More about David Gibson and Fordham University’s Center on Relgion and Culture
Partial Transcipt
T Carnes
Welcome to A Journey through NYC religions Television. My name is Tony Carnes, your host. Our producer is Brian Finnerty, and he leads our team. A couple of years ago, I sat down with the priest at Our Lady of Pompeii Church in the West Village, on what to do about the future of the Catholic Church, which has been taking a beating for a couple of years, has faced disgruntlement and some defections. And he had some pretty wise ideas. Well, now we have some more real wisdom from the very top, Pope Francis, because he’s called together bishops from around the world as well as lay to discuss the future of the church. The future of the church is in play, what will happen? Well, to help us sort through things and the Synod that the pope called together, I asked our old friend, David Gibson to come help us, David, welcome to the program. Thanks, Tony.
David Gibson
Great to be here.
T Carnes
You know, you’re just back from the meeting itself. And you were there as partly as the director of the Center at Fordham University. Can you tell us a little bit about what the center is at Fordham University and what it does?
David Gibson
Yeah, it’s the Center on Religion and Culture, but very much public life is what we’re engaged in. It’s as much as anything it’s, and I think I would stress the culture aspect of that title. It’s interfacing, engaging with the wider culture out there on issues. We’re a Catholic, Jesuit university. And we have a Jesuit Pope now for the first time in history, maybe the last time in history to talk to folks over in Rome. Part of the Jesuit mission is really interfacing with the culture you’re in.
T Carnes
This is the Center of Religion and Culture at Fordham University. Now, you’ve been a journalist also for decades, and you’ve seen…
Oh, thanks, so long time. Yeah, that’s a long time.
T Carnes
You’ve covered a lot of Catholic affairs. Have you ever seen anything like this Synod that took place in October?
David Gibson
Yes and No. No, in the sense that, you know, I started my journalism career, kind of fell into it by accident, or Providence, depending on your point of view. When I moved over to Italy as a young man, just after college, trying to figure myself out, and landed a job at Vatican Radio, at the English program at Vatican Radio run by the Jesuits who protected me against all the material bureaucrats. I was a Billy Graham Protestant at the time and Evangelical, I was raised so I wasn’t even Catholic. So it was it was a great time I wound up staying there for five years in Rome, and I covered my first Synod in 1987. And it was a synod on the laity of lay people. And, again, this whole Synod, that Pope Francis has done, a Synod which just means a gathering, what literally it’s a Greek term meaning walking together. It’s got a very long pedigree in Catholicism. It’s like assemblies.
T Carnes
And it’s called a synod of the bishops. Right?
David Gibson
Well, that’s just it. It had been traditionally been, when it was kind of reconstituted after the Second Vatican Council, the great council of 1962 to 1965. It was called by John the 23rd, who died in the middle of the council succeeded by Pope Paul the sixth. And Paul the Sixth wanted to continue that conciliar, model and process. So he reconstituted the Synod of Bishops in 1970.
And there were periodic Synods in the Vatican of bishops from all around the world, but as you say, they were synonyms of bishops and that first Synod that I covered in 1987, was a synod on the laity. Very wonderful. It was bishops talking about lay people, no laypeople. So there had been under John Paul the Second, who was Pope for 26 years. then for eight years of Benedict, the 16th, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, there were synods, but they were always senators of bishops. Then Pope Francis came in March 2013. He was elected Pope. Almost from the beginning. He wanted to do something different.
He wanted to open up this synodality, these synods to make them a be honest meetings, frank discussions. I’ve been lucky to be I was covering working as a journalist before coming to Fordham. I was at the Senate, he called in 2014, 2015, and 2018. There is one Synod on the Amazon region that was not at. But what he said the very first Synod was, Let no one say you cannot say this. Speak your mind. He had been other synods. And they were always stage-managed affairs, preordained. He remembered coming to a Senate in 2000, and he wanted to talk about a certain issue and they said, No, you can’t talk about that. Francis said, No, anybody here can talk about whatever they want. So that is the first big change of these Synod meetings under Francis.
And the second, of course, which is really what marked this meeting, was the introduction of lay people as voters, Ge realized we were having these meetings, and they were just meetings, they weren’t really engagement, conversations in the Spirit. So he said, we’re going to have a process he started two years ago, 2021.
And he said, we’re going to have global consultations, every parish, every diocese, every country, around the world, the Catholics are going to get together and talk. They’re going to issue give a report, pass it up the way about what they think the church needs to do, where it needs to go. We’ll gather those nationally, we’ll gather those in continent-wide meetings, synods, not just meetings but Syndods as really meetings of the Spirit. And then these continental assemblies will come together, which they did earlier in 2023. And collate their experience and what they’ve heard. It’s a listening process. And they worked up an instrument laborious a working paper that would guide this Synod.
T Carnes 06:59
When did he announce that this was going to be lay at this Synod.
David Gibson
Oh,, about a year ago, about a year beforehand.
T Carnes
And what was the response?
David Gibson
Predictable. I mean, if you don’t like that sort of thing. It was outrage. Right away. And, again, you also have to realize that this is coming because Francis has provoked enormous opposition, in some quarters, especially in the United States, and in the English speaking world. It’s small, relatively small, but it’s a powerful and influential opposition. It has various layers, some people just don’t like, what he does doctrinally, but others just don’t like, this isn’t the way we’ve done things.
You know, Tony, how many Catholics does it take to change a lightbulb? None, you don’t change anything. That’s, you know, the idea of change, the idea of doing anything differently, that just rubs some Catholics the wrong way. That’s not the way we operate. So there had already been an opposition. And when Francis announced that lay people, women, were going to have votes in this meeting of bishops, a lot of people said just they couldn’t compute it. They went ballistic. This is confusing. This is overturning the hierarchical church.
T Carnes
They said that it was a kind of catastrophe.
David Gibson
Yes, yeah, there was someone who said this was going to be totally catastrophic. And at the same time, there were those on the other side, let’s say, progressive liberals who were saying, this is this has to lead to women’s ordination, this has to lead to blessing of same sex unions, all kinds of other wishlists. So you had the catastrophists on one side and the fantasizes on the other side
T Carnes
So now we’ve had the Synod that took place in October of 2023. And we’ve had a paper that sums up the Synod come out after that. Some call it a nothing burger, that nothing came out of it. Other people you know, call it a paradigm shift. And then many, whatever their viewpoint, also say that it was profound spiritual experience. What do you say it is?
David Gibson
I guess, Yes to all three. I’d be more in the paradigm shift and especially the profound spiritual experience camp. I understand the nothing burger. And there are those who cheered that it was a nothing burger, but they feared; and there are those who lamented the nothing burger is like, this is not what we wanted. The one thing I would clarify, this wasn’t just happening in the month of October, October 4 to the 29th. But it wasn’t something that had a beginning and an end and Francis signaled this is a two year process. This was the first of a two part Synod on synodality.
It’s teaching the church how to be synodal again, as it has been in the past, and as it is today in many other cultures. So this is not just one event, this is an ongoing process. And in fact, these coming months until the next Synod in October 2024, are going to be crucial for processing what has happened. But yes, so this gathering was really what they say a conversation in the spirit, it was teaching the church how to speak to itself, in charity, in charity, mind you, to be honest with your differences. They kept stressing, say what you think, if you disagree, that’s fine. Say what you want the church do you think the church should be doing? That’s fine to push back, but do so in charity. And to that extent, I think it was a paradigm shift. And especially there’s a paradigm shift. Fine. But there’s also the personal shift, the transformation that you see of people who took part in these conversations, and often people who were skeptics to say the least going in?
T Carnes 11:25
Well, I want to dig into that a little bit.
More of the transcript available later today.
