From October 5 to 19, the third ever Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops was held in Vatican City. The reason for this meeting was “the pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization.” Essentially, the synod was convened by Pope Francis in order for the bishops of the Church to examine the pastoral techniques the Church employs concerning the family in order to better evangelize. It came on the heels of a worldwide survey of Catholics to determine their faithfulness to the teachings of the Church on social issues like contraception, divorce and the treatment of LGBTQ individuals. Crucially, this was not an ecumenical council. It had no doctrinal authority whatsoever, meaning that it could not develop or implement changes in doctrine. This, however, did not stop the media from indulging in reckless, unsupported speculation about the Church, revealing that the world of instant gratification is unequipped to deal with the Church. The Church still moves at a rate far different than that at which other social institutions — often political in nature — move.
Despite this synod’s lack of real authority , a document known as the “midterm relatio,” a mid-synod working draft of the final report, was at the center of a nearly weeklong speculative rollercoaster. The document provoked a furor in the press concerning a few statements that seemed to change the tone of the Church in relation to “homosexuals;” specifically, a section titled “Welcoming homosexual persons.” In response, commentators proclaimed everything from “a pastoral revolution” and “a paradigm shift in the church’s style of evangelizing” to some commentators forecasting imminent doctrinal change that made it seem as though the Catholic Church was on the verge of eradicating two millennia of established sexual morality and directly repudiating the Old Testament, the Gospels and Saint Paul.
A New York Times article on the midterm relatio demonstrates this misguided approach. The entire article is dedicated towards touting the midterm relatio as a seismic shift in Church teaching, citing a number of people who declare, among other things, that “[the midterm relatio] represents a revolution” and is a “total reversal of earlier church statements.” Now, it is important to reiterate that those grand pronouncements are interpretations based off of one section of an early draft of a non-binding, non-doctrinal report. Buried in the article is a critical truth: “However, the document reflects what appears to be a definite consensus among bishops against same-sex marriage.” This article dedicates only a single sentence to the only solid truth that came out of the synod: that Catholic doctrine did not change. And even then, the article still vacillates, declaring that there only “appears” to be a consensus against same-sex marriage among the bishops, when in reality there is absolute consensus against same-sex marriage among the bishops. The only time in which there was similar mistreatment of Church documents was in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, in which the declarations of the Council were widely abused through radical re-interpretations of their meaning.
These types of events, however, have become almost normative since the ascension of Francis I. The seismic incident that has defined the tenure of Francis I thus far was his famous response to a reporter when asked about gay priests in the Church: “Who am I to judge?” This was met with similar press furor, in which mainstream news outlets speculated whether “five little words uttered in 2013” might “change the course of the Catholic Church.” These misconceptions are predicated on a much deeper lack of understanding, in which the pope is seen as an all-powerful ruler with a reach that extends into every Catholic parish in the world. In reality, the pope only wields such power in very rare instances, when he speaks ex cathedra — or “from the chair,” the chair in this case being the throne of St. Peter. Other than that, the pope is mainly an administrator and figurehead with very little impact on day-to-day life in the Church. He is a caretaker of the Church, a body far greater and more important than any individual pope.
These responses reveal a deep lack of understanding of the Catholic Church and a corresponding desire to fit the Church within the paradigm of the 21st century news culture. The Church is not an organization that moves swiftly to address potential problems and does not operate like other institutions and organizations, for it is dedicated to far different ends. It is an organization that believes itself to be in possession of absolute, capital-T Truth; that it is the one true and universal Church in an unbroken line of succession dating to Saint Peter and the Apostles, and, as a result, it moves very slowly, if at all. Indeed, technically, the Church never changes and can never change on doctrinal matters. All it can do is develop in light of new understanding, and ecumenical councils are called to determine the direction of these new understandings. To endow this point with some perspective, there have only been twenty-one ecumenical councils in the history of mankind and only two since 1563. The declarations of the Second Vatican Council give some sense of how slowly the Church changes. In Vatican II, the Church recognized the legitimacy of the individual conscience, repudiated anti-Semitism and recognized the right of people to pursue other religions. Vatican II ended in 1965, which meant that until 1965, the Church was officially anti-Semitic, did not recognize the right of people to pursue other religions, and did not recognize the legitimacy of the individual conscience.
These examples do not mean that the Church is wrong, that it should change, or that it is not in possession of the Truth, Rather, it means that the celebrity-crazed, clickbait-obsessed news culture of the 21st century is wholly unequipped to deal with the Catholic Church. The news culture wants stories and headlines that immediately grab a reader’s attention in order to stand out in a world utterly saturated with content. As a result, they will attempt to wring a story out of anything including a five-word response from a pope to a reporter or a mid-conference draft of an essentially toothless synod.
The paces of the news culture and the Church could not be more different. The news culture depends upon change to provide it with a continued existence. The Church, in its promulgation of revealed truth, is opposed to the very concept. The two are not bedfellows and should not attempt to be. It is better to sit back and wait for the Church to speak, although you may be waiting for a very long time.