Morning coffee 12-2-2023 = Bishop Robert Barron on the recent Synod

See Bishop Robert Barron, “My Experience of the Synod” at Word on Fire = https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/barron/my-experience-of-the-synod/

I had heard of Word on Fire ministries and thought it was the Catholic equivalent of an evangelical Protestant ministry with more zeal than depth. However since returning to full communion with the Catholic Church I have come to appreciate the ministry. Part of its spiritual and frankly intellectual depth is Bishop Robert Barron. For the last four months I have been reading The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism. It is a remarkable work that reveals the bishop as a significant voice in American Catholic theology.

The Synod on Synodality has been in the news recently. Bishop Barron attended the Synod as an elected delegate. And recently published a short article which relates his experience of the Synod and comments on the published document (is it available to the public?) approved by the synod members and his “interventions” during the deliberations. It is short, simple, clear, nuanced, and helpful.

It is difficult to choose one section of the article to share in this post. Instead I will share a brief reaction to each paragraph.

• The second paragraph praises the synod for what it accomplished. Especially with regard to “listening to the voices of those who have, for a variety of reasons, felt marginalized from the life of the Church”.
• The third paragraph however expresses concern that “both the Instrumentum Laboris and the synod conversations were far more preoccupied with the ad intra than with the ad extra“. That the synod could have focused more on forming the laity in their mission to the world. This concern for the ad extra – the centrifugal dimension of Christian mission – is characteristic of the bishop’s ministry.
• I appreciate greatly the points raised in the fourth paragraph about perceived tension between love and truth. Love (properly understood) is the act which wills the good of the other. (A point made several times in The Priority of Christ.) “One cannot authentically love someone else unless he has a truthful perception of what is really good for that person. There might, I argued, be a tension between welcoming and truth but not between authentic love and truth.” This is a crucial point that is often lost in conversations today when the teachings of the Catholic Church are in tension with the values of the contemporary world (in the Johannine sense).
• In the fifth paragraph Barro raises concerns over a proper understanding of Christian mission.

There was, at least to my mind, a fair amount of ambiguity around the meaning of the word itself. Judging from what we read in the Instrumentum Laboris, mission seemed, more often than not, to designate the Church’s work in favor of social justice and the betterment of the economic and political situation of the poor. Conspicuous by their absence in the texts on mission were references to sin, grace, redemption, cross, resurrection, eternal life, and salvation, and this represents a real danger. For in point of fact, the primary mission of the Church is to declare the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and to invite people to place themselves under his Lordship. This discipleship, to be sure, has implications for the way we live in the world, and it certainly should lead us to work for justice, but we must keep our priorities straight. The supernatural should never be reduced to the natural; rather, the natural order should be transfigured by its relationship to the supernatural order.

• I appreciate especially the sixth paragraph in which Barron disagrees (!) with the final version of the synod report. Which suggests advances in scientific understanding require the Church to rethink its sexual teaching. Barron makes two important points here. That such language is condescending to the “richly articulate tradition of moral reflection in Catholicism, a prime example of which is the theology of the body developed by Pope St. John Paul II. To say that this multilayered, philosophically informed, theologically dense system is incapable of handling the subtleties of human sexuality is just absurd”. One sees this regularly today. When those who would defend the Sexual Revolution and/or argue against traditional Christian teaching on sexual expression say (in effect) “you have not thought this through or have done so poorly”. The Christian Church has thought through these issues for centuries – especially in the last few generations – and has done so very well.

• • Another more important Barron makes is that to say “science means we need to rethink moral theology” is a category error. Which one observes regularly in the contemporary world. Such reasoning is an example of scientism. “This is how people should live. Because science”.

Evolutionary biology, anthropology, and chemistry might give us fresh insight into the etiology and physical dimension of same-sex attraction, but they will not tell us a thing about whether homosexual behavior [ed = or any behavior] is right or wrong. The entertaining of that question belongs to another mode of discourse.

Thank you Bishop Barron.