“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
—Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
I spent yesterday off the internet and in the warm confines of my grandmother’s apartment, and so I awoke this morning to the news that Francis has extended the Synod. The meeting of bishops in the fall of 2023 will be followed up by another meeting of bishops in the fall of 2024.
But that’s the thing about the Synod on Synodality (which you may not have heard of at all, and if so, that’s okay): it was exciting because it’s about the people of God taking place in the discussion of how the Church is doing and where the Church is going.
Imagine a conversation about a state of a relationship where only one person talks and the other nods and listens and says nothing. That’s not much of a conversation, is it? Because the point of a relationship is working together toward something: a good life, a habit of being, joy, goodness, a family, a building block of a larger community.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, my favorite Swiss theologian, echoes many other theologians by discussing the “Marian” Church and the '“Petrine” Church. Basically, the Petrine Church is the Church founded on Peter “upon this rock I will build my church, etc.” and the Marian Church is the body of all believers who bear the body of Christ in the world and make Christ present, beginning with the virgin who said “let it be done to me according to your word.”
Too often only one lung of the Church breathes—the Petrine—without consulting the Marian Church—all of us, together—and breathing together.
And the Synod on Synodality is a chance to breathe and think together. To talk together. The preparatory document, which our friend Luciano bullied James into reading last October, who then harangued me to read it, is aptly titled “Journeying Together.”
It’s a beautiful document, that asks us to rethink what it means to walk together toward God.
I had already learned to parrot the joke I’ve heard many repeat since, “oh this is a meeting about meetings.” But when I read the document, I realized this was a powerful call from a pontiff whose initiatives —like the Economy of Francesco—often fall on deaf ears when it comes to the American Catholic press and American bishops. In fact, I found lay Catholics were the ones most often leading the way.
We Americans are not so good at operating as a community. We are formed to operate as individuals, to maximize our potential on our own, and focus on our own self-optimization. To be little kings of the dominion of ourselves. We see this individualism cause the breakdown of so many institutions, because our institutions have stopped operating like communities, and so operate as a battle of individual against individual. It’s midterms season, so if you need an example of this, turn on your television. Our political life has forgotten the common good. It’s the good of my side versus your side. We can’t cooperate for the common good, we only compete for our good and our own tribe.
The Church is not exempt from this competitive environment. We have learned to root for “our bishops” and back “our faction” within a diverse, varied Church of many cultures and factions, and ideas. We are formed in competition rather than cooperation.
And this is the promise of the Synod — but even before we think through what synodality means, Americans need to learn what community means.
Peter Maurin, co-founder of The Catholic Worker newspaper and whose ideas inspired Dorothy Day to launch the movement wrote (in 1933):
The Nazis, the Fascists and the Bolsheviks
are Totalitarians.
The Catholic Worker
is Communitarian.
What is a communitarian? Simply put, one who lives in, builds, and works for a community. Allow Peter to explain more what being a personality communitarian could look like:
A personalist is a go-giver,
not a go-getter.
He tries to give what he has,
and does not try to get
what the other fellow has.
He tries to be good
by doing good to the other fellow.
He is altro-centered not self-centered …
Through words and deeds
he brings into existence a common unity,
the common unity of the community.
People say:
"They don't do this,
they don't do that,
they ought to do this,
this ought to do that."
Always "They"
and never "I".
The Communitarian Revolution
is basically
a personal revolution.
It starts with I
not with They.
The Catholic Worker movement is many things—probably some of the things you’re thinking right now. But the reason it persists is because it is the Gospel in action. Peter Maurin grasped the fundamental flaw in American individualism and what Catholics needed to do to resist assimilation in capitalism—what Catholics needed to do to fully live the Gospel and bring it into explosive, world-changing life in the new world.
And he found, in Dorothy Day, a woman who was looking for just such an education in the Gospel. A way to live her faith, not to live communism or capitalism.
I find Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day so compelling because they captured, in their own unique genius, how to live the Gospel in their age—my age. It’s still the same culture, still the same dominion of the American dollar.
Similarly, I find the Synod on Synodality powerful because it’s asking, honestly, how the Church can continue to be what it was intended and is called to be. Because remaining the same, in a world that moves and changes, means changing, too. The Church is called to inculturate the truth in every age. So how can we do that in a way that remains true but also speaks to and sanctifies the culture?
Tradition isn't just yelling the same thing over and over into the void while everyone walks away. It's passing down the truth to the next generation, a dynamic "handing down" that demands dialogue and understanding, so that it's the same idea being passed down, but always being made new. Ideas and institutions grow and mature, just as a human being grows.
I spent a lot of the past year reporting on the Synod on Synodality. (once I finally read that preparatory document). What came up constantly in my reporting was the fact that people want to learn their faith in a deeper way and they were hungry for avenues of formation. You can read my article in The Tablet here.
I came away from most Synod listening sessions thinking we needed more of these forums for discussion, and I hoped and still hope, that the Church would be able to change: not in the sort of hot-button culture war issues, but in its formation.
Our church needs to become a less corporate structure and more of a community; our priests become less like non-profit CEOs and more teachers; our bishops become less like princes and more personalist communitarians. Our parishes need to be less like NGOs and more like houses of hospitality for the down and out.
Because you find, the more you live with the down and out: that’s where Christ is.