What, exactly, is a “listening Church”? And what does synodality mean today?

Synodality remains a featured project of the contemporary Church under the papacy of Pope Leo XIV. But it remains to be seen what Leo plans on doing with it, and so the debates and controversies surrounding it remain an ongoing aspect as well of this thing called “synodality”.

In what follows, I want to focus on one aspect of synodality still up in the air as to its precise meaning—an ambiguity that is itself indicative of the vague definitional world within which synodality lives. It is the repeated assertions of the strongest proponents of the “new synodal Church” that synodality, in great measure, represents the Church transitioning from a Church of “top down” pronouncements into a Church that “listens”.

The attempted revamping of Catholic morality

But what does this mean precisely? What, exactly, is a “listening Church” and what, exactly, is it that a “listening Church” does that a non-listening Church does not do? Are we to further surmise that prior to this synodal project, the Church was not sufficiently “listening” to the “people of God”? And if so, in what concrete ways did this insufficiency to listen manifest itself in her pastoral life?

When pressed for answers to these questions, the synodal advocates deflect away from definitional clarity. They seem to be saying, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, that “listening is as listening does.” But one sees certain “tells” as to what they mean when they link “listening” to a greater emphasis upon a deeper attentiveness to the “concrete lived experiences” of the faithful. Which, in turn, leads to a greater emphasis upon “accompaniment” for those faithful whose lived experiences are embedded within “complex concrete circumstances”.

Once again, there is the not-so-subtle implication that the pre-synodal Church was not sufficiently attentive to those lived experiences. We see, for example, frequent references to the need to avoid “one size fits all” pastoral approaches in which the Church presumes that her moral norms—e.g., the commandment not to commit adultery—are inviolable and that prohibitions against such moral acts harbor no exceptions, regardless of circumstances. Presumably, such a posture is coldly indifferent to those who find themselves in “messy and complicated circumstances”. Therefore, what is necessary, so the argument goes, is a greater posture of listening to determine whether mitigating circumstances are so great as to constitute a need for a more accommodationist posture under the law of pastoral gradualness.

There is a sense in which this is thoroughly unproblematic. The Church’s traditional moral theology has always held that there are three criteria for adjudicating the morality of any act: the moral object, the motives, and the circumstances surrounding the act. Pastors, for centuries, have applied these criteria to the penitents, and usually with sensitivity and pastoral mercy. Not always, of course, but it is a profound calumny of the past to imply that before synodality and a “listening Church” emerged, pastors were mostly a pharisaical group of insensitive clericalists. After all, was not the rise of forms of moral theological casuistry precisely an attempt at granting a broad latitudinarian presumption of diminished moral culpability for all manner of alleged sins?

One cannot help but get the sense that the proponents of a “listening Church” mean something other than this. They apparently want a complete revamping of the Church’s moral theology that begins with “lived experience” as the presumptive primary criterion for adjudicating the morality of an act, rather than the moral commandments and the admonishment to “avoid evil and do the good”. What seems new in this current push for a listening Church is an inversion of the criteria for a moral act that leads inexorably to a pastoral praxis that eviscerates the concept of intrinsically evil acts under the weight of a million idiosyncratic and morally mitigating circumstances.

This becomes even more apparent when one realizes that the reform of moral theology called for by Vatican II was carried out by thinkers including Germain Grisez and Servais Pinckaers, to cite but two examples. The Council in no way called for the repudiation of the Church’s traditional reliance upon natural law thinking. Rather, it called for that approach to be grounded more explicitly in scripture and the Fathers. To that end, Grisez (whom I studied under) grounded the moral commandments in natural law but gave it a more explicitly Scriptural foundation in what he called the “modes of responsibility”, which he developed out of the moral norms contained in the Sermon on the Mount. And Pinckaer redeployed natural law with a greater emphasis on the moral life as grounded in the development of various virtues, which is a very Thomistic move.

My point is that it is not as if the Church has been moribund and hidebound, clinging to outdated scholastic manuals, while ignoring the “lived circumstances” of the faithful. Rather, there has been a dynamic and robust development of moral theology, at once faithful to the traditional moral commandments while developing new pastoral pathways for discernment.

Listening to who? Where? How?

Historical context here is important. Alongside these developments in moral theology, there arose a new approach, loosely called “proportionalism”, with such thinkers as Bernard Häring, Charles Curran, and Richard McCormick developing the idea that moral acts are almost completely determined by the circumstances and motives of those involved, and with an eye toward the foreseen “consequences” of those acts. This formed the foundation for the rise of massive dissent from Humanae Vitae and indeed all of the Church’s teachings on sexuality.

With some exceptions, there was a concomitant rise in the dismissal of the idea of intrinsically evil acts, since no act can be judged in advance to be immoral until each of the relevant circumstances and potential consequences of an act is factored in. And it is precisely this denial of intrinsically evil acts that prompted Pope St. John Paul II to issue his encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor.

Returning to synodality and the emphasis upon a listening Church, we must not analyze the proposals of its adherents in a historical vacuum, as if the past sixty years of moral theological debate never happened. Indeed, it was Pope Francis who held up Bernard Häring as a “model” for how moral theology is to be done. I hasten to add that Pope Francis was not necessarily endorsing proportionalism, and as with so many other aspects of his papacy, his exact meaning was unclear. Nevertheless, he said what he said, and it is further evidence that the old debates were still framing the discussion and the backdrop to the new synodal way.

In other words, the proposals for a more listening Church cannot be read as involving a pristine, new way of thinking that was entirely devoid of connections to this history of theological debate. Those, including myself, who questioned certain aspects of the synodal way, and who criticized the ambiguities of Amoris Laetitia, and who called for a greater magisterial clarity on these matters, were not, and are not, little more than old guard reactionary cranks and “anti-Francis” dissidents who need to be put in their place. Many Cardinals and theologians of impeccable scholarship were among those seeking greater clarity. And that is because they understood the historical context of the debate and saw the telltale signs of a proportionalist undertow in the rising tide of the synodal listening Church.

(Do not rush in with the rejoinder that it is wrong to see such proportionalist leanings in Pope Francis. Regardless of his personal views, he empowered many thinkers who clearly evince such leanings and often without apology. The debate cannot be swept so neatly under the rug, and if one is going to promote such thinkers, then one must expect pushback.)

And the entire emphasis upon the “new and improved listening Church” is not exempt from this criticism. Especially because it is simply impossible for the Church to “listen” to 1.4 billion Catholics, spread across the globe in all kinds of different cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and demographic groupings. And given this impossibility, one is justified in questioning the process of “curated listening”, utterly lacking in transparency, wherein selected individuals and couples are invited to give “witness” to their “lived experiences”. Who selected them and why? What criteria were involved? What theological/ideological lenses were allowed to do the refracting in post-synodal documents?

Worldwide, only about 1% of Catholics bothered to attend the various “listening sessions” of the Continental phase in the lead-up to the first Synod on synodality. But their input via answers to unscientifically developed questions has been touted as an example of the Holy Spirit speaking to the Church through the people of God. This is, in a word, rubbish. And it has the distinct odor of manipulation.

Furthermore, this manipulation seems geared toward the favored conclusion that a listening Church is one open to a “development of doctrine” on nearly all issues. And despite the admonition of Pope Francis to the contrary, all of this “listening” seems oriented toward a more parliamentary proceduralism, where the Church is viewed as an endless debating club with settled doctrines treated as “one party line” among many, and which thus stand open to reversal, now repackaged as the mere consequence of “listening to the Holy Spirit via the people of God”.

By implication, those who oppose this process are now viewed as enemies of the Holy Spirit who are stuck in a “fundamentalist” mindset of intransigent absolutes. This sleight of hand, in which listening to the “lived experiences”, is equated simplistically with the ipsissima verba of the Holy Spirit. It blithely and somewhat insouciantly ignores the many ways in which human beings can deceive themselves.

A more traditional moral theology stood for the supremacy of conscience, but also held that consciences can be grossly malformed, even if sincerely so, and that such malformations arise most often precisely out of the bad effects of those same “concrete circumstances of lived experience.” Human beings in “difficult situations” are capable of deep rationalizations for why their situation is “unique” and one of those liminal situations that cry out for accommodation.

Failure is not an option; it’s inevitable 

But in the new “listening Church” such malformed consciences are treated as a kind of prelapsarian eruption of unvarnished truths, in an almost oracular fashion, to be taken at face value and never questioned lest one be accused of being deaf to the voices of the people. Some might say that I am exaggerating here and engaging in rhetorical hyperbole.

But I think not. Proportionalism was bad enough, but the emphasis upon “listening” to lived experience as the barometer for all theology going forward is something far more dangerous. It is a quasi-gnostic bypassing of the dreaded “institutional Church” with all of its pharisaical “rules” and “outdated” deontological moral norms in favor of the pristinization of conscience as an oracular voice within us that comes directly from God in spiritual immediacy and which, therefore, trumps everything in the bulbous and lumpy world of “mere doctrines”.

And just as in gnosticism, not all “experiences” are treated as being equal, with some being favored as more “illumined” than others. In the Church of “Todos! Todos!” those inner voices most illumined by the spirit of modernity are to be listened to and “included”, but not the voices of those retrograde reactionaries who love the old Mass, the old devotions, and all the old doctrines. We must listen to the pained voices of the “LGBTQ+” experiencers. But not to the pained voices of those who long for non-banal liturgy.

In short, non-transparent and curated listening is no listening at all. And nobody’s “lived experience” is a prelapsarian and non-problematic, privileged oasis of the Holy Spirit. In that light, synodalism and the listening Church will fail to the extent that they refuse to address the deeper existential crisis the Church faces today.