CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING, ORGANIZING, AND SYNODALITY: A New Confluence for Our Times
Adapted from a keynote address delivered by Austen Ivereigh for the “Prophetic Communities: Organizing as an Expression of Catholic Social Thought” conference, University of San Francisco, February 9-11, 2023.
The magic of three. Writers like this. The pope likes it too. So does God (the Holy Trinity). Threeness is fruitful and generative, it opens new horizons, and it is pregnant with possibility.
Because of Pope Francis, we have a new threeness on the scene, the confluence or coming together of three life-giving streams in a new way: Catholic social teaching (CST), community organizing, and synodality. The pope has brought a “new thing” to each of these three that allows them to come together in a kind of kairós, or providential moment.
THE NEW CONFLUENCE
Catholic social teaching and organizing have long been partners as ways to connect faith to everyday life, to form leaders, and to help the church have an impact on local neighborhoods. To realize CST is to become agents of enabling human dignity, especially among the poor, in issues over which the church has been a major advocate, from just wages to migrant regularization.
In a larger sense, CST and organizing have a shared mission: to build the strength of civil society faced with the power of the state and market. This shared mission occurs amid the context of shrinking civil society in a globalized marketplace—with its cult of individual sovereignty, endless mobility, insecurity, and fragmentation. This is one of the main drivers of religious decline, but also of the decline of associations and institutions more generally.
The idea of the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be has helped many Catholics avoid the traps of both sentimental idealism and other-worldly cynicism. It helps us to grasp what Jesus means when he urges us to be as innocent as doves but as wise as serpents. The gap between the earthly and the heavenly kingdom is at the heart of all mission.
Afflicting the comfortable—the frozen—people of God has been one of organizing’s major contributions to the life of the church. By bringing Catholic churches into broad-based alliances with other traditions, faiths, and civic traditions, it has helped instill the culture of encounter Pope Francis speaks of. It teaches Catholics to listen and dialogue so that differences are made fruitful rather than divisive.
Another natural affinity between organizing and CST is that the object of actions is not to humiliate the other but to enable a relationship. Polarization and personalization are necessary to gain a relationship, but once a relationship has been achieved and concessions won, there is collaboration. This kind of politics is non-ideological; both CST and organizing are rooted in people’s concrete concerns such as immigration status, living wage, decent housing, etc.
The new element here is the pope’s support for the kind of political action that organizing represents. He has made his encouragement explicit throughout his papacy, including in addresses to the popular movements of the developing world, speeches to online conferences, and recent meetings with organizers in Rome.
In Let Us Dream, Pope Francis speaks of the people’s selforganization as a source of moral energy, a reserve of civic passion capable of revitalizing our democracy and putting the economy at the service of the people to build peace and justice and to defend Mother Earth. In 2014 he told popular movements that it “is impossible to imagine a future for society without the active participation of great majorities as protagonists, and such proactive participation overflows the logical procedures of formal democracy.” He went on to urge “new forms of participation that include popular movements and invigorate local, national, and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny.” When this happens, he says, “we can say that our peoples have claimed back their soul.”
The current Synod on Synodality is distinct even from Pope Francis’ reformed synod of bishops in that it gives direct agency to the people. The experience has been transformative, as Pope Francis knew it would be, and it is already clear that the main fruit of the synod will be synodality itself.
Through this synod, the pope reclaims synodality as an ancient tradition that gives concrete expression to the idea that the faith of the church is passed through the sensus fidelium. This amounts to a conversion of authority and power in the church in which there is a mutual listening of people and pastors together to hear what the Spirit has to say to the church.
What now opens before us is a new style of being church, one appropriate for our time that is able to connect with seeking and searching and that welcomes participation, co-responsibility, and discernment into the heart of decision-making.
This transformation is just beginning, and it is particularly challenging for the church in the United States, where it runs
Catholic Social Teaching Organizing
A New Confluence
Synodality
counter to clericalism and a corporate mentality, alliances of money and power, and an ideologically driven focus on one or two bioethical issues at the expense of the gospel. No one said this conversion will be quick or easy, but it will happen.
FRUITFUL OVERLAPS
What implications does synodality have for organizing?
To the extent that dioceses and parishes are not synodally converted, very little. But as they learn this new style, organizers will need to adapt in ways that could be fruitful for organizing and may perhaps help organizing recover some of its own roots.
If organizers are willing to be reformed and accept that organizing is downstream from synodal processes, synodality could be a great gift to organizers. A new thing is being born here. Getting that formation—for parish leaders and community organizers—is one of the most essential tasks now.
In the United Kingdom, organizers have already begun to notice that strongly synodal parishes are among their strongest members. This is a slower and more patient way of proceeding, but by involving the whole parish—or at least inviting the whole parish—to be involved in discernment of the parish mission, the whole parish may see the aims of organizing as part of that mission.
Meanwhile, organizing can help parishes and dioceses focus on the margins and translate the fruits of synodal discernment into concrete actions. Without either of these, synodality remains truncated and risks degenerating into just fine words and self-referentiality.
TENSIONS AND CONVERSIONS
In Let Us Dream, Pope Francis writes, “God acts in the simplicity of open hearts, in the patience of those who pause until they can see clearly.” He goes on to describe
what should be, essentially, organizing in a synodal church: “Discerning what is and what is not of God, we begin to see where and how to act. When we find where God’s mercy is waiting to overflow, we can open the gates, and work with all people of goodwill to bring about the necessary changes.”
There is an obvious difference between the relational oneto-one organizing meeting and synodal meetings, and it’s important to respect that. The first is intended to produce an outcome: to find new leaders or get consensus for a campaign. If that outcome is not achieved, there is disappointment and a sense of failure. A synodal meeting, on the other hand, is open; it’s not a discussion, it’s facilitated rather than directed, and uses the method of spiritual conversation.
In my experience of organizing, parishes often felt that they were constantly being asked to furnish cannon fodder. I had that feeling myself, and while I admired organizing, that feeling was the origin of my disillusionment with it.
It’s a familiar burnout story: Campaigns come to depend more and more on organizers trying to motivate ever-smaller numbers of leaders. I know that community organizers are well aware of this and see it as a need to re-focus. Yet I wonder whether this is a design fault in the organizing process.
In Roots for Radicals, Ed Chambers writes that “people in congregations are available to be mobilized. Part of the Industrial Areas Foundation’s deal is to get them out of their pews and into their communities.” This is clericalist language, the language of authoritarian or movement politics. It is to deny agency to the people themselves.
Such an approach cuts right across synodality, which is an invitation to recognize that people are agents, subjects, and vessels of the Spirit. The assumption of synodality is that the Spirit has been poured out on the baptized, who get together to understand what the Spirit is saying to the church here, in this place.
If organizing and synodality are to work together for the benefit of both, organizing needs to respect this agency. Synodality can “purify” organizing’s understanding of selfinterest, which is usually understood as a member organization’s values or priorities or (in one-to-one meetings) what drives a leader. In a synodal parish, it’s not just the values of CST that form one’s self-interest, but also the consensus flowing from the synodal discernment of the parish itself. This discernment is also one of priorities: Among all the goods we believe in, which ones are the Spirit asking us to prioritize?
This also has implications for the way organizing understands power. Leadership training teaches us to not be afraid of power, to see it as the capacity to act, to bring about change: Power is organized people and organized money..Chambers distinguishes between power over and power with. Relational power includes the interests of others. But even in “power with” the agency is still us, and that means in practice the organizers and the leaders they work with. So it is all too easy for the people to be disempowered—campaign cannon fodder.
But what if our action was powerful because it is in service to what the Spirit is already doing? Theologians talk about prevenient grace, or the idea that the Spirit is already out there long before we get there. In deep listening processes, we see this happening: We see what the Spirit has already lain on people’s hearts, what synodality is bringing to the fore. In this case, we cooperate with divine power; we are partners. It is the difference between sailing into the wind and sailing with the wind behind you.
Pope Francis has taught me that in every crisis there is a grace on offer, so perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by power. Pope Francis contrasts power over (potestas) with the power of service (ministerium), meaning that all true power is participation in divine power, which is a vulnerable power (and therefore relational, collegial, and calling for collective action
in alliances) but not a weak power: It is the life force of the world at the service of life and healing.
In this way, organizing in a synodal church becomes a way of serving the mission which God’s Spirit has revealed in listening, and sticking to that mission and purpose will remain the criterion for the action.
Let Us Dream, written by Pope Francis in collaboration with Austen Ivereigh (Simon & Schuster, 2021)
Left: Austen gives the keynote address at “Prophetic Communities.”
In Let Us Dream, Pope Francis writes, “To promote the Gospel and not welcome the strangers in need, not affirm their humanity as children of God, is to seek to encourage a culture that is Christian in name only, emptied of all that makes it distinctive.” At the same time churchgoing is in decline, people vote for populists who promise to protect our identity by scapegoating and rejecting the foreigner. The loss of relationship with God and a loss of a sense of universal fraternity have created isolation, anxiety, and fear of the future.
The future of our church depends on our willingness and capacity to religare, to re-bind our bonds with one another based on respect that begins in our care for creation and for the outsider. In doing so, we also build our community, our capacity as a church.
This isn’t some corporate, proselytizing idea of “how do we get people into our church?” or “how do we make our church attractive to young people?” Build it and they will come. In our commitment to creation and the strangers, people will come to recognize the gospel in our time, and it is impossible to imagine an evangelization in this generation that does not involve a witness in these two areas.
There is one thing I am sure of: The three rivers of synodality, Catholic social teaching, and organizing will be a confluence for many years to come, long after this pontificate, nourishing a new generation of Catholic social action that will become a vital witness in these times. Time to dive in!
Austen Ivereigh is a UK-based writer, journalist, and commentator. He is a fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and in 2020 he collaborated with Pope Francis on Let Us Dream: the Path to a Better Future (Simon & Schuster).
Hear more from Austen Ivereigh and several of the other authors in interviews with Cecilia Flores for IPJC’s Justice Rising podcast. Get more information and a link to the podcast at ipjc.org/justice-rising-podcast.
