Among the gifts left to the Church by the late George Cardinal Pell is a critique of the Synod on Synodality, published posthumously in the Spectator. He says what many, in fact most churchgoing Catholics think: this Synod doesn’t speak for us. The Synodal findings so far are summed up in a 56-page document titled “Working Document for the Continental Stage.” Flip through a few pages and you can see why Cardinal Pell called the whole process a “toxic nightmare.”
The central metaphor of the Working Document is the big tent. It’s taken from Isaiah 54:2: “Enlarge the space of your tent.” Lest you forget the metaphor, a picture of a big tent is drawn on virtually every page in what appears to be crayon. The idea is that a big tent Church has three features: it has plenty of room for lots of new people, it has some sort of structure, and it can move around as needed (§ 27). But structure and mobility won’t matter if our tent is empty, so how are we going to fill all that extra space? It turns out that, as we hear so often these days, diversity is going to be our strength. “Enlarging the tent requires welcoming others into it, making room for their diversity” (§ 28).
What sort of diversity are we talking about here? Well, it’s not the Maronites or the Chaldeans. They are already included. Cardinal Pell recognized that this is a call to fill the Church with people who are not really Catholics. “With no sense of irony, the document is entitled ‘Enlarge the Space of Your Tent,’ and the aim of doing so is to accommodate, not the newly baptised—those who have answered the call to repent and believe—but anyone who might be interested enough to listen. Participants are urged to be welcoming and radically inclusive: ‘No one is excluded.’”
This idea for filling the pews will be familiar, Pell wrote, to ex-Anglicans. As a convert from Anglicanism myself, I can tell you that he’s right. I remember it growing up, because I watched it play out in almost every church I attended. We were going to show everyone that they would be accepted at church. No longer would we be gatekeepers! And so we threw open the doors…and no one came.
And then we started second guessing. Maybe we were gatekeepers after all. Was the music too old-fashioned? Was the language of the liturgy too hard? Were the homilies too serious? Were teachings on suicide or divorce or abortion or homosexuality putting people off? Were we leaving out popular victim groups that we could shoehorn into the faith?
The mere fact that someone could identify a potential hindrance became a reason to abolish the thing or leave it, to quote Pell, “parked in a pluralist limbo where some choose to redefine sins downwards and most agree to differ respectfully.” Soon the churches of my youth would find they had compromised on so many things that they had changed beyond recognition, except in one respect: they were still empty.
I privately think of this process as the “The Two-Step Plan.”
Step One: The Church becomes accepting of all so that no one is excluded.
Step Two: The previously excluded flock into the Church.
The big problem with the Working Document is its assertion that we have to follow the Two-Step Plan in the Catholic Church.
The Protestant experience shows the Two-Step Plan failing again and again. Why do people keep trying it? The answer is that once upon a time, it did work. The Two-Step Plan is what grew the early Church.
The first Christians encountered a world where most people thought of gods as tied to families or cities or nations. These gods demanded our best. That meant their worship often excluded slaves, outsiders, cripples, the insane, the cursed, or those who were otherwise unclean. The early Christians didn’t just bring a different faith, they changed the philosophical framework of faith.
