Why Can’t We Be Friends? The Synod on Synodality and the Eucharistic Revival

Abstract

This article considers how two ongoing major ecclesial events—the Synod on Synodality and the Eucharistic Revival—might shed light on each other. While both events have garnered much attention, few have read them together. Nevertheless, the Eucharist and synodality belong together. This article argues that reading the Synod through the Revival and the Revival through the Synod—a Eucharistically-revived synodality and a synodally-shaped Eucharist—can strengthen the aims of each, thus resolving various critiques of both initiatives while also charting a bracing vision of U.S. Catholicism in the twenty-first century.

1. Introduction

Today, Catholics in the United States are witnessing two unique, multi-year ecclesial events. On 10 October 2021, Pope Francis launched the consultative phase for a Synod on Synodality. It will culminate in a year-long ordinary general assembly of the Synod of Bishops starting in October of 2023. The effort is ambitious, aiming to promote processes and structures of co-responsibility throughout the global church. On 19 June 2022, the Feast of Corpus Christi, the U.S. Catholic Bishops launched the diocesan phase of a Eucharistic Revival. It will culminate in a five-day Eucharistic Congress starting on 17 July 2024. The effort is also ambitious, aiming to rekindle Eucharistic devotion throughout the U.S. Catholic Church.

Predictably, in a church rife with polarization, ecclesial commentators have gathered on their respective sides of the ring. Those on the ecclesial right fear that the Synod on Synodality will degrade into a bureaucratization of the church at the expense of its Christological witness. Those on the ecclesial left fear that the Eucharistic Revival will foster a Tridentine-like reification of the Eucharist at the expense of its ecclesial mooring. While such fears are not entirely unfounded, this essay will suggest that reading these two events together—developing a Eucharistically-revived synodality and a synodally-shaped Eucharist—can assuage both fears.1 On the one hand, the Eucharistic Revival ensures that the Synod on Synodality remains Christologically oriented. On the other hand, the Synod on Synodality ensures that the Eucharistic Revival promotes an entire Eucharistic way of life and mission. Reading these events in tandem presents a compelling vision of renewal for a beleaguered U.S. Catholicism.

2. The Synod on Synodality

Synodality has become the keyword for Pope Francis’s vision of the church. To date, the ongoing Synod on Synodality represents the clearest means to implement this vision. Synodality looms large in Pope Francis’s ecclesiological imagination; in his address celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s institution of the Synod of Bishops, he asserted that synodality is “a constitutive element of the Church” (Francis 2015a). Commentators have recognized the importance of this endeavor for Pope Francis. Richard Gaillardetz has labeled synodality the “unifying center” of Pope Francis’s reception of Vatican II (Gaillardetz 2023, p. 45). Austen Ivereigh has ranked the entire synodal process as “the most significant event since the Second Vatican Council” (Ivereigh 2021, p. 365). That the Synod on Synodality will play a pivotal role for the church of the twenty-first century is without question.

Nevertheless, the precise meaning of synodality remains elusive. Several years prior to the launch of the Synod, the International Theological Commission (ITC) published a document devoted to synodality. In it, the ITC admits that synodality is a “linguistic novelty, which needs careful theological clarification” (International Theological Commission 2018, #5). Sister Nathalie Becquart, appointed by Pope Francis as an undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops (and the first woman with voting rights in a synod), likewise confesses that synodality is a “rich and polymorphous notion that has no completely settled definition” (Becquart 2022, p. 65). The elusiveness of that definition frustrates some; at the same time, however, it opens a space for theologians to tease out its meaning more fully. Etymologically at least, synodality derives from the Greek words for “with” (συν) and “path” (όδός), connoting the way that the church walks together. Pope Francis has identified three words to focus reflections on synodality: communion, participation, and mission (Francis 2021a). Each word draws out a positive element of synodality while also indicating the issues to which synodality might respond.

Communion supplies the most obvious meaning of synodality. Synodality advances the communion ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council.2 This ecclesiology recovered an ancient ecclesial vision, one that regularly employed various gatherings to deliberate issues of the faith, stemming all the way back to the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–31). Against tendencies to spiritualize the communion ecclesiology of Vatican II, synodality promotes structures and processes of communion. In this, synodality can realize the hopes of Pope John Paul II to “valu[e] and develo[p] the forums and structures which, in accordance with the Second Vatican Council’s major directives, serve to ensure and safeguard communion” (John Paul II 2001, #44). Such structures of communion afford a counter to the clerical sex abuse crises that continue to haunt the contemporary church and what Russell Shaw calls “the stifling, deadening misuse of secrecy that does immense injury to communion and community in the church” behind the coverups of those scandals.3 In implementing these structures then, the church can more fully realize its identity as communion.

Closely related to that aim is participation. These structures of communion should involve all, from laity to bishops. In his reflections on synodality, Pope Francis has referred to the ancient principle: “quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari debet,” “that which affects all should be discussed by all” (Francis 2015a). The listening sessions and surveys for the Synod of Synodality attempt to concretize that maxim. More broadly, to borrow a distinction from Johann Baptist Metz, synodality aims to move Catholics to see the church as one “of the people” more than “for the people,” a participatory reality linked with one’s identity rather than an extrinsic (and largely irrelevant) sacrament dispenser (Metz 1980, p. 137). To borrow language from the ITC, “[s]ynodality means that the whole Church is a subject and that everyone in the Church is a subject…. They are called to play an active role inasmuch as they share in the one priesthood of Christ” (International Theological Commission 2018, #55). In fostering this awareness, synodality aspires to help believers more fully realize their baptismal identities and, thus, their belonging in the communion that is the Body of Christ.

Thus, this participation cannot but conform believers to the mission of the church, whose communion is missionary by its very nature. The ways in which synodality can foster participatory communion in the church’s life can heal the world. In Pope Francis’s words, “I have wanted to develop this ancient process not just for the sake of the Church but as a service to a humanity that is so often locked in paralyzed disagreements” (Francis 2020a, p. 81). He has charted the church’s mission most clearly in his two social encyclicals, Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti. The former calls for an integral ecology that recognizes the interconnectedness of all created things amid an anthropocentric world, while the latter calls for attentive friendship amid a globalization of indifference (See especially (Francis 2015b, ##137–62) and (Francis 2020b, ##56–86)). Synodality serves as the ecclesial analog to these missionary calls. The Synod on Synodality promotes what Pope Francis has called a “culture of encounter” in the church’s own life such that, as synodal, the church becomes “like a standard lifted up among the nations (cf. Is 11:12) in a world which—while calling for participation, solidarity and transparency in public administration—often consigns the fate of entire peoples to the grasp of small but powerful groups” (Francis 2015a). In a world marred by polarization, loneliness, and narcissism, the full realization of the church’s synodal character can offer a redemptive alternative to both its own members and those beyond its visible boundaries.

3. The Eucharistic Revival

While the Synod has global aims, the Eucharistic Revival is limited to a U.S. context. Since the American ecclesial traumas of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report and the McCarrick Affair, the Revival represents the most constructive and most comprehensive effort launched by the U.S. Bishops thus far. Like the Synod on Synodality, its intentions are similarly amorphous. The mission statement of the Revival outlines its broad hope “to inspire and prepare the People of God to be formed, healed, converted, united, and sent out to a hurting and hungry world through a renewed encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist” (National Eucharistic Revival 2023). The contours of that hope are most clearly specified in The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church, a document prepared and approved by the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) at its November 2021 meeting. There, the U.S. Bishops conclude by exhorting, “Let us all ask the Lord to call us into a time of Eucharistic renewal, a time of prayer and reflection, of acts of charity and sincere repentance” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #58). Indeed, this text helps capture the scope and intentions of the Eucharistic Revival.

Cultivating a keener sense of and reverence for the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist stands as the first goal of the Eucharistic Revival. A now famous 2019 Pew Research found that 69% of U.S. Catholics reported that they believed the bread and wine at Mass are not Jesus, but instead “symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”4 Bishop Andrew Cozzens—who, as chair of the Evangelization Committee for the USCCB, spearheads the Eucharistic Revival—views the Revival as correcting that catechetical failure ((Cozzens 2022). See also (Barron 2023, pp. v–vii)). Thus, the first part of The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church reflects upon the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist through the notion of sacrificial gift. After reiterating traditional church teaching on the Eucharist, the bishops state that “[i]n the sacramental re-presentation of his sacrifice, Christ holds back nothing, offering himself, whole and entire. The use of the word ‘substantial’ to mark the unique presence of Christ in the Eucharist is intended to convey the totality of the gift he offers us” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #22). Transubstantiation specifies how that gift becomes real to believers. So as to awaken an appreciation for this gift of Christ, the document encourages paraliturgical Eucharistic devotions like Eucharistic adoration and Eucharistic processions (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #23). It is on this Christological foundation that the rest of the text stands.

The second goal underscores the ecclesial dimensions of this Eucharistic presence. The bishops’ document laments waning Mass attendance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #3). It accordingly reminds Catholics of the necessarily communal dimensions of the Eucharist; after all, another name for the Eucharist is Holy Communion. The bishops explain the significance of this name further: “by placing us in intimate communion with the sacrifice of Christ, we are placed in intimate communion with him and, through him, with each other” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #25). The Eucharist effects communion; so, too, does it demand communion. The bishops describe one’s obligation to attend Mass on Sundays as “a vital expression of our unity as members of the Body of Christ,” and, as such, represents “an act of love” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #28). Devotion to Christ’s Eucharistic real presence enables and requires communion with others.

This communion extends beyond the church, and so the third concern focuses on the social consequences of the Eucharist. Prior to the publication of the document and precipitated by the 2020 presidential election, much controversy and debate arose about whether Catholic politicians publicly advocating positions antithetical to Catholicism (e.g., support for abortion) should be admitted to the Eucharist. While The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church declines to name names and thus, as per canon law, leaves such decisions to local ordinaries, it does insist on the importance of living a Eucharistically coherent and consistent life. Such a life cannot but take a public shape: mission. As the bishops posit, “The personal and moral transformation that is sustained by the Eucharist reaches out to every sphere of human life…. The very solidarity or communion in Christ’s self-giving love that makes the Church and makes us members of the Church orders us beyond the visible community of faith to all human beings whom we are to love with that very same love that forms our communion” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #35). In particular, say the bishops, this Eucharistic ethic can heal and transform what Pope Francis describes as a “throwaway culture” that threatens the vulnerable, from the unborn to migrants (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #38). The document’s last section is entitled “Sent Forth,” capturing the missionary orientation of the Eucharist. Rooted in a deeper awareness of Christ’s Eucharistic real presence and thus a deeper immersion in the ecclesial Body of Christ, one becomes a Eucharistic person broken and poured out for others, especially those on the margins.

4. Critiques

Neither the Synod of Synodality nor the Eucharistic Revival holds back in their ecclesial aspirations. Both offer lofty images of the possibilities for the church in contemporary culture. Both, however, have also garnered considerable critique and even suspicion in the United States. The controversial reception of these initiatives is especially ironic given that both attempt to foster unity in the church.5 Polarization risks subsuming and distorting this shared unitive aim. Still, these criticisms cannot just be dismissed out of hand; examining some of them can enrich the potential of both the Synod on Synodality and the Eucharistic Revival.

A number of voices have expressed concern over the Synod on Synodality. In fact, the working document for the continental stage of the Synod acknowledges concerns, as does the North American final document for the continental stage of the Synod: uncertainties about its purposes and fears about its potential conclusions (See (General Secretariat of the Synod 2022, #18) and (North American Synod Team 2022, ##49–52)). This concern consists of something more than just a general unease; it ultimately resides in key theological principles. That reasoning is most clearly expressed in a 2021 issue of Communio devoted to synodality: in particular, articles by Nicholas J. Healy Jr. and Michael Hanby, both of the Pope John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC. While the articles appeared early in the process—a fact acknowledged by the authors—the concerns capture well some potential pitfalls of the Synod.

Healy, as does Hanby, worries about reductive and self-referential understandings of synodality, a possibility given the term’s amorphous character. In “Communion, Sacramental Authority, and the Limits of Synodality,” Healy suggests that “[o]ne of the distinguishing features of synodality is an emphasis on processes, structures, and meetings or assemblies designed to promote reciprocal listening” (Healy 2021, p. 666). While acknowledging that magisterial treatments do consider synodality theologically, Healy fears that this excessive preoccupation with structures can overshadow the church’s theological character. He notes, for instance, how the ITC document on synodality swiftly transitions from theological reflection on the church’s synodal character to specifying processes like parish councils and surveys as the concretization of synodality. In so doing, it “adopts the modern faith in bureaucratic procedures” (Healy 2021, p. 678). Healy expands on this point:

One can be forgiven for feeling a certain dismay at the notion that the laity’s role in “building a synodal Church” involves joining a parish council (pastoral or financial) and completing internet surveys about synodality and about new ways to include the laity in “decision-making within the hierarchical structures of the Church.” Apart from the obvious limitations of a self-selecting “internet survey,” and the near-impossibility of collating and interpreting thousands of brief answers in a meaningful way, it is perhaps worth noting the self-referential and doctrinally impoverished framework for these questions. In place of the whole Church bearing witness to the central mysteries of the faith—the triune God as revealed in the life-giving death and Resurrection of Christ, the Eucharist as the pledge and hope for eternal life with God—the principal concern of these questions is the organization or governance of the hierarchical Church.

(Healy 2021, p. 675)

Healy worries that the Synod on Synodality will be too inwardly focused on structural reconfigurations of power (and meager ones at that), betraying an assumption that such changes exhaust the mission of the ecclesia semper purificanda. Instead, Healy states, “[t]rue reform… demands a return to the life-giving source of authority, Christ himself” (Healy 2021, p. 679). Reform understood as such requires a fundamental posture of receptivity to God’s Word. At the conclusion of the article, Healy reechoes this call, reminding readers that true reform originates in a Mariologically-colored participatory holiness (Healy 2021, p. 684). In its present instantiation, for Healy, the Synod of Synodality risks neglecting this Christological charge, distracted by structural questions instead.

Michael Hanby pronounces this fear with more force. In “Synodality, Sociologism, and the Judgment of History,” Hanby introduces readers to the cultural critique of the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce. While Del Noce’s read of modernity is far-ranging, central to his narrative is the yielding of atheistic Marxism and historicism to a “sociologism” that “reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, expressions of the historical-social situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures or forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life.” ((Hanby 2021, p. 693) citing (Del Noce 2017, p. 219)). As Del Noce confesses, the church is not immune to such forces, and Hanby suggests that synodality opens the door towards such an ecclesial sociologism. In his examination of how various influential commentators interpret synodality, Hanby discerns a tendency to read synodality in terms of who has what power and whose voices should be privileged over others.6 In his view, such sociologism results in nothing less than the eclipse of God in the life of the church.

There is a considerable danger that the implementation of “synodality” will become the occasion for replacing what remains of the Church’s sacramental, organismic, and Marian self-understanding with a bureaucratic and political understanding. This would mean that the Church had completely blocked God out of its field of vision and exiled him from its thought forms….

(Hanby 2021, p. 718)

Like Healy, while apparently distinguishing the actual reality from its commentators, Hanby fears that the Synod on Synodality lends itself well to this eclipse. The reduction of ecclesial concern to intramural power dynamics maims the church’s prophetic capacity in an increasingly technocratic, “sociologistic” world (Hanby 2021, p. 726). In other words, for Hanby, the synod can occasion a forgetfulness of the church’s distinctively Christological and, thus, theological character to the detriment of its mission. Both Healy and Hanby aver that the Synod on Synodality might very well lead to this sort of reductionism.

Voices critical of the Eucharistic Revival strike a different tone. Several commentators have raised eyebrows over the planned USD 28 million budget for the Revival and the USD 375 tickets for the Eucharistic Congress (The Pillar 2023). In this, they share the same concerns about the bureaucratization of the church’s mission as Healy and Hanby. As was the case with the Synod, though, the critiques of the Revival reach deeper, touching upon some key theological principles. Two articles in particular—one by Kevin Irwin and one by Thomas Reese, both in the National Catholic Reporter—identify these tensions most clearly.

Both worry that the Revival betrays an overly narrowed Eucharistic theology. Amid the release of The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church, Kevin Irwin laments it “could have been created before the Second Vatican Council” (Irwin 2021). In other words, by underscoring themes like real presence and sacrifice, the bishops speak of the Eucharist “in a Tridentine framework, not a Vatican II framework.” Irwin particularly bemoans the text’s failure to develop a robustly ecclesial conception of the Eucharist. According to him, the document “does not address the issue of the privatization of the Eucharist.” Silence on this danger, along with its promotion of devotions like Eucharistic adoration, “leads to a pious individualism” (Irwin 2021). Lost in this individualistic approach to the Eucharist is its necessarily corporate, ecclesial character.

Thomas Reese seconds this fear while proposing an alternative. In response to the launch of the Eucharistic Revival, he asks, “what would an effective Eucharistic revival look like?” (Reese 2023). The assumption behind this question, of course, is that the current one is not effective. Echoing Irwin, he begs U.S. bishops “to consult with experts who understand liturgical and theological thinking that has developed since the Second Vatican Council” since “[a]ny attempt to return to the piety of the 1950s is bound to fail.” Instead, Reese offers a three-part plan that can chart a more effective Eucharistic Revival.

[F]irst, forget transubstantiation. Better to admit that Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is an unexplainable mystery that our little minds cannot comprehend. Second, remember the purpose of the Eucharist is not to worship Jesus…. Third, the Eucharist is not about me and Jesus; it is about us in the Christian community, about us being transformed into the body of Christ, about us joining in the mission of Jesus in the world.

(Reese 2023)

Like Irwin, Reese advocates for less focus on a devotional approach to the Eucharist. Such an approach can function too individualistically. Instead, Reese believes a more communal understanding of the Eucharist tethered to the church and oriented towards mission is needed. Such a focus can broaden the scope of the Eucharistic Revival. Both Irwin and Reese contend that, in its present form, the Eucharistic Revival opts instead for an individualistic Eucharistic devotion and theology.

Though they fail to give a charitable reading to either initiative, the critics of both the Synod and the Revival deserve attention. The Synod on Synodality offers clear theological grounds for synodality while situating its concern for structures of communion in the pontificate of John Paul II. So, too, does it situate synodality not as a self-referential exercise but at the service of mission. As for the Eucharistic Revival, no Tridentine document would cite Dorothy Day—an American laywoman who had an abortion and devoted her life to serving the poor—on its second page (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #5). Furthermore, the bishops devote approximately half of The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church to the ecclesial and missionary character of the Eucharist. Thus, both critiques miss the mark. Yet, they, too, deserve a charitable read. That is, both name and respond to likely popular receptions of each initiative in U.S. Catholicism. The Synod can very well become a limp form of ecclesial navel-gazing obsessed with power dynamics. The Revival can very well become an emotive reification of the Eucharist that mimes broader subjectifying American religious tendencies. What these critiques offer are guardrails against how not to interpret the Synod and how not to interpret the Revival. Nevertheless, the dangers remain. Joining the two efforts together can protect against both distortions while also readying an invigorating vision of the church in the contemporary world.

5. A Eucharistically-Revived Synodality, a Synodally-Shaped Eucharist?

The Synod on Synodality and the Eucharistic Revival are rarely read together. In an 81-page bibliography on synodality that covers articles written between 2013–2022, Jos Moons lists only five articles that mention either the liturgy or the Eucharist (Moons 2023). This dissociation is surprising, given the history of synodality and the history of the Eucharist. From the earliest days of the church, stemming as far back as the Eucharistic problem solving of Saint Paul, the two were linked (cf. 1 Cor 11:17–34). Historically, church synods have operated as quasi-liturgical, Eucharistic events (Zizioulas 2010, pp. 190–97). Both Pope Francis and the ITC have situated the Synod on Synodality as a reception of the communion ecclesiology at the Second Vatican Council. The Council’s Eucharistic centering of the church precipitated its recovery of that proto-synodal ecclesiology, giving rise to various Eucharistic ecclesiologies. Post-conciliar calls for synodality, such as from the French ecclesiologist Jean-Marie Tillard, took a Eucharistic shape (Ruddy 2006, p. 109). Others have considered post-conciliar synodal gatherings as themselves liturgical celebrations (Join-Lambert 2017, p. 129). By their very natures, synodality and the Eucharist inform each other.

5.1. A Eucharistically-Revived Synodality

Magisterial treatments of synodality have themselves proposed links between the Eucharistic liturgy and synodality. The ITC notes that “[t]he Church’s synodal path is shaped and nourished by the Eucharist” and the Eucharist represents the “paradigm” of synodality wherein “are expressed the specific elements of the Christian life that are called to mold the affectus synodalis” (International Theological Commission 2018, ##47, 109). In both his address and homily for the opening of the Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis underscored “adoration and prayer” as central to the synodal journey (Francis 2021b). The writers of the working document for the continental stage of the synod proclaim that “[t]he Eucharist is already, itself, the ‘source and summit’ of the Church’s synodal dynamism” (General Secretariat of the Synod 2022, #89). Though such statements posit profound connections between the Eucharist and synodality, they do not specify how. The continental stage working document offers a case-in-point. It roots synodality Eucharistically by calling it “a liturgical, Eucharistic act” (General Secretariat of the Synod 2022, #28). It then devotes much attention to how synodality can shape the liturgy while devoting very little attention to how the liturgy can shape synodality. That is, left unanswered, is exactly how the liturgy—and the Eucharist in particular—might mold the affectus synodalis and how Eucharistic adoration and prayer might ground synodality. Reading the Synod through the Eucharistic Revival can respond to this need, thus better defining the amorphousness of synodality, allaying fears surrounding synodality, and capturing the importance of synodality in the contemporary church.

The first way that the Revival can strengthen the Synod is by ensuring its orientation to Christ. There is a danger, as Healy and Hanby intimate, that synodality can lose its Christological footing. Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, relator general for the Synod, has urged a move away from the Christocentrism of the Second Vatican Council towards instead a deeper pneumatological emphasis in synodal ecclesiology (Hollerich 2023). This has shaped the Synod. The opening, foundational section of the preparatory document for the Synod contains nineteen references to the Holy Spirit and only four to Christ (Synod of Bishops 2021, ##1–15). Of course, there can be no dichotomy between the Holy Spirit and Christ; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ (cf. Jn 14:26).7 Still, this Christological forgetfulness can disorient the walking together that defines synodality and might very well lead to a sociologism insofar as the path becomes up for debate. One ecclesiologist defines synodality as “not just a group of people trying to take a walk together to a common destination, but rather it is a community trying to find a way together through collective discernment” (Hinze 2020, p. 215). Such an understanding of synodality cannot but have a self-referential quality insofar as it reduces synodality to conversations about which direction to head, which way to go, and who makes the decision. The way has already been made clear, however, as it is Christ who calls himself “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).

Before all else, the Eucharist incorporates believers into this Christological way, the Christological synodos. The Eucharist enables one to live through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ. The U.S. Bishops employ ambulatory language in asserting how, in the Eucharist, “Christ gives himself to us so that we may continue the pilgrim path toward life with him in the fullness of the Kingdom of God” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #24). The Eucharist anticipates the church’s heavenly destination in Christ. In this Eucharistic key, the walking together that defines synodality has a clear direction. So, too, does this Eucharistic key help recover certain magisterial reflections on synodality that say as much. Pope Francis describes the synodal church as “nothing other than the ‘journeying together’ of God’s flock along the paths of history towards the encounter with Christ the Lord” (Francis 2015a). The ITC likewise posits—with Eucharistic resonance—that the synodal church “journeys with Christ, through Christ and in Christ,” who is “the wayfarer, the Way and our homeland” (International Theological Commission 2018, #50). Perhaps the bishops of the Nordic Countries capture this point best in their reflections on synodality:

A synodos… is “a way pursued together.” It stands for fellowship in movement towards a shared goal. There is no particular virtue in just being on the way; it has to lead somewhere. We need to know where we are going… In the New Testament, the “way” points towards a Person, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is henceforth the True North towards which our life’s compass needle turns. But that is not all. Christ does not remain apart from us as the remote goal of our spiritual desire. He calls us to be one with him. That is why he can say, “I am the Way” (Jn 14:6). The synodality that matters most is our wayfaring in union with Christ as we seek to be faithful to his teaching and example, mindful that “whoever says, ‘I abide in him,’ must walk just as he walked” (1 Jn 2:6). Like Christ, we must learn to love and serve “to the end” (Jn 13:1), humbling ourselves and becoming “obedient to the point of death”.

(Phil 2:8)8

This is a Eucharistic presentation of synodality, reflecting how synodality consists in something more than a discernment about potential directions. A Eucharistically-revived synodality sees its ultimate point as conforming the pilgrim church ever more fully to Christ as it journeys both with him and towards him. As such, it can foster a sense that all believers participate in that Christological journey and destination.

In fact, a signature feature of the Revival—namely, Eucharistic processions—can make this journeying together with and towards Christ a visible reality. As noted already, in “The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church,” the U.S. Bishops call for more emphasis on Eucharistic devotions like processions (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #23). Indeed, a central component of the Revival is its “National Eucharistic Pilgrimage,” wherein four different Eucharistic processions will travel from four points of the United States to converge in Indianapolis for the Eucharistic Congress (National Eucharistic Pilgrimage 2023). Such processions, in general, are literally synodal experiences while also furnishing synodality with a clear Christological orientation, as an ecclesial community literally walks together both with and towards the Eucharistic Christ. Read in this light, processions supply a concrete witness of the pilgrim, a synodal path that conforms the church more fully to Christ.

Second, if synodality represents a deepening of the church’s communion, this Christological orientation can foster Eucharistic ways of relating to each other. As Healy observes, however, the synodal experience for many (at least in the United States) has been digitally mediated: taking online surveys, perhaps participating in a listening session on Zoom, or following synodal deliberations online. So, too, relatedly, has it tended towards the impersonal; in-person surveys are not much better! Such an experience of ecclesial communion mimes the more general depersonalization of church life in a fragmented and liquid society, the disembodying tendencies of a virtual world. At its best, however, retrieving synodality can overcome that depersonalization. As Vincent Miller has argued, synodality signifies something more than “an exhortation of the Magisterium” but a “true work of the ecclesia” that” has the potential to engender forms of communication and connection that current… neoliberal global structures neither facilitate nor allow” (Miller 2022, p. 22). Miller goes on to suggest that it is within those concrete, synodal forms of communication that “the church’s sacramental nature inheres” (Miller 2022, p. 22). That sacramental nature is Eucharistically-determined, and thus a Eucharistically-revived synodality should foster that type of concrete communion.

The Eucharist gathers people together in this incarnate way. Again, the U.S. Bishops remind readers that, in part, Christ’s Eucharistic presence consists in the way that he “binds us together in one body” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #6). Later, they describe how the Eucharist binds one not only in “intimate communion” with Christ but also, through Christ, “with each other.”9 They hail the Eucharistic asceticism of Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who, precisely through her devotion to the Eucharist, could detect Christ’s real presence in the poorest of the poor (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #37). An ecclesial communion shaped by the Eucharist is concrete, tangible, and embodied. At its best, synodality must promote that type of tangible communion. As the ITC states, after all, the local church celebrating the Eucharist represents the “first level on which synodality is exercised,” the most accessible and most ordinary access to synodal experience (International Theological Commission 2018, #77). Commenting in this vein, Bishop Daniel Flores—an American serving on the preparatory commission for the Synod—suggests that the “synodal emphasis on the vivacity of local communion directs our senses and our minds to concrete and particular manifestations of communion.”10 Such a claim finds grounding in the concreteness and particularity of the Eucharistic celebration. A Eucharistically-revived synodality can direct believers to experience the church in its local, concrete instantiations: helping the poor in one’s town rather than obsessing with political performances on television, sharing meals with fellow believers rather than obsessing over Catholic Twitter, conversing with neighborhood parishioners rather than seeking like-minded Catholics on a particular Substack. Fostering this Eucharistic type of localized and particularized walking-together can make Christ’s healing presence become real in a virtual world.

Third, this Christologically-oriented, incarnate synodos can only be received as a gift in thanksgiving: eucharistia. In naming the sociologistic distortions of synodality, Healy and Hanby both warn against the assumption that ecclesial communion can be something “made.” Both fear that synodality can become ecclesiological iterations of what Joseph Ratzinger dubs as die Machbarkeit, a worldview that privileges calculative thinking over contemplative attention, doing over receiving (Ratzinger 1971, pp. 66–80). Scheming to push synodality towards the left or right, seeing certain doctrines as now “up for grabs,” or fixating on which side possesses what power all betray the common assumption that a malleability characterizes the church like any other social grouping (from a legislature to a local birding club). The church, while undoubtedly an institutional reality in constant need of reform, exists as something more than a polity determined by the proclivities of key stakeholders, more than a human construction built on clever machinations. If synodality expresses the communion of the church and—as the ITC repeatedly emphasizes (International Theological Commission 2018, ##12, 16, 43)—that communion is a gift, then a genuine synodality can only be received, not made. Underlying a reduction of synodality to a political process like any other lies a forgetfulness of the theological, indeed graced, nature of ecclesial communion that stands beyond the manipulable.

By its nature, the Eucharist—as eucharistia, thanksgiving—indicates that the church’s communion is a gift for which one gives thanks and becomes real through this thanks. Naming a basic Catholic sensibility, James Alison describes the “just there” quality of Christ’s Eucharistic presence, apart from (and perhaps despite) any human ingenuity or performance (Alison 2006, p. 42). Indeed, the U.S. Bishops structure The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church around the theme of gift: “Christ’s gift of himself in the Eucharist and our response to that gift” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #7). The gifted character of Christ’s Eucharistic presence thus carries with it an ecclesiological lesson: if the Eucharist makes the church, then the communion of the church is not something made but a reality to be received and celebrated as a gift. The same Eucharistic lesson must guide synodality, ensuring it does not lapse into a sociologistic power game. In his sharp 2019 letter to the church in Germany, Pope Francis says as much (Francis 2019). He identifies the belief “that the solutions to current and future problems can only be found through structural reforms” as “one of the first and greatest temptations in the church,” even labeling it as Pelagian in character and a form of what Pope Francis calls “spiritual worldliness.” While such structural changes “would perhaps lead to a well-structured and functioning, even ‘modernized’ ecclesiastical organism,” Pope Francis continues, the church “would remain without soul and without the freshness of the gospel.” Preserving that ecclesial soul requires recognizing the church as a product of grace above all else.11 Moreover, and in contradistinction from some commentary about the Synod, the synodal documents evidence this recognition. The continental stage working document confesses that the ecclesial vision of the Synod “will need to be supported by a spirituality that will sustain the practice of synodality, avoiding reducing this reality to technical-organizational issues” (General Secretariat of the Synod 2022, #72). In a Vatican document that starts to outline that spirituality, the authors state that “[s]ynodality, as the life of the Church, is a gift that we cannot produce through our own efforts” (Synodal Commission on Spirituality Sub-Group 2021, #13). The centrality of listening in synodal processes points to this receptivity toward the Word of God (Join-Lambert 2017, p. 133). Locating synodality Eucharistically ensures that remains the case. It ensures that synodality involves an ever-deepening understanding of and appreciation for the gift of ecclesial communion.

5.2. A Synodally-Shaped Eucharist

The texts for the Eucharistic Revival fail to mention synodality. They do, however, meditate upon the communal dimensions of the Eucharist (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, ##24–28). As such, and if the Synod hopes to give a synodal shape to ecclesial communion, then the Synod can enrich the Eucharistic praxis of the church. Not only does the Eucharist make the synodal church, but so too does the synodal church make the Eucharist. That is, the Synod on Synodality can and must inform the Eucharistic Revival. Several individual American bishops have begun to make that connection, albeit in an ad hoc manner (e.g., Thompson 2022). In his address to the U.S. Bishops at the opening of their 2023 spring assembly, apostolic nuncio Archbishop Christophe Pierre invited the bishops to situate the Revival as a synodal event (Pierre 2023, pp. 5–7). Such claims merit further development. Reading the Synod through the Revival can better define its intentions, mollify various critiques of it, and again capture the relevance of the Revival for the contemporary church.

First, a synodally-shaped Eucharist encourages one to develop an expansive understanding of the Eucharist that informs all of life. In typical parish life, there is a temptation to segregate the Eucharist to the sanctuary on a Sunday. There is also a temptation to reduce the Eucharist to a battle over personal, perhaps ideological, preferences. Both reflect an individualistic, extrinsicist approach to the Eucharist that disregards its transformative breadth. Certain popular devotions can (though certainly need not) exacerbate this truncation of the Eucharist. As Irwin and Reese both note, this reduction of the Eucharist to a private sensibility is a particularly American temptation. Instead, needed is what Pope Benedict XVI calls an entire “eucharistic form of life,” whereby the Eucharist—and the self-offering of Christ it makes real—determines the attitudes, actions, and relationships of both individuals and communities (Benedict XVI 2007, #82). The Eucharist is a reality far more challenging than simply a thing to be adored statically or a ritual to celebrate occasionally. It lays forth a veritable way of life.

The Synod on Synodality, meanwhile, aims to make synodality an all-pervasive ecclesial reality, encouraging one to think comprehensively about the church’s life. Synodality, says the ITC, supplies the “modus vivendi et operandi… on all levels” of the church, a reality “to be expressed in the Church’s ordinary way of living and working” (International Theological Commission 2018, #70). A synodally-shaped Eucharist encourages a Eucharistic modus vivendi et operandi then, one that shapes every dimension of the church’s living and working. Such a theology foregrounds those dimensions of The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church that discuss how the transformation wrought by the Eucharist “reaches out to every sphere of human life” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #35). So, too, does it foreground those theologians who narrate the Eucharistic Revival precisely as this type of holistic conversion. For instance, Timothy O’Malley, a member of the executive planning team for the Eucharistic Revival, has outlined a vision of the Eucharistic Revival that encourages an enculturated Eucharistic reverence, an integral Eucharistic formation that attends to the whole person, Eucharistic celebrations of popular Catholicism, and an outreach marked by Eucharistic solidarity. Together, these can result in an entire “Eucharistic culture” that shapes every parish, diocese, school, and any other ecclesial grouping (O’Malley 2022, pp. xxviii–xxix). Reading the Revival through the Synod ensures that the Eucharist does not remain privatized but rather determines every aspect of the church’s life, from its educational outreach to its commitment to the poor.

Second, if it is to shape every aspect of the church’s life, so too does a synodally-shaped Eucharist encourage particular structural configurations of the church. Certain Eucharistic theologies can fall prey to what James Gustafson labels a “theological reductionism” (Gustafson 1961, p. 100). Under the auspices of devotional language, one can spiritualize the Eucharist in such a way that it loses its concrete referent and its structural implications for that concrete referent: the church. A parish might celebrate Mass on Sundays while its staff remains beholden to the bottom line of the budget. A Catholic university might place a chapel at the center of campus but fail to encourage genuine Eucharistic leisure from the classroom to the athletic field. That is, the Eucharist affords a focal norm through which the actual practices of the church might be judged (Montecel 2022, pp. 401–16). The question of Eucharistic coherence is reserved not only for the lives of individual politicians but for the life of the church itself. While the church cannot be reduced to its institutional apparatuses, the church possesses an essential structural and juridical dimension to its communion. Thus, if the Eucharist is to shape every component of the church’s life, then it must have some sort of structural effect.

The Synod, meanwhile, hopes to lend structural heft to the church’s self-identity as communion. In part, the Synod aims to overcome a tendency to spiritualize away ecclesial communion into a vague sentiment of belonging. While an excessive (and sometimes exclusive) concern about ecclesial structures justifiably alarms figures like Healy and Hanby, a general attentiveness to such structural questions can tether the church visibly and tangibly to people’s actual lives. Reading the Eucharistic Revival through this synodal (and thus structural) lens inspires one to consider what Eucharistic ecclesial structures might look like. For instance, given fresh impetus through the Eucharistic Revival, the Simone Weil Catholic Worker House (Portland, OR) runs classes and workshops on how parishes might establish a “communion economy”: parish-centered lending cooperatives that reflect the Eucharistic body of Christ and the mutually-implicative liturgical belonging it entails (Roden 2023). One might also consider the types of Eucharistic structures demanded by the clerical sexual abuse crisis. Insofar as the Eucharist makes real the vulnerable self-offering of Christ that points beyond himself to the Father, so too does the Eucharist demand church structures predicated not on self-protection but rather self-giving: a transparent concern for the most vulnerable regardless of the costs so that the church might give fuller witness to the judgment and mercy of God. Reading the Revival in tandem with the Synod forces one to anchor the loftiness of Eucharistic meditations in the concrete life of the church.

Nevertheless, these structural concerns are not an end unto themselves; so third, a synodally-shaped Eucharist orients the Eucharist towards mission and anchors mission to the Eucharist. Both Reese and Irwin fear that the Eucharistic Revival neglects the centrifugal character of the Eucharist, segregating it to the sanctuary and domesticating its dynamism. Especially given the ecclesial divides of Western Catholicism between those who care about the liturgy and those who care about justice, there is a distinct possibility that the actual enactment of the Eucharistic Revival can forget the church’s mission to the poor (e.g., exorbitant ticket prices for the Eucharistic Congress). That is, it can fail to affirm how, in Pope Francis’s words, “worship becomes pleasing to God when we devote ourselves to living generously, and allow God’s gift, granted in prayer, to be shown in our concern for our brothers and sisters” (Francis 2018). Once this dimension of the Eucharist is forgotten, so too can mission lose its Eucharistic telos and become indistinguishable from any other work for justice.12 Detaching the Eucharist from mission or the mission from the Eucharist deforms both. Instead, the Eucharist—by its very nature—should form believers to be bread broken for others and wine poured out for others so that God might be glorified in all things (cf. 1 Pt 4:11).

Just as it directs the church towards mission, so too can the Synod direct the Revival towards mission. Mission, after all, serves as the third and final pillar of the Synod after communion and participation. Pope Francis describes the synodal process as “a process of becoming… in an exciting and engaging effort that can forge a style of communion and participation directed to mission” (Francis 2021a) (See also (Lemna 2023, pp. 509–40)). Synodality orients both ecclesial communion and participation ultimately to the church’s evangelical witness. Moreover, as the Synod shows, this mission finds its first end in the vulnerable and the voiceless; a synodal church takes shape from the poor (General Secretariat of the Synod 2022, #40). The Synod can remind the Revival of these calls, ensuring the missiological orientation of the Eucharist and the Eucharistic orientation of mission. In fact, in a way that parallels the Synod, The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church, concludes with mission. After meditating on the gift of the Eucharist itself and the human response to that gift, the U.S. Bishops include a final section entitled “Sent Forth.” There, with reference to the missionary option that Pope Francis dreams for the church, readers are told that “we who have received the Body and Blood of Christ and have been incorporated more profoundly into his Mystical Body are likewise sent out to proclaim the Good News for the salvation of the world” (United States Catholic Conference of Bishops 2021, #56). Casting the Revival in this missiological way sheds new light on its call for Eucharistic devotional practices like processions. In the United States, such processions visibly witness to the healing unity of Christ in a country divided by geography, socio-economic class, and partisan loyalties. Even the paths of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage chosen by the U.S. Bishops carry with them a missionary flavor. One procession commences along the U.S.–Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas, showing how the Eucharist relativizes artificial boundaries; another procession travels through towns embroiled in racial tensions like Saint Louis and Minneapolis, showing how the Eucharist can promote healing solidarity across racial lines. Reading the Revival through the Synod shows how such efforts are, in fact, missionary enterprises and how the Eucharist enacts the church’s mission in the world.

6. Conclusions

Moving beyond more conventional ways of defining decadence as self-indulgent or immoral, Jacques Barzun defines institutional decadence this way:

All that is meant by Decadence is “falling off.” It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted; the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetitions and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces. It will be asked, how does the historian know when Decadence sets in? By the open confessions of malaise….

(Barzun 2001, p. xvi)

Barzun’s words resonate ecclesially. A restlessness that hides a certain despairing desperation shapes a considerable portion of U.S. Catholic praxis. Polarization divides the church. Abuse crises create suspicion in the church. For many in the pews (and in my classroom), Catholicism seems implacably boring, predictable, and routine—beholden to the dictates of a moralistic, therapeutic deism or trite partisan party lines. Parishes opt for maintenance over mission. The mere desire to survive fatigues Catholic institutions, from chanceries to universities. Institutional inertia stymies visionary initiatives. It is unclear what direction to head. The available options appear ideologically charged. The confession of this malaise appears in countless theologians and church commentators—even popes themselves!

The Synod on Synodality and the Eucharistic Revival are two galvanizing events that can respond to this ecclesial malaise and decadence. When read together, their visions become even more rousing. The church finds its center and direction not in partisan loyalties and fads but in Christ, made present in the Eucharist. Not just religious professionals but all believers are called to appropriate a robust sense of ecclesial belonging and thus participate in Christ’s priestly self-offering concretely and comprehensively. The church’s primary duty is to reflect not itself but this Eucharistic presence, from its structures to its mission. Purpose comes not through institutional branding but through the joyful mission of proclaiming Christ to the nations, a mission that finds its source and summit in the Eucharist. It was the Benedictine liturgical reformer, Virgil Michel, who once said, “Not paper programs, not high sounding unfulfilled resolutions once renewed the world, but new and living [people] born out of the depths of Christianity.” (Quoted in (Marx 1957, p. 208)) We can only hope that the Synod on Synodality and the Eucharistic Revival will together usher in such a renewal of holiness.