The Gospel, not “listening,” is the message

Toward the end of the recent Roman meeting to discuss the Church’s 21^st-century mission to marriage and the family, Pope Leo XIV asked the participating bishops to share their reflections on that experience.

Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO, of Trondheim, did so in a post on his indispensable blog, Coram Fratribus [Among Brethren]. Please take a moment to read it here. Even in its relative brevity–perhaps because of its relative brevity–I find it the most persuasive, pastorally useful, and moving statement on marriage and the family to have come out of the synodal process that began in 2014-15 and eventually led to the Vatican meeting earlier this month.

With the clarity and wit characteristic of his writing, the Norwegian monk-bishop explains the Church’s understanding of the primordial sacrament and the Christian concept of the family with biblical and theological depth, while leavening his exquisite catechesis with charming bits of popular culture, like the duet between Tevye and Golde in Fiddler on the Roof.

Bishop Varden’s explication of the Catholic understanding of marriage and the family is all the more compelling, and all the more needed, because it’s chock-full of evangelical substance. For in meeting the contemporary crisis of marriage and the family—which has led, among other things, to cratering birth rates virtually everywhere—what the world most needs is biblical truth: the truth about men and women, their distinctiveness and complementarity; the truth about marriage as a covenant, not a mere contract; the truth about families as the first schools of freedom, where the little tyrants we all were at age two are transformed into adults who can flourish as individuals while living in solidarity with others.

Unfortunately, one prominent concept in the “synodal process” that began in 2014-15, that intensified during the 2023 and 2024 synods on synodality, and that was evident in Rome earlier this month, reflects a different—and, if I may say, alarmingly anorexic—notion of the Church’s mission to marriage and the family.

That concept came to the fore when one of the theologians chosen to address a press conference at the end of the recent Roman meeting said that this gathering of the presidents of the world’s episcopal conferences demonstrated that we are now “a Church where listening becomes the message.” For “when we listen to each other’s stories, when we allow each other’s stories to become our stories, we see a sudden convergence of multiple stories through which we can see clearly the footprints of God.”

That was not the experience of the two disciples walking out on the road to Emmaus in Luke’s gospel.

They recounted to each other their stories, and others’ stories, of “the things that have happened [in Jerusalem] in these days” (Luke 24:18). But they could not see the “footprints of God” in those stories, and they kept walking in the wrong direction, until they had been instructed by the incarnate and risen Son of God and recognized him in the breaking of the bread. It was only then that “their eyes were opened” (Luke 24:32) and they began walking in the right direction: back to the Jerusalem that prefigures the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:2), the destiny of a redeemed and glorified humanity.

“The message” of the Church is not “listening.” The message of the Church is the Gospel. Its proclamation and its invitation to friendship with the Lord Jesus certainly require listening, so that the proclamation and the invitation are appropriate to those being evangelized and invited.

But if the message is “listening,” then the Church is a circular gabfest, trapped in the contemporary cultural confusions to which the biblical story of our humanity and the Gospel of Jesus Christ offer the remedy.

A Catholicism where “listening becomes the message” cannot be a Church permanently in mission, because mission is rooted in the conviction that there are settled truths of Catholic faith that make for personal happiness and solidarity with others, including happiness and solidarity within marriages and families. Inviting someone to hear those truths and helping the hearer to embrace them requires careful listening, to be sure.

But if the medium—listening—becomes the message, the message is lost. Perhaps that is what some would like “synodality” to mean. If so, they are sadly mistaken. Because when listening is the message, and not the Gospel, the listeners are still lost on the many Emmaus roads of our time, none of which are superhighways to the New Jerusalem.