out of season, is affirmation of the “transcendent dignity of the human person;” not in an “expert” summary paper (paper!) mingling on-the-ground urgencies together with what is foundational: moral and ecclesial, and not merely “hot-button issues.”
SEVEN: The synodal potpourri confuses Gaudium et Spes’—the clarified distinction between the domain of the Church and the domain of Secular Society (a confusion readily exploited by both radical Secularism and fideistic Islam).
EIGHT: Synodal mutation would reduce the inborn Natural Law and moral absolutes to a polarization to be arbitrated; this law now explicitly included in the Church’s magisterium (Veritatis Splendor, nn. 56, 115). “The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this norm” (n. 95).
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What the Church IS, is always more than what the Church DOES (councils, synods). Rather, the indwelled Church serves as the ever new “guardian” of the Deposit of Faith. To answer the secularist, self-referential, and ambulatory “style” now arguably entangled with synodality: “that’s what the meaning of IS, is.”