UNITED STATES
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor
For those of us who covered a Synod of Bishops at the Vatican during the John Paul II and Benedict years, there was always a slightly surreal “Emperor has no clothes” dynamic about the experience.
An all-star cast of bishops from around the world would gather in Rome for a month to debate some critical issue, often pouring considerable time and effort into their speeches, a handful of which were memorable. (The late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’s “I have a dream” speech at the 1999 Synod for Europe, for instance, still makes the rounds.) Working groups would assiduously go over the final propositions, which for a long time were considered a state secret – making their inevitable leak 24 hours later a cherished guilty pleasure.
Reporters would describe the synod’s fault lines, document the push for compromise, and speculate about the final result, sometimes giving the impression that we were covering the Congress of Vienna.
In other words, everybody acted as if the synod mattered. The unspoken truth, however, was that all the cards were in the hands of the pope, and in most cases the big-picture decisions were already made.
When John Paul II used to attend sessions of the synod, he would sit in the front and read his breviary, the book of daily prayers for Catholic priests. Wags would quip it wasn’t actually a breviary but the final conclusions of the synod, which had already been written.
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