SYNOD 2021-2023
The synod on synodaliTy: is The church really GoinG To The “PeriPheries?” one iGnored “PeriPhery”: The workinG class, sufferinG mosT from family devasTaTion n BY ANTHONY ESOLEN Pope Francis' visit to the Roman parish of Saint Peter Damian at Monti di San Paolo on the southern suburbs of the city on May 21, 2017. The Holy Father meets the children and young people of the parish (Galazka photo)
“This synodal Process…is inTended To enable The church To beTTer wiTness To The GosPel, esPecially wiTh Those who live on The sPiriTual, social, economic, PoliTical, GeoGraPhical, and exisTenTial PeriPheries of our world.” -From the Vatican’s oFFicial synod on synodality 2021-23 website
P
ope Francis has repeatedly urged his pastors to “smell like the sheep,” that is, to make sure they are among the flock, to get to know their joys and sorrows, to enter into the confusions and the ills of the world they live in, not — to give him the benefit of the doubt — to approve their sins and to confuse them all the more, but the better to diagnose their ills and to provide the right and fitting remedies. I do not believe, however, that the mainly well-heeled Europeans and Americans who promote what Francis has called the “synodal way” show any intention to mingle with either the most faithful and largely despised sheep or the worst wounded and bleeding. Twice a day does the stopped clock give the right time, and so it is that we can lay a Marxian finger on the otherwise baffling phenomenon, that those who speak the loudest about pastoral rather than doctrinal matters show so little interest in certain large fields of the 30
INSIDE THE VATICAN SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2022
flock. People of a comfortable social class will tend to support measures that confirm them in their comfort, and that insulate them from unpleasantness without, or from competition and threats to their status. Anyone looking at the state of the working class in the United States and Canada — I speak of what I know first-hand, though people like the pseudonymous doctor Theodore Dalrymple have made similar observations elsewhere — must see that they have been devastated by fatherlessness, which was a direct and perfectly predictable consequence of a terrible combination, the sexual revolution and the vast expansion of the welfare state. The teenage boy who is unsocial, sullen, foul-mouthed, pitched by turns into lassitude and unproductive aggression, who never gets within a mile of the church, needs a father. He is not going to get one, not so long as both Church and state turn demurely aside, as if he were above all to be
