Pope Leo models Synodality, and Asks His Cardinals to Help Him Provide Vision and Equilibrium
Why the Cardinals Are Being Asked to Integrate Benedict’s Stability with Francis’s Mission.
On the 7th and 8th of January, Pope Leo will gather his Cardinals in Rome for forty-eight hours of sustained conversation and prayer — an extraordinary consistory that marks the first real test of his papacy.
This is the meeting many of us have been waiting for since his election. This is not a matter of drama, or the exercise of power, it is an exercise in discernment.
There will be no conclave at its conclusion. No votes, no resolutions, no theatrical clash of factions. This is not a political arena in which positions are asserted or victories claimed. It is a listening exercise, deliberately structured around working groups, in which the Cardinals are asked to uncover the mind of the Church. The Pope himself will give the final address.
What is taking place is a consultation — not between equals, but between the Pope and the senior colleagues on whom he depends to help him shape a coherent mind for the Church at a moment of inherited division and instability.
Ever since Leo was elected, and given the fact that the open wounds his predecessor left behind him have been continuously bleeding, we have been waiting to see how the new Pope would approach the division and turmoil he inherited.
There was a great deal of pressure on him to rescind different aspects of Francis’ legacy. But for one pope to overrule another by fiat would simply have taken what Francis had done in departing from the Magisterium and made it worse. There had to be another way.
And here we have it.
From the beginning, it was obvious to many of us that Cardinal Robert Prevost (as he was then) was a careful, thoughtful, and considered administrator — someone who would not allow himself to be rushed or pressured, and who understood the complexities of the office that had been imposed upon him by the will of his fellow Cardinals and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
He knew that the depth of discontent in the Catholic Church had created fissures of resentment and misunderstanding between different theologies, different cultures, and different interest groups. It was predicted by many of us that the way he would approach this would be to draw the Cardinals around him and, collectively, carefully, and prayerfully, find their way to a common mind — one by which they could take the Church forward and undo what had been done provocatively, carelessly, or improperly.
This would allow him to avoid the very anti-Catholic dramatic act of simply reversing his predecessor. He was going to act collectively and not arbitrarily. He was going to act only after a period of time had allowed him to work out the politics of the different fault lines that lay before him in one of the most complicated and complex organisations that has ever existed.
The two most pressing issues are synodality and the Latin Mass.
It is no great surprise, then, that he has asked the Cardinals to prepare by reading two documents that form the foundation on which many of the issues dividing the mind of the Church now rest: Evangelii gaudium and Praedicate evangelium.
Evangelii gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”, 2013) is Pope Francis’s programmatic apostolic exhortation. It sets out his vision for a Church renewed by missionary conversion, freed from inward-looking clericalism, and re-oriented toward the proclamation of Christ rather than institutional self-preservation.
Praedicate evangelium (2022) is an apostolic constitution. It replaces Pastor Bonus (John Paul II, 1988) and restructures the Roman Curia.
In short, you might sum them up by saying this:
Evangelii gaudium directs what the Church must do;
Praedicate evangelium rearranges the machinery and organisational priorities of the Church to try to make it happen.
Fault Lines: Synodality and the Latin Mass
Synodality was a double-sided project, with the capacity both to heal and to shatter the Catholic Church. The Latin Mass became a profoundly emotive totem of what appeared to many to be disobedience and discontent, and it too had the capacity either to heal or to shatter the Church.
It would be an attempt to second-guess the Cardinals to spend too much time reconsidering the strengths of both documents. What really matters is how the Cardinals come to use the resources Francis left the Church, and how they decide to apply them to the challenge of creating a mind for the Church that reflects the papacy Pope Leo can and will implement.
If it is not too pretentious to say so, there is a kind of symbiotic interdependence at work here. Leo needs the Cardinals to give him a clearer sense of priorities and the epistemology that will shape his pontificate. And the Cardinals need Leo to implement a shared vision which he has delegated responsibility to them to articulate.
Francis: Correction and Disequilibrium
Although Pope Francis left us with complexities, wounds, contradictions, paradox, and fear, not everything he did was wrong or destructive.
You could, in fact, make a case for saying that he brought a much-needed capacity to release a corrective spirit in order to revive a Church that had become moribund and inward-bound.
The reason Francis struck so much fear into the hearts of many of us was that we did not trust that he knew when to stop. Clearly death stopped him — but none of us knew how far he would go before that point.
He had the capacity to put into the mix ideas that were prophetic and powerful alongside ideas that were erratic and heterodox.
It is part of the task of the Cardinals to separate those two.
When they come to read Evangelii gaudium, there is much they may want to draw from it in principle as a catalyst for refreshment.
Francis was right when he contrasted the need for a missionary Church with a self-referential Church.
He was right when he contrasted pastoral compassion with excessive legalism.
He was right when he called for a fresh authenticity of ministerial spirit to replace clericalism and the diseased addiction to ecclesial power.
Evangelii gaudium called the Church to abandon self-defensive, self-protective habits and rediscover itself as a joyful missionary body — travelling light — where structures, language, and pastoral practice exist primarily to proclaim Christ and draw people into mercy, grace, and conversion.
There was also much to be said for his favourite remark:
“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and insecure.”
As with so many prophetic assertions, it was true — but it could not be the only truth. This insight needed to be set within a broader context that gave it stability and equilibrium.
The same was true of his comment about the Eucharist:
“The Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
This is in part true. The Eucharist is indeed our sacramental medicine. It should never be treated as a prize or an award for the perfect. But at the same time, these are more the observations of a pastor and missionary than the settled words of a pope.
Once again, powerful and potentially prophetic words needed to be set within a more stable context — one that saved the Church from slipping into sacramental minimalism or downplaying the heroic quest for holiness and confession. It was all too easy to confuse mercy with indiscriminate access to the Eucharist.
Such was Pope Francis’s enthusiasm for his own corrective insights that he set up an opposition which feared he was going to unbalance the careful equilibrium of mutually necessary priorities within the Church.
Francis brought hope, but he left behind disequilibrium. He made a Church anxious with dizziness as it felt the ground beneath its feet shift and wondered whether there were any handholds or brakes.
