Synodality Against Unity. From the Church That Receives the Faith to the Church Produced by Consensus

 

Óscar Méndez Oseguera

The Church does not become one by walking together; she walks because she is already one. Her unity arises neither from a method, nor from conversation, nor from a synthesis of experiences, but from Christ Himself, the one Bridegroom of one Bride. Every ecclesial reform must therefore be judged by its fidelity to what the Church has received, not by its capacity to produce consensus. Wherever process seeks to occupy the place of Tradition, synodality ceases to be an instrument of communion and begins to operate as a counter-form of Catholic unity: without altering the indefectible being of the Church, it obscures her visibility and corrupts her ordinary mode of operation, replacing the transmission of the revealed deposit with the administration of divergent opinions.

Public Revelation attained its fullness in Jesus Christ. No further revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of Our Lord. The Church does not live by inventing a new truth, but by faithfully guarding, expounding, and transmitting the truth she has received. Nor is the unicity of the Church a pastoral conclusion: just as there is one Christ, so there is one Body and one Bride. The one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and the bishops in communion with him.

What is being challenged here is not the existence of synods, councils, or prudent forms of consultation within the Church’s hierarchical constitution. From antiquity the Church has known episcopal deliberation, pastoral consultation, and councils ordered to the supernatural common good. What must be judged severely is constitutive synodalism: the attempt to make process a principle of ecclesial self-understanding, government, and reform; the temptation to make the Church understand herself no longer from the Revelation she has received, but from the historical path by which she listens, discerns, and reformulates herself.

Synodalism cannot abolish what Christ founded, for the Church is indefectible. It can, however, corrupt her visible operative principle. By turning listening into a practical source of doctrine, morals, and ecclesiastical government, it introduces an understanding of the Church that substitutes the ascending causality of manufactured consensus for the descending causality of truth received, guarded, and handed down.

I. The One Church: A Principle Prior to Every Process

The unicity of the Church is not a pastoral result but a theological datum. The Church is one because Christ is one. Unity is neither an atmosphere, nor a sensibility, nor a procedure; it is an essential property of the supernatural society founded by the Incarnate Word.

The International Theological Commission itself, in its 2018 document on synodality, defines synodality as the Church’s modus vivendi et operandi, yet expressly situates it within a hierarchically ordered community. A synod, assembly, or council does not constitute a parallel power; it serves communion under the legitimate pastors. If that formal principle is taken seriously, an operative dimension cannot redefine the sources of the communion that precedes it.

The Church can walk because she already possesses a principle, a form, and an end. She is not an indeterminate pilgrimage discovering her identity as she advances. She is the Bride journeying toward the consummation of what she has already received from her Lord. Once this is forgotten, the path no longer leads to truth; the path begins to produce it.

Here lies the first fracture. Catholic unity is founded upon truth received; synodalism tends to found it upon process shared. But a unity founded upon process is not Catholic unity. It is conversational unity. It may preserve the signs of communion, but it has altered their root.

II. The Three Bonds of Communion and the Objection from Development

According to the law of the Church and the classical doctrine of her visibility, full communion in the visible Church is recognized through three bonds: the profession of one and the same faith, participation in the same sacraments, and submission to the same ecclesiastical government. Lumen gentium teaches that those are fully incorporated into the society of the Church who accept her entire constitution and all the means of salvation established within her; canon 205 expresses this clearly in the bonds of profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical government.

Contemporary synodalism introduces, de facto, a fourth and spurious bond: the procedural bond. It is no longer sufficient to preserve the faith, the sacraments, and hierarchical obedience; one must also adhere to the grammar of the process. He who preserves doctrine but resists the method appears divisive. He who erodes dogma but participates in the conversation is validated as a legitimate interlocutor. Process thus becomes more binding than the deposit.

Against this judgment, reformist thought will raise its most sophisticated defence by appealing to the doctrine of doctrinal development, to Newman, or to an expansive reading of Dei Verbum 8. It will argue that synodality represents a homogeneous maturation of the Church’s self-understanding. Yet this appeal encounters the insurmountable limit established by Saint Vincent of Lérins: authentic development must occur in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia—in the same dogma, in the same sense, and in the same judgment. Catholic development explicates what was contained in the premise; it does not contradict it in practice.

When synodal praxis authorizes divergent interpretations of morality or sacramental discipline, it does not develop dogma; it suspends its practical dominion. The abstract formula is preserved while its necessary consequence is rendered sterile. By the very logic of homogeneous development, preservation of type is a criterion of authenticity. If the type of descending authority and visible unity is altered, what has occurred is not development but corruption.

III. Authority Inverted: From Guardianship to the Administration of Opinions

The true question raised by the synodal deviation concerns the proper understanding of the potestas received from Christ to guard, teach, and govern. Authority in the Church is not an ascending delegation from the faithful but a descending mandate. The Magisterium exists to judge experiences in the light of the faith, not to adapt the faith to the weight of experience.

Synodalism transforms the operation of authority. The pastor no longer appears chiefly as one who teaches and governs in the name of Christ, but as one who facilitates and synthesizes processes. Authority does not disappear; it is dissolved immanently into the mechanism. Synodality does not democratize authority in order to destroy it; it dissolves authority into procedure in order to relieve the ruler of responsibility.

The pastor ceases to answer directly for the truth taught and begins to shelter behind “communal discernment.” Unity ceases to be formally doctrinal, sacramental, and hierarchical, and becomes merely administrative.

The Final Document of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of 2024 presents itself as the fruit of a path marked by listening to the People of God and by the discernment of the pastors. Its publication was expressly approved by Pope Francis, and Episcopalis communio provides that when the Final Document is expressly approved by the Roman Pontiff, it participates in the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter. The novelty does not consist in the process bestowing authority upon itself. It consists in the fact that the fruit of a dynamic of listening and synthesis is juridically disposed to be assumed into the magisterial order.

Hence the decisive question: what judges what? If the deposit of faith judges the synthesis, the procedure remains in its proper instrumental place. But if the synthesis, clothed with a higher investiture, begins to shield what ought first to have been judged by the deposit, then the instrument ceases to serve the truth and begins to occupy its practical place.

IV. From the Sensus Fidei to the Common Opinion of the Baptized

This operative displacement requires the denaturing of the concept of the People of God. The sensus fidei is neither a sociological survey nor an average of the sensibilities of the baptized. It is a supernatural connaturality with revealed truth, presupposing grace, docility toward the Magisterium, and perseverance within Tradition.

The International Theological Commission, in its 2014 document, expressly distinguishes the sensus fidei from public opinion and identifies the dispositions necessary for its authenticity: participation in the life of the Church, attentive hearing of the Word of God, openness to reason, adherence to the Magisterium, holiness, and concern for the edification of the Church. That document is itself a witness against the attempt to confuse the sense of the faith with the shifting opinions of the faithful considered merely as a sociological body.

When the sensus fidei is translated into democratic listening, Revelation ceases to be the rule and becomes the matter to be interpreted. It is one thing to know the wounds of men in order to heal them with the truth; it is quite another to bend doctrine toward the wound until doctrine itself is deformed.

Once the speech of the assembly is treated as possessing a quasi-revelatory function, experience displaces the deposit and centres of local interpretation multiply. The community no longer appears primarily as the recipient of the faith, but as the place from which its practical meaning emerges.

V. Communal Protestantism

The charge of Protestantization must be formulated with theological precision. What is at issue is not a frontal rupture with Rome, but the adoption of an interpretive principle similar in its dissolving structure. Classical Protestantism replaced the living Magisterium with individual private judgment, thereby destroying the sufficient principle of visible unity and provoking inevitable fragmentation.

Modernist synodalism replaces the Magisterium with communal private judgment. The ultimate subject of practical interpretation is no longer the isolated individual, but the assembly, the episcopal conference, or the territorial discernment group, each adapting Tradition to its historical experience. The formal language remains Roman, but the operative principle is Protestantizing: the subject that ought to receive the truth begins to act as the instance determining its meaning.

The history of Protestantism reveals what follows when the visible principle of unity is lost. The common faith becomes the particular reading of a group; the common Scriptures become local interpretation; the common community becomes a denomination; reform becomes the reform of reform.

Transferred into the Catholic sphere, the danger does not consist chiefly in the immediate appearance of formally separate denominations. It lies rather in the coexistence of incompatible practical Catholicisms beneath a single visible administration: German, African, Latin American, North American, progressive, or traditional, all invoking communion, yet not all professing, worshipping, and governing according to the same understanding of the faith.

The atomization produced by Protestantism followed from its principle, not merely from the temperament of its founders. Once the subject receiving Revelation becomes the final subject interpreting it, division is already contained in the premise. First unity with Rome is broken; then those who have broken with Rome divide among themselves.

Synodalism threatens to reproduce that consequence internally. It does not necessarily establish new denominations outside Rome; it permits local communities to act as though each possessed a proper practical norm within Rome. The result is not yet formal separation, but a thinning of real unity beneath the continued signs of juridical communion.

VI. Three Documented Signs of Practical Rupture

The dissolution of unity does not necessarily announce itself as juridical schism. It establishes itself as a fragmented praxis that alters the faithful’s understanding of doctrine.

1. The regionalization of practical morality

Fiducia supplicans opened the possibility of non-liturgical blessings for couples in irregular situations and for same-sex couples, while insisting that no confusion should arise between such blessings and the blessing proper to marriage. Yet the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, through Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, declared that such blessings would not be offered in Africa because of the danger of scandal and confusion, while expressly maintaining communion with the Pope.

The subsequent clarification of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith acknowledged the need to clarify the document’s reception and admitted that, in some contexts, a longer period of pastoral reflection might be required.

The visible result was an officially tolerated practical plurality: what could be presented in some places as a legitimate pastoral gesture was declared impracticable elsewhere because of the danger of scandal. The doctrinal formula remained universal; its practical sign became territorial.

The gravity of the matter lies precisely here. A moral and sacramental sign is not indifferent to doctrine. The faithful learn what the Church believes not only through propositions but through what she blesses, permits, forbids, and celebrates. Where opposed practices are tolerated under the same doctrinal formula, unity remains verbal while ecclesial life teaches divergent lessons.

2. The claim to local normativity

The German Synodal Way has made this danger unmistakable. The Holy See itself was compelled to declare that the German process possessed no authority to oblige bishops and faithful to adopt new forms of government or new approaches to doctrine and morals.

That Roman intervention demonstrates that the danger was not imaginary. A local ecclesial structure was beginning to act as though it possessed the power to redirect doctrine, morality, and ecclesiastical government.

This is more than a disciplinary excess. It reveals the internal tendency of the synodal principle once emancipated from the deposit and the apostolic constitution of the Church. Every region invokes its context; every culture claims its own reception; every assembly produces a synthesis; every local body seeks recognition for its discernment. Catholic universality is then endangered by a federalization of doctrine in practice.

3. Punitive asymmetry as a principle of government

The third sign is the asymmetry between the treatment of inherited Tradition and the treatment of doctrinal innovation. While ecclesiastical authority exercises centralized severity toward the traditional Roman liturgy—Traditionis custodes and the subsequent Responsa ad dubia strictly regulated the use of the liturgical books prior to the reform of 1970 in the name of ecclesial communion—processes touching doctrine, morals, and ecclesiastical government are often granted patience, dialogue, graduality, and time.

This contrast does not by itself establish formal schism, but it reveals an operative orientation. Traditional fixity is treated as an immediate danger; diffuse doctrinal innovation is treated as a process to be accompanied.

The severity directed against Tradition and the patience extended to heterodoxy are not necessarily contradictory within the new principle. For a Church conceived as process, the intolerable offence is not deviation but fixity; not innovation against the deposit, but resistance from those who insist that the deposit is not available for revision.

VII. The German Laboratory and Religious Immanentism

The German case deserves separate examination, not as a geographical eccentricity, but as an anticipation. It reveals what occurs when the logic of process assumes a local constitutive function and seeks to order doctrine, morals, and ecclesiastical government from the historical experience of a particular Church.

This laboratory discloses the modernist root already condemned by Saint Pius X: religious immanentism. In Pascendi dominici gregis, Saint Pius X denounced the doctrine according to which religious sentiment arises through “vital immanence,” making religious consciousness the rule to which even doctrinal and disciplinary authority must conform. Within that logic, the Church and authority arise from religious consciousness, while the Magisterium tends merely to formulate what corresponds to the common consciousness.

The German synodal experiment operates according to this structure. Faith no longer appears as something coming from without through the preaching of a truth received—fides ex auditu—but as something arising from the collective consciousness and evolving experience of the People of God. The synod then becomes the technical instrument for extracting, ordering, and giving normative form to this supposedly immanent revelation.

This is why the language of “lived experience,” “new understandings,” “signs of the times,” and “local reception” cannot be treated as a merely pastoral vocabulary. Once such categories acquire normative force over doctrine and discipline, experience is no longer an object to be judged by the faith. It becomes the principle from which the faith is practically reinterpreted.

The ancient modernist thesis is therefore not overcome; it is reorganized ecclesially. What once emerged from individual religious consciousness now emerges from communal consciousness. The assembly replaces the solitary subject, but the immanentist structure remains.

VIII. Two Understandings of the Church in Conflict

Dogmatically, the Church of Christ is one and indefectible; there are not two ontological Churches. Yet two incompatible principles of ecclesial understanding now operate within the same visible body: the Catholic principle of received Tradition and the synodal-modernist principle of constitutive process.

According to the Catholic principle, the source of meaning is Revelation completed with the Apostles. According to the synodalist counter-form, the signs of the times acquire a practical value approaching a quasi-revelatory function.

According to the Catholic principle, the bond of unity is the univocal profession of the orthodox faith. According to the counter-form, unity is found in procedural inclusion within “walking together.”

According to the Catholic principle, authority imperatively guards the deposit through the munus docendi and the munus regendi. According to the counter-form, authority facilitates, receives, and synthesizes consensus.

According to the Catholic principle, truth judges, corrects, and orders action. According to the counter-form, historical experience reinterprets truth.

This is not an external separation between two visible societies. It is a counter-form inhabiting institutions, language, and structures of obedience proper to the Church. Its effectiveness lies precisely in avoiding formal schism while producing interior dissolution. It preserves the exterior signs of communion while attenuating the real bonds of unity.

The expression “two Churches” must therefore be used only analogically and with the greatest precision. There cannot be two true Churches of Christ. Yet there can be two contrary principles at work within the same visible ecclesiastical field: one by which the Church remains what she received from Christ, and another by which men of the Church attempt to make her operate according to a principle foreign to her constitution.

The first is Tradition: the transmission of what has been received. The second is process: the progressive production of what is to be accepted.

The first preserves unity because it submits all ages, nations, and local Churches to one received truth. The second fragments unity because it grants historical experience a practical authority capable of multiplying local interpretations.

The first is Catholic because it is universal in origin, content, worship, and government. The second is Protestantizing because it allows the interpreting community to become the operative measure of the received deposit.

IX. Conclusion: Synodality Subjected to Unity

The Catholic Church is not one historical possibility among others, available to be reformulated through a procedure of communal self-understanding. Her identity does not arise from the consensus of the living, but from the Revelation entrusted once and for all to the Apostles.

Synodality is legitimate only insofar as it remains strictly subordinate to unity in faith, sacraments, and apostolic government. Once it becomes independent and claims the right to serve as a principle of ecclesial self-construction, it fractures unity by altering its source: from faith to process, from Tradition to consensus, from the Magisterium to listening, from apostolic government to the participatory administration of opinions.

Where there was a deposit, it introduces constitutive discernment.

Where there was Tradition, it introduces process.

Where there was apostolic authority, it introduces the administration of consensus.

Where there was unity of faith, it introduces coordinated plurality.

Where there was a mission of conversion, it introduces inclusion without return.

The Church will not be saved by listening to herself, but by listening anew to her Lord. Wherever process replaces identity, what confronts us is no longer reform, but the modern form of a rupture that does not yet dare to speak its name.

The Church does not need to become the product of a path. She must remain faithful to the truth that constitutes her. Only by remaining Catholic does she remain visibly one.