This is part of Outreach’s series of articles on the Study Group 9 report.
Before the birth of our first child, my wife and I — like many new parents — read books about parenthood. We learned about sleep patterns and mapped out our baby’s “wonder weeks.” By the time our son was born, we thought we had a solid grasp on what parenthood was about. But it did not take long to realize that the lived experience of parenthood was far greater (and messier!) than the ideal models we had read about.
As a lay Catholic theologian, parenthood has taught me a lot about what it means to do theology, what Saint Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) famously defined as “faith seeking understanding.” Like parenthood, theology, I have discovered, is far greater (and messier) than the ideal models one finds in books, art, and the sanitized depictions of saints.
In its Final Report, the Synod’s Study Group No.9 wrestles with this challenge and affirms a way of doing theology that can speak to the complexities of the world. While much attention has been paid to its groundbreaking inclusion of LGBTQ voices, this methodological turn has wider implications for both theology and mission.
In its Final Report, the Synod’s Study Group No.9 wrestles with this challenge and affirms a way of doing theology that can speak to the complexities of the world.
Guided by the synod’s method of Conversation in the Spirit,” the group suggests that theology should not begin with rigid abstract ideals detached from reality. Instead, it should attend to “the lived experience of the People of God, read and interpreted ecclesially in the light of Revelation” (4). In other words, theology must begin not only with abstract ideas of beauty and truth, but with the concrete realities in which people encounter God.
This tension between doctrine and lived experience is not new. In the 1930s, Joseph Cardijn — later made a cardinal for his work with the Young Christian Worker movement — described a tension between “the truth of faith” and “the truth of life,” between the Christian ideal and the new experiences facing the working class.
Cardijn saw how young workers felt unseen, socially marginalized and alienated from the church. If we wanted to keep them in the church, he argued, we needed a pastoral method that took seriously their experiences and what he proposed is the method popularly known as the “see, judge act.”
The Synod’s study group points to this dialectical tension by framing “Christian experience as a journey with two horizons: ultimate eschatological fulfilment (God’s universal saving will in Jesus, through the ministry of the Church, in service to the coming of the Kingdom); and the concrete, varied, complex, ever-changing reality in which we live…” (9).
To be credible to people today, theology needs to find a way to address this tension. This point is also made by another Synod Study Group, no. 2, To Hear the Cry of the Poor and the Earth. This group calls for an approach to theology that can:
listen to how God is speaking in and through communities/ecosystems made poor and vulnerable. A synodal theology that can discern the signs of the times for following Jesus in missionary discipleship arises from fidelity to the lived faith experience of ecological communities in whose struggle for life the God of life is revealed. This theology is contextual, intercultural, transdisciplinary, ecclesial, and rooted in the Word of God. (35)
Study Group No. 9 further develops this line of thinking by emphasizing the importance of context as “the vital environments in which communities of ecclesial discernment are necessarily situated” (20). And it is here that it includes the experiences of LGBTQ Catholics and those working on nonviolence.
Of course, for many of us, this is not a revolutionary insight. Ignatian spirituality, to take but one example, encourages believers to seek God in all things and liberation theologies have long treated the experiences of marginalized communities as privileged places for encountering God’s presence. What is revolutionary, here, is to see official Vatican documents endorse the contextual framework.
To be clear, this is not a form of subjective relativism, but rather a genuine way to get closer to the incarnate God. “We are rediscovering,” the study group writes, “the biblical conception of the truth of God who reveals himself in history and who, through a story of divine love, leads us to live this story ever more fully, fostering an ongoing process of shared learning within the Christian Community” (8).
This “paradigm shift” in theology has important implications for LGBTQ Catholics today at two levels.
If theology is truly to serve the Gospel mission of evangelization, it must engage the actual lives of people rather than speaking only in abstractions.
First, church leaders and scholars should take seriously the report’s call to attend to context and experience. If theology is truly to serve the Gospel mission of evangelization, it must engage the actual lives of people rather than speaking only in abstractions. Here, we are challenged to find ways to integrate experiential learning into all levels of theological study (including seminaries and Ph.D. programs) and tenure considerations.
Second, at the pastoral level, parishes and schools need to create spaces of genuine encounter and shared learning where people can speak honestly about their experiences of faith, exclusion and belonging. The conversation in the Spirit method offers one model for this kind of discernment, though other forms of prayerful dialogue are possible as well.
As many LGBTQ Catholics know, it is precisely though experiences of encounter where conversion of hearts and heads can happen. And it is here where we can see a lasting potential for synodality to get us past the rigid impasses of exclusion.
