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We Must Set Our House in Order

What will be the agenda of Sacramento's synod?

BY ERIC RESLOCK

On August 3, 2003, Sacramento diocese's Bishop William Weigand proclaimed the opening preparations for a diocesan synod that will take place in October 2004. The next nine months will be dedicated to an extensive process of distilling survey responses from religious and lay people for the synod's agenda and for the new diocesan plan. In a subsequent message, Bishop Weigand said that "the synod will result in a pastoral plan that will guide us as a diocese at least through the year 2010, as well as in legislation, ordinances and guidelines that will flow from this pastoral 'road map'." The diocese of Sacramento has had only one synod in its history. Its opening decrees were issued in the fall of 1929. The spokesman for the diocese says planning for the second synod has been going on since 2001.

A diocesan synod, according to canon law, is "a group of selected priests and other Christian faithful of a particular church, which offers assistance to the diocesan bishop for the good of the entire diocesan community." Since it is concerned only with establishing law for a particular diocese, a synod cannot treat of matters subject only to the decrees and teachings of the universal Church and is not supposed to be a referendum on Church doctrine.

From January through March of last year, every parishioner in the Sacramento diocese was invited to fill out a lengthy questionnaire that covered such topics as "overall satisfaction with the parish," "the quality of the liturgy," "its open, welcoming spirit," "its commitment to social justice," and so on. Each parish representative, after receiving a synthesized summary of his parish's survey results, submitted a report that gives a summary of the responses, ending with an analysis of parishioners' written responses to the question, "on what need or program should the parish most focus?" Chairmen from each parish were required to meet to share their preliminary parish reports with the diocesan planning committee.

The diocese plans to look at the response to the question of what each parish should focus on in order to guide a diocesan-wide downsizing in the number of churches where Mass is going to be available, while keeping open churches that will no longer provide Mass. The cause of this is a shrinking supply of priests. According to diocesan documents, the description of this stage is the formation of "parish clusters." The basic idea is to find out the particular strengths of each parish and to find a way to continue to offer those aspects of Catholic life that are most popular to parishioners. To what extent this initiative will guide the synod is unclear, but a just-completed synod in the archdiocese of Los Angeles that pondered the shortage of priests focused almost exclusively on increasing lay ministries.

Also last year, some 300 parish lay leaders and religious attended a series of nine regional meetings at various locations throughout the Sacramento diocese. The Synod Preparatory Commission produced and sent out a more refined survey last fall to a smaller group of 1,500 people on synod topics. Regional "speak-out sessions" will take place in the spring of 2004, as yet another opportunity for people to offer their views on possible topics for the synod. Even with this comprehensive effort and expense of gauging Catholic opinion in the diocese, the extent to which the laity's opinions will drive any substantial change is limited by canon law.

Any official documents that come from the synod must be approved first by the bishop and then by Rome. According to the 1997 Instruction on Diocesan Synods, issued by the Holy See's Congregations for Bishops and for the Evangelization of Peoples, synods are forbidden to issue opinion surveys. "In view of the bonds uniting the particular Church and her Pastor with the universal Church and the Roman Pontiff," says the instruction, "the Bishop has the duty to exclude from the synodal discussions theses or positions -- as well as proposals submitted to the Synod with the mere intention of transmitting to the Holy See 'polls' in their regard -- discordant with the perennial doctrine of the Church or the Magisterium or concerning material reserved to supreme ecclesiastical authority or to other ecclesiastical authorities."

Rome has recently shown its willingness to enforce the limitations it has placed on synods. In 2000, Bishop Muskens of Breda in Holland called for a synod to take place in his diocese for 2003, the 150th anniversary of the diocese. According the February 2001 National Catholic Reporter, Bishop Muskens said the synod would discuss "such themes as living the faith, the Eucharist, collaboration among priests and laity in response to the priest shortage and the role of the layperson in the church." Archbishop Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Holy See's Congregation for Bishops, told the bishop to call off the synod, but did not give any reason for doing so. Citing "observers in the Netherlands," the National Catholic Reporter said "the Vatican seemed worried about a possible reassertion of the polarization that characterized the Dutch church in the 1970s" over issues like clerical celibacy.

The 2002-2003 Los Angeles diocesan synod is perhaps another example why Rome retains control of the official documents that synods produce. In a 2000 pastoral letter, As I Have Done for You, which some see as the guiding document for the Los Angeles synod, Cardinal Roger Mahony wrote, "what some refer to as a 'vocations crisis' is, rather, one of the many fruits of the Second Vatican Council, a sign of God's deep love for the Church, and an invitation to a more creative and effective ordering of gifts and energy in the Body of Christ." Cardinal Mahony had also expressed a willingness to issue a "companion document" to the synod that would address some pet topics of the perennial dissenter, like a married priesthood.

But is either the shortage of priests or the enlistment of lay people to perform more ministries something that is irreversible and welcome? Pope John Paul II, in his 2002 Lenten address, said, "we all know how necessary vocations are for the life, witness and pastoral action of our ecclesial communities. And we also know that the decrease in the number of vocations in a diocese... is often the result of the weakening of faith and of spiritual fervor. Therefore, we must not be easily satisfied with the explanation that the scarcity of vocations is compensated for by growth in the apostolic commitment of lay people, nor even less that it is desired by Providence to foster this growth. On the contrary, the more numerous are the lay people who intend to live their own baptismal vocation generously, the more necessary are the presence and pastoral work of the ordained ministers."

The shortage of priests is a serious problem in the Sacramento diocese. According to material from the diocese, of the 214 priests, at least 89 are age 65 or older. This constitutes 42 percent of the total. Another 72 (or 35 percent) are between 50 and 64. Only 49 priests, or 23 percent of all the priests in the diocese, are under age 49. Unless the diocese has a staggering increase in vocations, in a short time it will have relatively few priests to cover the diocese's 42,597 square miles and to minister to the roughly 500,000 Catholics who live in it.

When asked how the synod was coming together, Father Charles McDermott, spokesman for the diocese of Sacramento, said, "it's coming along well; the preparatory commission is doing all it has to do." McDermott then read aloud to me excerpts from around 40 pages of opinions from the latest survey. The topics he read focused almost exclusively on a need to improve on what parishes offer now, like having more catechetics and activities for young Catholics, affordable Catholic education, promotion of seminaries and schools faithful to the magisterium, and so on. Topics calling for doctrinal change from the surveys were few, although 'clerical celibacy' came up once. Father McDermott said that such a response is not unexpected from a survey and that a limited number of suggestions would make the final cut.

I asked Father McDermott if there was any danger the synod might be used to express the agenda of dissenters from Catholic doctrine -- in particular, if the downsizing of parishes will result in a weakening of discipline so that those who disagree with Church teaching will be able to become more active and prominent in parishes with less oversight. Father McDermott said, "our synod recognizes the limits of its competence. We will be conducting the synod in an orderly fashion. We are not going to stifle the Holy Spirit, but we do recognize our limits." With regard to a married clergy, Father McDermott said, "the issue of celibacy belongs to the universal Church. We cannot propose suggestions or solutions to those issues outside our competence. We must set our own house in order first."

With regard to maintaining discipline over the sacraments, Father McDermott also pointed out that in 1988 the Vatican issued a document, Directory for Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest, that is clear and comprehensive. Asked if the synod would address solving the priest shortage or whether the diocese would assume that the declining number of priests was a trend that needs simply to be accepted, he said, "we will be seeking positive means of doing better with regard to vocations. We have a very active vocations office, and we also have the help of many priests from abroad, from Africa and elsewhere. We're doing well."

Continuing he said, "what we want to have is an orderly, serious, theological, pastoral synod that will look at the state of the diocese, give directions to a pastoral plan, and look at what provisions we need to renew. And of course the only legislator in the synod is the bishop. He has the final say over the fruits of the synod."

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