The Vatican synod was about the meaning of church

Amid conflicting and confusing headlines about the Vatican synod in October, a major issue was lost. What’s happening within Roman Catholicism is a fundamental discussion of ecclesiology. Despite the fact that Catholic theology itself cannot be reduced to progressive or conservative labels, there are indeed progressive and conservative Catholics disagreeing on what it means to be church. That foundational disagreement underlies every debate about sexuality, family life, and divorce and remarriage.

Progressive Catholics (full disclosure: here I stand) tend to have a decentralized, collegial notion of church. Allegiance is to a community expressed imperfectly in a church that, many Catholics forget, is a human institution of divine origin designed to disappear when the kingdom comes. This conception is key to Pope Francis—a Jesuit imbued with the Spiritual Exercisesof St. Ignatius Loyola and his deeply-insightful psychological sense that incremental discernment both individually and as a group produces good decisions. He asked the synod participants to speak openly and freely (“Let no one say: ‘This you cannot say’”), and to journey together as a community of faith.

The church as the people of God is a heritage Catholics lost in the 16th century. Ancient and medieval Christians had a sense of themselves as part of Christ’s mystical body, but Reformation Catholicism restricted the “body of Christ” to sacramental theology. The Council of Trent emphasized transubstantiation—the lasting and real presence of Christ in the Eucharist—against Protestant conceptions of consubstantiation or memorial instead of sacrifice. A casualty of that emphasis was the ecclesiology of God’s people as the body of Christ, which was recovered in the 20th-century renewing theologies of ressourcement and nouvelle théologie that bore fruit in Vatican II’s aggiornamento.