But do you gird your loins

The greatest irony about this irony-stuffed Synod on Synodality is fundamental and glaring. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

It’s this:

Anxiously desiring to show that it’s a listening Church, institutional church leaders perfectly demonstrate that they aren’t listening.

In short:

Take a look at the world around you. If your first response to the seeking, pain, suffering and questions that’s glaring evident at every level of society, in almost every home and even every heart is: let’s have a meeting on Church process and structure….you’re not listening.

Villanova’s Massimo Faggioli has a piece in Commonweal bewailing the lack of planned and actual involvement by universities in the synodal process. He asks: “If Synodality Can’t Get Young People Interested in the Church, Then What Can?”

I couldn’t make my point more clearly.

Yes, young adults who have seen their lives and plans totally upended over the past two years, who have been ill themselves, have had family members sick and perhaps die, who have been buffeted this way and that by authorities claiming to have their best interest at heart, whose parish churches have shut them out in times of greatest need, who face economic and professional futures that seem to grow more uncertain every day, who are immersed in a cylcone of fierce, competing forces seeking to commodify every corner of their existence for profit…..

…of course they’re going to leap into church meetings about church process as an answer!

So…why aren’t they?

Such a mystery!

Here are today’s Mass readings.

Jeremiah receives his call. Paul calls us to the heart of the Gospel. Jesus announces that in his presence, God is at work.

There are a lot of ways we can say that the Second Vatican Council “failed,” but it’s always seemed to me that the greatest failure was that, unintentionally, the move to reform, which was offered as a way of equipping the Church to go into the world with more power and credibility, ended up severely handicapping that effort as “reform” became, unsurprisingly, decades of internal, inward-looking conversations and infighting.

Instead of the go out that’s packed into every word of the Gospel, every breath of even just this Sunday’s readings, we end up with: talk and fight about territory, role, organization and process.

And so, here we go again. Not that the Church isn’t always in need of reform. Always. And those reforms can be necessary, indeed, to enable evangelization and service to a broken world to flourish.

But is this the case, right now, with this particular synod, with its particular focus? In this moment?

We’ve had a global crisis which has impacted the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health of billions…..

Countless human beings are living in fear of illness and death, perhaps never having ever seriously confronted these realities before –

Human beings have lost income, jobs and businesses.

Great numbers of human beings struggle with questions and tensions related to the role of government and business entities in their lives.

Globally, human beings and societies are wrestling with questions of the questions of balancing autonomy, social responsibility and risk.

Human beings are flooded with information and assertions and communications, at sea regarding whose voice to trust.

Responses to this crisis have left human beings vulnerable, lonely, abandoned, anxious, fearful and broken and, let’s not forget angry.

If your answer to all of that bruised and beaten crisis-soaked world is to spend lots of time and money telling the members of Christ’s body – his hands, feet and voice on earth – that the most important thing they can do right now in this moment is to just keep talking endlessly amongst themselves about themselves….

….you’re not listening.

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