Ecclesial Transparency, Liturgical Peace, and Synodality

By Larry Chapp

Satan lives in our secrets. And a Church of secrets is therefore uniquely prone to the self-deceptions and rationalizations induced by the evil one, with the deep temptation toward a purely worldly conception of ecclesial “power” ever present in the background. This is a secrecy that festers in the clandestine closets of a layered bureaucratic anonymity even as it erodes the good under the guise of a variety of false goods.

This then too is a secrecy that fosters suspicion, hostility, and resentment when decisions are made in a manner that lacks transparency but affect the whole Church in deep and profound ways and where certain ecclesial polities are seemingly cut out of the conversation without sufficient explanation. Therefore, what we need now is a Church that lives in the transparent light of Christ and not in the shadow world of secrets.

All of this was on my mind as I followed the dust storm kicked up over the issue of Traditionis Custodes in recent weeks by certain revelations. The veteran, Rome-based reporter Diane Montagna made public leaked documents from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) which would seem to indicate that the majority of bishops who responded to the Vatican survey on the status of Summorum Pontificum in their dioceses saw no major problems with its implementation and advised that its regulations allowing for a wider celebration of the old Mass be left in place. She has now followed up by pointing to a new book in Italian which corroborates her original story with even more documentary evidence.

What these documents make clear is that the survey results could not have formed the only foundation for the restrictions of Traditionis on the old Mass. This has led to a firestorm of online accusations that Pope Francis intentionally misled the Church when he claimed that his restrictions were a response to the findings of the 2020 survey of the bishops. In other words, the accusation is that Pope Francis used deception. Furthermore, the implication is that his closest advisors on this issue, such as Cardinal Arthur Roche (head of the Vatican Dicastery for Divine Worship), were also lying to us and deliberately so.

Cardinal Roche greets Pope Francis // Credit: Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales

These are serious accusations, and they are made even more severe by the simple fact that we are not talking here about ancillary and insignificant issues of discipline, but of the Eucharistic Liturgy which is, as Vatican II made clear, the very summit of the Church’s entire activity and the “font” from which that activity flows.

Therefore, those who wish to ignore the so-called “liturgy wars”—a term I hate—on the grounds that this is all just an “inside baseball” ecclesial cat fight over trivialities the rest of the world does not care about, are manifestly wrong. This is not a “war” between belligerents fighting for turf and treasure, but an internal ecclesial abscess that has been festering for sixty years now and which touches upon the deepest and most profound sacramental elements of the Catholic faith.

In other words, this is not a war but a wound, and one which requires the ministrations of a universal pastor who understands that this is not a war between benighted backward-looking nostalgics on the one hand, and clear-headed and right-thinking “modern people” on the other. This is instead one of those seminal and defining issues concerning a matter of the deepest importance that it is the job of the pope to resolve in a manner that displays a deep sensitivity to the concerns of all involved.

Therefore, the accusation that the pope and his advisors were deliberately deceptive about the results of the 2020 survey is not just a piece of gossipy irrelevance. However, the usual defenders of the Francis papacy have come forward and, predictably, argue that there is nothing to see here and we should all just move along since, after all, the pope has every right to ignore the advice of the bishops and to promulgate whatever he wishes. Did not Paul VI do this same thing when issuing Humanae Vitae, which went against the majority opinion of the pope’s own birth control commission? Furthermore, the summary of the bishop’s survey put forward by the DDF, and which Diane Montagna quotes, is perhaps not as unambiguously clear, or so it is claimed, as it appears at first glance.

However, as one observes this debate unfold there is the palpable sense that we are all outsiders attempting to look into the inner workings of a secretive process which culminated in a decision by a now-deceased pontiff. And therefore, there are charges and counter-charges that conservative journalists like Montagna on the one hand, or the “centrist” papal biographer and defender Austin Ivereigh on the other, are spinning the interpretation of the data available in tendentious directions to suit their respective leanings.

And therein lies the problem. This to me is the most salient and almost self-evident fact that we can glean from this mess. To wit, that the entire process that led to the issuing of Traditionis was, and is, shrouded in mystery, secrecy, and an utter lack of public transparency. And this from a pope who called for a more synodal Church where decision making is more collaborative, dialogical, widely inclusive of many voices, and most important of all, transparent. From a pope who called for “parrhesia” and for all voices to be heard (“Todos!”).

Therefore, forget for now the currently unresolvable debates over the pope’s mindset, what documents he had in front of him, and what back channel communications beyond the official survey he may have been getting about allegedly “anti-Vatican II” traditionalists in France and the Catholic anglosphere. Forget too whether the pope had the juridical right to do what he did and to ignore whatever surveys were coming across his desk. He had that right.

Focus instead on the question of secrecy vs. transparency, since that is the deeper ecclesiological issue at stake here, and that the current mess has been caused precisely by the late pope’s performative contradiction of advocating for a synodal and transparent Church even as he made major decisions like this behind the iconostasis of old-fashioned papal secrecy.

Until the Vatican releases all of the relevant documents in an act of open transparency, we will simply never know the truth. And if one wants to argue that we have no “right” to see such documents, and therefore there is no obligation for Rome to be transparent, then let’s just say the quiet part out loud: that ours is a Church run by an elite few in Rome who have every right to do whatever they please with publicly opaque processes and that any and all criticism of the secrecy involved is simply the grumbling of “anti-Francis” malcontents who are “dissenting from the pope.”

The primary question before us now, and despite the recent revelations from Diane Montagna, has not changed, and it is the same question, regardless of accusations of lies and deceptions and surveys and so on, that we have had all along: was Traditionis Custodes pastorally wise? Because the decision is now in Pope Leo’s capable hands and that is truly the only question he needs to address. But there is no way to answer the question of the pastoral wisdom of Traditionis unless we can see the documentation that the pope saw.

Obviously, Pope Leo will have access to these documents, and one hopes that their contents will be made public forthwith, but if the problem of ecclesial secrecy is not addressed and remedied, then this conflict, as well as many other pressing issues, will not only continue to ferment in the ecclesial wort, but will multiply and create even more problems.

Of course, there are some things that should remain in the domain of the legitimate sphere of privacy, such as personnel files, delicate negotiations with world leaders, and issues of governance that sometimes require a certain level of quiet discretion. But who can doubt that even here the Church has not erred too far in the direction of secrecy?

For example, would the clerical sex abuse crisis have happened if bishops had been required to be far more open and transparent about why “Father X” was suddenly “retired” for “health reasons,” only to reappear a few years later in a new parish where the entire process repeated itself until the priest in question was suddenly outed and arrested? Once again, who can now doubt that Satan lived in those secrets and that the Church was more interested in covering up child rape than in openly and honestly confronting the problem with more public transparency?

This might seem a bit of a digression from the topic of Traditionis Custodes, but it isn’t. Because from the very beginnings of the liturgical reforms after Vatican II, the decision to gut the old liturgy in radical ways and to replace it with a very, very different rite, was made in Rome without much collegial collaboration with the world’s bishops and with little consultation outside of the curial hallways of the Vatican. And the new liturgy was formulated by a relatively small committee of liturgists in Rome, in a mostly secret process, and then summarily imposed “from above” upon the entire Church by papal decree.

The intentions were good, I presume, and whatever the merits of the new rite and its presumptive “improvements” upon the old, this imposition from above created a deep wound in the souls of many Catholics. The exact numbers of those so wounded is irrelevant in one sense, since the numbers were sufficient to create a deep and ongoing fissure within the Church between those who embraced the Novus Ordo and those who longed for the older liturgy.

Every pope since then has sought to heal this wound in various ways, with the most serious attempt being Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum, which greatly broadened Pope John Paul II’s previous indult, which placed most of the decisions in the hands of the local ordinaries. Pope Benedict, as is well known, allowed any priest to celebrate the older liturgy if he so chose and without any need to gain the permission of his superiors.

This deeply pastoral move on the part of Pope Benedict did, in my view, go a long way toward healing the old wounds even if, as we saw in some cases (how many is a matter of dispute), there were those in the TLM communities who treated their liturgical communities as some kind of “holy remnant” set over and against the broader Church. However, and despite these unfortunate pockets of restorationist zealotry, the overall effect of Summorum was to bring a measure of healing to an important subset of tradition-minded Catholics. That is not to minimize the harm done by the restorationist zealots, but I am sure there are ways to address that concern in ways that do not harm everyone interested in a more traditional approach to the liturgy.

But more importantly for my purposes here, this pastoral move on the part of Pope Benedict was done with complete transparency. Yes, it was done “from above” as well, and yes, there was little collegial consultation beforehand, but in this case nothing was “imposed” on the unwilling, and instead what we got was simply a latitudinarian allowance for a greater pluralism of liturgical expressions in the interests of healing a wound and bringing a certain measure of liturgical peace to the Church.

Furthermore, Pope Benedict provided, in complete transparency, a clear theological rationale for his actions (which we need not rehearse here). My point is that Pope Benedict issued this motu proprio without grounding his decision in secretive surveys, the contents of which remained hidden, and without any pretense that he was doing so as a response to anonymous, faceless, and unknown agents who had urged him to do so. This was therefore a true motu proprio in the sense that it was a decision made by the Pope himself and on his own initiative, making no effort to locate its rationale within some broader framework of secretive requests from hidden sources.

This kind of transparency does not mean that all agreed with his reasons or with the decision as such. There were those who did indeed object on the grounds that this was a step “backward” liturgically and too great an allowance for traditionalist elements in the Church who might now create mischief. But at least the debate was based upon open and clear lines of theological differences, where one knew what theological principles were in play. There was nothing hidden or clandestine in the debates where the pro-Benedict side could claim that his critics did not understand that Pope Benedict was responding to sources of information to which only he and his closest advisors were privy.

Let me conclude by referring back to the issue of a “synodal Church,” which I raised earlier, and which is related to the issue of the current debates over liturgy. Synodality as an ecclesial concept has been much debated of late and its precise definition seems to differ from one group to the next. In my view, this lack of consensus coalescing around a precise definition of synodality is the result of it referring more to an “ethos” rather than a concrete policy. And that ethos is the desire for a Church with minimal secrets and one in which decisions that affect the entire Church are made with complete transparency.

This point can be illustrated in the fact that various episcopal conferences (e.g., Germany and Australia) have begun their own “synodal way” with the stated purpose of eliminating the secretive and clericalistic culture that led to the sexual abuse cover ups. The fact that the motives of many in those countries may have included a desire to change core Church teachings, especially in the area of sexual morality, is unimportant to the question at hand. Those distortions do indeed need correction, and Pope Francis, to his credit, issued a few such correctives. But the fact remains that the goal of a more transparent and less secretive clericalistic Church culture is a laudable one and provides us with a synodal “ethos” yearning for a Church that does not live in the shadows.

And this is an ethos that can live within a variety of ecclesial arrangements for how the Church is governed. In fact, it can even live within a more traditional ecclesial structure. I am not saying however that all structures are equal in this regard, and many practical changes may need to be made to the governing apparatus of the Church, but no matter the form, the ethos of transparency must somehow be front and center.

This, then, is real and true synodality: a synodality where the Church is not viewed as a pyramidal structure with a supreme potentate at the top who makes decisions in secretive ways, but rather more like a set of Russian nesting dolls where each “layer” of the Church’s richly textured life rests comfortably, but also constitutively, in what is “above;” where there is a trinitarian life of a circumincession of charisms and office in the Church in a “communio of love” where all voices can be heard with deep, empathetic solidarity.

This then is for me the takeaway from the recent debates generated by the reporting from Diane Montagna. Regardless of what one thinks of her claims (for the record, I think her interpretation of the documents is correct), the sad reality is that this debate would never have happened in the first place if Pope Francis had been completely transparent about the results of the surveys. If there were many bishops who were complaining about Summorum, then in the interests of transparency, let’s see what they had to say.

Absent such transparency, Traditionis Custodes gives the impression that it was a raw act of authority wherein Pope Francis ignored his own counsel for a synodal Church where all voices are empathetically heard, with a pastoral eye turned toward healing those wounded sheep on the liturgical peripheries. And this was done under the cover of an appeal to a set of secretive surveys that he was unwilling to share with the wider Church.

Perhaps Traditionis Custodes was thoroughly warranted and perhaps Summorum Pontificum was an unwise pastoral move in hindsight. But we will never know the answer to that question, and the deep liturgical wound of the Church will remain with all of the resentment and hostilities intact, so long as these decisions are made secretively within the hothouse of curial intrigue devoid of public ecclesial accountability.

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Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22. Read Larry’s other WWNN essays.