1. The obstacles

The felt need for ecclesial renewal through synodal participation could hardly be stronger. It seems as though nearly every commentator on synodality – or at least those who aren’t outright detractors of the endeavor – finds valid practical reasons for pursuing a more inclusive and participatory way of being the Church. Some, such as Peter Hünermann, highlight the internal ecclesial challenges that synodality could remedy by providing a ‘way out of the series of scandals’,Footnote ³ and, in Herve Legrand’s assessment, a way to address overly hierarchical governance that stands at the root of such scandals.Footnote ⁴ Others focus on the ad extra implications. Citing its missionary implications, Cardinal Radcliffe notes that synodality provides a way forward for the Church in a world that has ‘lost confidence that human existence has any meaning’.Footnote ⁵ Still others note both the ad intra and ad extra implications: according to Eamonn Conway, ‘synodality offers a pathway towards cleansing the Church of current impediments to its mission, such as clericalism and loss of credibility’ and ‘towards marshalling and channeling the many gifts and charisms of God’s people towards addressing the ecological crisis we face as a planet as well as challenges to authentic human ecology and the fracturing of fraternal humanism globally’.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, the late Richard Gaillardetz noted that ‘only a penitent, humble church that dares to follow where the Spirit leads can offer itself to the world as a school for a more meaningful, authentic form of existence’.Footnote ⁷ Of course, Gaillardetz is also claiming here that only a synodal church can be so penitent, so humble, so daring, and, of course, he’s right. Indeed, it would be just as foolish to separate the ad intra and ad extra practical upshots of synodality from one another as it would be to denigrate any of those upshots as of merely secondary importance. I intend here to do neither. Rather, I want to suggest that if we fail to see these and other laudable practical aims within the wider context of the Church’s identity and mission we run the risk of selling ourselves and the world short, of misunderstanding exactly what is at stake in the task of becoming a synodal Church. This is a task that Rafael Luciani (following Leonardo Boff) has highlighted as an ongoing renewal and remaking of the Church, an ‘Ecclesiogenesis’.Footnote ⁸ We risk, as Gilles Routhier has put it, turning synodality into a ‘magic word which will be here today and gone tomorrow’.Footnote ⁹ Radcliffe’s wider perspective, then, is instructive: ‘Practical decisions are, of course, unavoidable and necessary. But they must spring from the personal and communal transformation of who we are, otherwise they are mere administration’.Footnote ¹⁰

The Teilhard-esque term is apt, I think, since through synodality the Church is seeking to become more fully itself. What does it mean, then for the Church to rediscover its identity in the contemporary world? We could hardly do better here than Lumen Gentium §1: ‘the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race’. Below, I’ll attempt a slightly more substantive treatment of what this sacramental identity entails, but since in this section I’m treating ‘obstacles’, let me first address a failed understanding of that identity, which is at bottom a failed understanding of the nature of sacramental grace and participation. Despite the Catholic archive’s rich, varied, and numerous treatments of sacramental grace as transformative of our hearts, minds, desires, and, indeed, our whole lives,Footnote ¹¹ our moral and theological imagination still falls into the trap of juridical, mechanistic, and transactional modes of thought. The Magisterium seems unable to offer definitive affirmation of the salvation of unbaptized infants;Footnote ¹² collectively we tend to understand the ‘ontological’ change occurring in the sacrament of orders in terms that perpetuate an unhelpfully strict divide between laity and clergy and breed clericalism; and the residue of transactional thinking so infects our mindset to this day that we perpetually need Francis’ repeated admonition that the Eucharist is ‘not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’.Footnote ¹³

There’s more than meets the eye in Francis’ admonition, but for now let us simply take note that the problem isn’t merely on the side of the Magisterium or those who are eager to ignore and/or besmirch the synodal process. Indeed, those of us who eagerly embrace synodality risk perpetuating the same problem by merely challenging the present (perceived or real) boundaries and norms of sacramental participation and not asking after the deeper rationale of sacramental efficacy and then advocating for wider participation, whether concerning holy orders, Eucharistic participation, or elsewhere. But to see why that is so, it’s necessary to move beyond these two obstacles – a narrowly practical rationale of synodality and a mistakenly mechanistic and juridical understanding of sacramental participation – and recover the promises of a more well-rounded understanding of sacramental participation. Doing so will enrich our understanding of synodality’s meaning, purpose, and outcomes.

2. The promises

As LG §1 has already reminded us, to appreciate the centrality of sacramental participation is to understand the very identity of the Church as a sacrament. Fuller appreciation of this fact would not minimize the importance of the seven ritual sacraments but would set them within the wider context of the Church’s life and action as sacramental, through and through.Footnote ¹⁴ But such appreciation requires a recovery of the plainest and most unadulterated meaning of what any and every sacrament is: ‘a sign and instrument’ of the union between humanity with God and of our union with one another. And that union is nothing other than a dynamic process with a specific ratio to it – namely, the transformation of mind, heart, affections, will, and entire lives into union with and likeness to Christ. Indeed, that’s the richest theological heritage bequeathed to us: those with late ancient and medieval theological predilections might well reach back not only to Augustine and Aquinas but also to Gregory of Nyssa or even Maximus the Confessor, for whom full and active participation in the sacramental-liturgical life enables the faithful to ‘receive both fellowship with him by participation through likeness, and identity, by which the human is deemed worthy to become God out of the human […] passing from the grace that is by faith to the grace according to sight, he will remake us into himself’.Footnote ¹⁵ We could just as easily tap the insights of a major figure in the West, such as Bonaventure, who reminds us that the grace available to us in every sacramental act is the very ‘uncreated gift’ of the Holy Spirit given ‘through the Incarnate Word’Footnote ¹⁶ – i.e., the direct presence of the divine Lord with and in us. But given the context of this argument, it’s perhaps best to listen to a more recent source, and one also notably germane to the theme of synodality: Pope Francis. For him, the Eucharist is not a prize for the worthy precisely because as a healing remedy, and it is a healing remedy not for some vaguely mystical reason. No – a sacrament provides truly mystical healing because it signifies and effects an ongoing and transformative union with Christ that reorders our vision, our desires, and so also our actions. As he reminds us in Amoris Laetitia, the sacraments are not a ‘thing’ or a ‘power’ but an ‘encounter with Christ’.Footnote ¹⁷ More than that, in echoes of the Greek tradition, Francis is clear that in the Eucharist the created order partakes of its ultimate goal, which is divinization, or theosis. This is at the heart of Francis’ lofty (and Möhler-esque) claim that the Church must seek to fulfill its identity as the ‘prolongation of the Incarnation’.Footnote ¹⁸ We would do well, then, to understand the communal process of deification as the ongoing assimilation of the Body to its Head, a ‘Christification’ whereby individually and corporately we no longer live but Christ’s lives in us (Gal. 2:20).

But why talk in such elevated terms about sacramental participation, and what does it have to do with the Church’s synodal journey? Don’t such lofty locutions about sacramental grace and ultimate unity with Christ risk ‘spiritualizing’ ecclesial participation in a manner that undermines the broader social and ecclesio-political dimensions which synodal reforms aim to effect? Do we not fall into the trap Cardinal Radcliffe warned us about when he said, ‘We are facing a crisis of the system that cannot be dealt with by spiritual exhortations, desirable as these may be’Footnote ¹⁹? And mustn’t we pursue concrete structural action in the place of ‘spiritual’, even seemingly abstract soteriological analysis? I think not. For, to be held captive by these worries is to perpetuate problems which synodality aims to rectify. Synodality promises both to perform and, further, to inaugurate structural reforms that are simultaneously processes of intellectual and moral transformation, in conjunction with ritual-sacramental participation and transformation. All of which is to say that to appreciate synodality via this wider understanding is to reject a strict (and ultimately false) division between the spiritual and soteriological, on the one hand, and the structural and ecclesio-political on the other.

We should instead challenge this framework writ large and recognize that the salvific and the structural – the speculative and the practical, as it were – are inextricably linked aspects of the more broadly ‘spiritual’ life of the Church. That’s because our ongoing deifying union with God is, again, nothing other than the transformation of our individual and corporate patterns of thought, desire, will, and action. And this same transformation is the substance of embodied sacramental-liturgical action, of embodied synodal practices of ecclesial coresponsibility, discernment, and action, and of the happily unavoidable interplay of these two. And such a unitive and symbiotic interplay between synodality and ritual sacramental participation is affirmed by the documents of Francis’ papacy and the documents of the synodal process in at least two ways: first, when the documents speak of both aspects of ecclesial life in similar terms – i.e., as personally transformative, Christ-encountering terms; and, second, when these same documents explicitly ground synodal participation in ritual-sacramental communion.

For Francis’ part, the longer passage from Evangelii Gaudium §47 says much of what we need to hear on the matter of ritual-sacramental participation:

The Church is not a tollhouse precisely because the Eucharist is nourishment and medicine for our weakness. It is, as Francis regularly reminded us, the transformative healing of our memory, the reshaping of our desires, what he calls the ‘divine pedagogy of grace’.Footnote ²⁰ And lest we think that such transformation is merely passive receptivity to a one-sided divine action, Francis goes on to remind us that Eucharistic participation is a personal, and thus mutual, encounter – an encounter with Christ and necessarily with one another and the world: Eucharistic memory is ‘not an abstract, cold and superficial memory, but a living remembrance that comforts us with God’s love. A memory that is both recollection and imitation’. Francis continues, elsewhere:

No doubt, we passively receive transformative grace in receiving the sacraments, but as an active response to God’s love and toward one another, we engage in an act of reciprocity and mutual engagement.

The same kind of subjectively active, Christ-centered, transformative language characterizes explanations of the meaning and purpose of synodality from Francis, the ITC, and the Synodal texts themselves. Of course, this emphasis is part of Francis’ broader affirmation that the encounter with God and the encounter between humans remain inextricably interwoven: ‘Whenever we encounter another person in love, we learn something new about God. Whenever our eyes are opened to acknowledge the other, we grow in the light of faith and knowledge of God.’Footnote ²² The encounter of the synodal journey is a privileged instantiation of this reality: synodality is central to the Church’s identity precisely because at its heart it is the encounter between divinity and humanity, through the mutual encounter of the Body of Christ among and with itself. This, first and foremost, is why synodality is more than a mere procedure or strategy and is, instead, ‘a constitutive element of the Church’ such that ‘the Church is nothing other than the “journeying together” of God’s flock along the paths of history towards the encounter with Christ the Lord’.Footnote ²³ This, Francis goes on to suggest, is an encounter born of listening to God through listening to one another.

That work of encounter is both transformative in nature and reciprocal, which is to say mutually engaging of all parties involved. To the transformative point: as the ITC and the IL 2 point out, synodal participation is an ‘encounter with the Lord that entails a process of continuously converting our attitudes, relationships, mentality, and structures’.Footnote ²⁴ Again, such an undertaking does not sidestep the needful practical, procedural, and structural reforms. Indeed, one cannot separate the intellective and appetitive transformation which happens at both the personal corporate levels without simultaneously addressing the structural features of ecclesial life. This is what I think Francis may mean when he asserts that to take up the synodal path ‘is not a matter of form, but of faith’.Footnote ²⁵ It is both a reshaping of the structural modus operandi et vivendi and an ongoing transformation of the faith of those involved, an endeavor by which the whole Church ‘constantly reshapes her identity through listening and through dialogue with the people, the realities, and the history of the lands in which she finds herself’.Footnote ²⁶ Form and content, we might say, are inseparable. As Francis himself boldly asserted in 2015, such a holistic undertaking cannot help but implicate all of its members in a work of reciprocal enrichment that ‘prevents a rigid separation between an ecclesia docens and the ecclesia discens [the teaching Church and the learning Church] since the flock likewise has an instinctive ability to discern the new ways that the Lord is revealing to the Church’.Footnote ²⁷

These linguistic and conceptual overlaps between sacramental participation and synodal journeying show that both are communal endeavors that bring us into transformative union with God. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s better to speak of both as ‘sacramental’: the ritual-sacramental and the synodal-sacramental. Indeed, this way of thinking is perhaps conspicuously contained in my initial quote from the IL I: synodal participation ‘attests to and realizes the initiative by which the Lord Jesus makes himself present and active in the Church’.Footnote ²⁸ That is, like a ritual sacrament, it signifies and effects that which it signifies.

It’s no surprise, then, that the documents explicitly ground the synodal process in ritual-sacramental participation: ‘A synodal Church cannot be understood other than within the horizon of communion’ that is ‘nourished in the common participation in the Eucharist’.Footnote ²⁹ Or, as the ITC has put it, ‘[t]he Trinitarian, anthropological, Christological, pneumatological and Eucharistic dimensions of God’s plan of salvation, which is at work in the mystery of the Church, are the theological horizon which has been the context for the development of synodality across the centuries’.Footnote ³⁰ Statements such as these are, to my mind, welcome. Yet, given what I’ve already suggested about the interplay between synodal journeying and sacramental participation, we might suggest that these characterizations fail to capture the mutuality of these forms of participation: not only is synodality grounded in Eucharistic communion but Eucharistic communion is grounded in synodal communion – a Church which does not listen to itself and to God through itself in a conversation in the Spirit cannot fully hear the transformative voice of Christ at the Eucharistic table. It’s from this vantage point, then, that I’d like lastly to consider a few practical upshots of this sacramental reading of synodality.

3. Some practical sacramental implications

In some ways, my analysis here merely complements the arguments of others concerning the necessary (and unavoidable) grounding of the rationale for a synodal Church in the equality of all the baptized, in each of whom the same Holy Spirit dwells.Footnote ³¹ Baptism is a fulcrum point of a lifelong process of intellective, appetitive, and volitional transformation, an ‘objectively’ efficacious participation in grace that, even for infants, always also has its beginning, middle, and end in ‘subjective’ acts of faith and love.Footnote ³² So, baptism obviously functions as the sacramental basis for participation in synodal journeying and the individual and corporate transformation that such engagement effects. We forget this if instead we favor a more mechanistic understanding of baptism only as ‘objective’ transformation or transferral of a subject from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ the Church or the impartation of a sacramental character upon the soul.Footnote ³³ But so also do we similarly risk forgetting if we understand baptism as a juridical guarantee of universal membership in the procedures of synodal participation. In either case, we miss the more profound implications of participation in the dynamic and transformative life of the Church: baptism is incorporation into Christ and thus the (ordinary) starting point for participation in the ongoing process of deification. As a similarly sacramental and transformative endeavor, the synodal journey is itself part and parcel of that ongoing work of the Spirit in conforming us, individually and corporately, to Christ. And at the interface between these two – the synodal-sacramental and the ritual-sacramental – we must also discern and pursue changes that will bring to the fore precisely this transformative character. Such changes would be in keeping with the insights learned both about and through synodality, grounded as they are in a deeper recognition of our baptism equality. As the IL I asks us to consider: ‘How should we celebrate Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist so that they are occasions for witnessing and promoting the participation and co-responsibility of all as active subjects in the life and mission of the Church? How can we renew an understanding of ministry not limited to ordained Ministry [sic] alone?’Footnote ³⁴

The present argument also reaffirms the suggestions made by scholars such as Gaillardetz, O’Loughlin, and LeGrand, each of whom insist that the sacraments of ordination and reconciliation must recover their communal dimensions by way of certain procedural and structural reforms. We know that communal discernment and consensus represent a more trustworthy mode of proceeding more generally, but it is also and especially true in a community whose focus is the transformation of minds and hearts through participation in a sacramental community. This would entail reconceiving of the entire process from nomination through ritual ordination as a communal and sacramental act of discernment and judgment,Footnote ³⁵ rather than viewing only the event of an ordination Mass as a punctiliar and isolated sacrament, simpliciter.Footnote ³⁶ The practical upshots ought to be clear: on balance, healthier results among the clergy, achieved through simultaneously reaffirming and enacting the reciprocal engagement necessary between lay and clergy. Again, form and content are inseparable. An analogous proposal is made by O’Loughlin regarding reconciliation, and the unnecessary sidelining (if not outright denigration) of the communal rite of reconciliation (Rite III).Footnote ³⁷ These two basic reappraisals of sacramental participation in light of the logic of synodality and of the shared sacramental shape of ritual action and synodal engagement warrant much further exploration and application, some of it surely complex. But I want briefly to address yet one other concrete sacramental and synodal question – namely, that of Eucharistic participation for the divorced and remarried.

I have recently argued that it’s a mistake to see in Francis’ emphasis on mercy and accompaniment a shallow ‘niceness for niceness’ sake’, and that this is because Francis sought to recover our understanding of ecclesial life in terms of divine nearness – a nearness that is always directed toward redemptive correction and transformation.Footnote ³⁸ I want to suggest something similar in regard to n. 351 of Amoris Laetitia. Yes, this means that I think Francis saw in the opening up of the Eucharistic table to some of the divorced and remarried a chance to nourish the hearts and minds of those communicants as recipients – he says explicitly (and elegantly) so in the document. But if we take him, the ITC, and the synodal documents seriously, we must also reckon with the wider implications of keeping the table closed to these members. If being the Church requires being both ritually-sacramentally and synodally-sacramentally transformed, then the table at which we consume the Lord’s body and blood and the table at which we engage in synodal conversations in the Spirit are intimately linked, and in some sense absence at one can negatively impact presence at the other. But before considering further these communal and synodal implications, let us first reconsider the specific question of Eucharistic participation for those in irregular situations from the perspective of sacramental transformation.

If we are to give deference to Francis’ assessment of the persons involved in such complex situations, we must recognize that their and their pastors’ journeying through such circumstances is precisely a work of discernment – i.e., of knowing – and one of dynamic growth. Amid that journey no one is immune to error, of course. That is the risk of taking such a journey. And, as Francis makes clear, some of those who bear culpable moral error within their irregular situations are so because they are facing ‘a great difficulty in understanding’.Footnote ³⁹ If, then, the sacrament is not a ‘prize for the worthy’ precisely because it is a transformative, grace-filled encounter touching minds and hearts, then those for whom the complexity of their situation is to some degree the result of their own culpable acts or omissions, perhaps participation in the Eucharist will itself be integral to their reformation of mind and heart, if not also an active change in their circumstances.Footnote ⁴⁰ Francis’ intervention in AL perhaps attempts to make space for these cases, as well as for those in which the subjects’ complexities genuinely admit of no such morally necessary action to alter present circumstances. But in either case, such space can only be made by trusting subjects to form and follow their consciences, as they (and we) also trust the conscientious guidance of their local pastors: ‘[w]e have been called to form consciences, not to replace them’.Footnote ⁴¹

If nothing else, the broader context of n. 351 (if not the whole of AL) emphasizes the epistemic and appetitive process of maturation and transformation inherent to a life of Christian discipleship. Discernment about Eucharistic participation on the part of the faithful and their pastors is itself an act of knowing, susceptible, of course to errors in perception, judgment, and action, but also susceptible to the workings of grace. But Eucharistic participation is itself a privileged locus of divine intervention, of graced reformation of our minds, desires, and wills, when received faithfully. In short, the personal work of discernment in those individuals’ daily lives as well as the communal work of discernment called for in AL §291–312 is an invitation to transformation.Footnote ⁴² The prima facie and outright rejection of Francis’ suggestions there in fact risks a denial of that work of transformation through discernment, instead oftentimes seeing the question sheerly in terms of adequacy or inadequacy to a juridical rule, and thus unworthy of further consideration.

Similarly, the wider process of synodal dialogue and discernment by and for the whole Church cannot be conceived as wholly separable from the communal engagement in word and table, as well as in mission and, perhaps what is most easily neglected in so many parishes, common life shared from day to day, week to week. All of which leads us back to the question of synodality and Eucharistic participation. The power of the sacramental life of the Church is, most fully, the salvific union between divinity and humanity made transformatively present to us both in the rituals of word and table and in the complementarily sacramental practice of synodal engagement, each of which practices informs and enriches the other. So, can we expect to encounter the Lord and one another most fully and fruitfully without the fullest participation of those who, through their own consciences and prudent pastoral discernment seek communion amid their complex situations? Insofar as our shared synodal journeying together draws its strength fundamentally from our shared participation at the altar, we must wonder whether we risk robbing these individuals and the entire community of the reciprocal enrichment that might make us even more conformed to Christ.Footnote ⁴³