To the surprise of many Catholics, including seasoned Vatican observers, Pope Francis on March 11 “definitively approved the start of a process of accompaniment and evaluation of the implementation phase by the General Secretariat of the Synod.”
This new phase of the Synod on synodality is a three-year implementation phase leading up to a final “ecclesial assembly” in October 2028. Pope Francis’ decision, taken and announced during his five-week-long hospitalization, is of great importance from an ecclesial point of view. It’s a consequential decision in terms of church politics because it sends a message about the agenda of the next conclave and his succession.
But it is also very significant because it helps us understand the value of the synodal process in the world of today. There has been an almost perfect chronological overlap between the synodal renewal of the Catholic Church, which begins with Francis’ pontificate in 2013, and the acceleration of the crisis of many democratic and constitutional systems. It’s a global crisis that has a lot to do with religion — at a much deeper level than, for example, the issue of how many Catholics voted for Donald Trump in the United States or Giorgia Meloni in Italy.
On April 1, Timothy Snyder, the American historian of Europe, delivered the annual Robert B. Silvers lecture at the New York Public Library titled The New Paganism—A Framework for Understanding Our Politics. (On July 10, 2024, Snyder delivered a different, pre-U.S. election version of the lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna).
In his lecture, which I highly recommend, Snyder argues that our present moment—one in which obsession with what is new distracts from very old patterns—is best understood as a political religion, rooted not in Christianity but in something far older and pagan. (It’s an argument similar to the one I made in a book published in Italian in January about Trump and Catholicism in the United States).
Elements of new paganism
Snyder identifies five elements of this new paganism in our politics. The first is language: there is a visible erosion of active vocabulary, and we are becoming illiterate because we are less able to read complex texts and understand them. This is not just an individual problem but a growing issue of incommunicability both between us and within ourselves.
The second is the oracle: ours is a time of oracles that speak from hidden sources of knowledge. And, of course, the invisibility of the real sources of power feeds conspiracy theories and distrust of the very idea that truth and facts exist.
The third is a political dynamic of sacrifice: our pseudo-populism, controlled by oligarchs (digital and hydrocarbon elites in the United States, Russia, and many countries in between), seeks to impose visible suffering on others to justify enduring their own. The new displays of violence, like the immigration policies and deportation, and the street abductions of students with a visa or green card are typical of a spectacle of pain where sacrifice is necessary for the worship of hero politics. The enforcement of immigration policies is now a show that is supposed to make us hate each other.
The fourth is charisma: our charisma-based politics, with the rise of strongmen in many countries, is a reversal of the process of state-and institution-building based on laws. This new paganism is a project of unmaking and breaking institutions — political, social, cultural, but also religious.
The fifth is value: our heroes are billionaires whose idea of wealth is hoarding, which entails the dismissal of the concept that we live in a community. It’s also the idea that you can take your wealth with you because you believe you are immortal. But keeping that immortality is possible only if you stay away from people as a source of threat.
Synodality is life-giving communication in the church
Synodality is not a political system, and, as Pope Francis often reminded us, synods are not parliaments. Indeed. But the theology and spirituality of a synodal church is today also an implicit response to the perversion of our political and legal systems and to the project of changing our humanity, a project in progress by America’s “broligarchy.”
Synodality is an exercise aimed at recovering language and life-giving communication in the church, beginning from Scripture and prayer. Synodality is a rejection of the power of the internet oracles and their grip on digital (church) politics: Jesus was the opposite of the oracle in a pagan temple who answers in obscurity. Synodality is a powerful critique of the politics of “us versus them,” which ultimately leads to the sacrificial scapegoating of members of the community in the name of a politics of fear and hate. Synodality aims at infusing institutions of the Catholic tradition with new life and to imagine new ways of keeping together the church’s movement and institutions, now that they are also endangered by the return to charismatic “caesarist” and authoritarian forms of authority. Finally, synodality points to the real value that gives meaning to human, mortal life: a life lived in the one human family, where all of us have been created in the image and likeness of God, and on the one planet Earth as part of God’s creation.
“Synodality is part of the Catholic Church’s many possible contributions in the effort to stop the world from falling into the abyss of a new 1939.”
There is much that we do not know yet about the second synodal journey of 2025-2028: Pope Francis’ role in it, the response from the local churches that were not an active part of the first in 2021-2024, and its effect on the next conclave. But the example of the synodal process for the Catholic Church dealing with its internal differences and polarization is very different from the model offered by the heroes of our populist, post-democratic times. Synodality is evangelization also in the sense of a response to the new paganism in our politics. As Snyder said in another recent lecture, this moment in history since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 feels like the year 1938 in Europe, when it was still possible to stop World War II. Synodality is part of the Catholic Church’s many possible contributions in the effort to stop the world from falling into the abyss of a new 1939.
Massimo Faggioli @MassimoFaggioli
Reproduced with permission by La Croix International.
