The Catholic Church is, famously, not a democracy. But popes do seek advice; popes convene councils, gathering the world’s bishops and Catholic authorities, as in the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Before Vatican II, there was not just a preparatory period but an “antepreparatory” period (God’s bureaucracy is beyond satire), in which the Vatican consulted bishops, university theologians, and other bigwigs, asking them how they thought the Church should meet the challenges of the modern age. In 2020, Pope Francis announced that he would be convening a council, the kind called a “synod,” a convention of (mostly) bishops. Synods typically deal with particular theological or pastoral areas, like 2005’s synod on the Eucharist or 2014’s on the family.
Before this synod, Pope Francis would consult the Catholic world once more—but this time, “the Catholic world” would include far more people, far closer to the ground. This would be a Synod on Synodality, a council to discuss ways of making the Church more responsive to the needs of ordinary Catholics. “Synodality” means something like “collaboration,” both the collaboration of the bishops and the collaboration of the Church’s hierarchy with all Catholics. Nowadays, “synodality” is everywhere, often with a strong connotation of “listening to the people.”
Everything about the Synod on Synodality, which opened in 2023, left me baffled and cynical. Official church lit explained that “[s]ynodality denotes the particular style that qualifies the life and mission of the Church, expressing her nature as the People of God journeying together and gathering in assembly, summoned by the Lord Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the Gospel.” This is the kind of thing you write on the test when you weren’t listening the day they covered the material. A “Synod on Synodality” sounds like a parody of recursive democracy: “Let’s hold a listening session on how to listen—no, wait, first we have to hold a listening session on how to hold a listening session on how to listen … ” Also, it sounds silly. “Sid Caesar presents Your Synod of Synods!”
The Synod has a faux crayon logo, is what I’m saying.
And my first experiences of synodality were about as edifying as you’d expect. In preparation for the synod, dioceses across the world distributed questionnaires and held listening sessions, where the thoughts and hopes of ordinary Catholics were recorded. In 2022, I was one of the secretaries for my parish’s virtual listening session focusing on LGBT+ life in the Church. People poured real effort and vulnerability into that session, and yet it still wound up feeling fairly predictable: an airing of grievances with no clear purpose. I didn’t think we’d ended that session with deeper community, greater mutual understanding, or any suggestion for our priests and bishops that they hadn’t all heard many times before. I found myself thinking, In the end, all these churchmen will just say whatever they say anyway, and none of it will matter unless the Pope says it does.
A “Synod on Synodality” sounds like a parody of recursive democracy. “Let’s hold a listening session on how to listen—no, wait, first we have to hold a listening session on how to hold a listening session on how to listen … ” Also, it sounds silly. “Sid Caesar presents Your Synod of Synods!”
But the synod on synodality closed in November, and I’m surprised to find my position completely changed. I dug it! Synodality is good, and we should do more of it! I have, in fact, learned something from this goofily-named gathering of the God guys. (And not just God guys, but God ladies: This was the first Catholic Synod of Bishops in which women were invited to vote.)
Three things changed my mind. All are related to my experience starting an organization during the Synod: Building Catholic Futures, a nonprofit equipping Catholic institutions to evangelize and catechize (in lay terms, “serve and share the Gospel with”) LGBT+ people. BCF’s personnel are all openly gay/bi/same-sex–attracted, and we embrace Catholic teaching. We’ve had to wrestle with all the questions that fellow LGBT+ Catholics and seekers have confronted: Does the Church see any purpose in my love? If I accept the teaching that sex and marriage are only for heterosexual unions, am I just giving in to self-hatred? I know that what I’m feeling is love; does the Church have anything to say about that besides “no”? How can I forgive those who harmed me? Is God calling me to work for justice for people like me? And, maybe most pressingly, What will my future be if I entrust it to the Church? We use our experience of accompanying others in navigating these questions to help priests, parents, educators, and other leaders welcome and guide gay people into deeper relationship with Jesus.
The first way the synod helped us is that synod listening sessions uncovered a deep desire for better approaches to gay people. It’s not a coincidence that my church focused on this group; pre-synod gatherings and questionnaires in many countries revealed that Catholics wanted to know what the Church can say to their gay friends, neighbors, and children. I already knew there was a crisis of catechesis in the United States: every time I talked to teachers, youth ministers, catechists, or college chaplains, they told me that one of the most common and hardest questions they get is, “What does the Church have for gay people?” Through the various consultations leading up to the synod, bishops received this message over and over. The synod served as a massive evidence-gathering operation. The evidence showed that people don’t know how “gay and Catholic” might go together.
Second, through my work with BCF, I’ve gotten to know Catholic leaders who have received the message of synodality with the humility I lacked. They don’t want to be dictators or salesmen, merchant princes of the Church. They sense a difference between right answers, which can be given from on high, and wisdom, which can only emerge in the context of individual lives. Wisdom is what happens when Catholic teaching meets the lived experience of struggling people. Synodality is a “theory of change” (a term I have heard way too often since entering the nonprofit world): guides need to know where the people they’re guiding are starting from, and solicit ideas about how to get where they’re going. Guidance that comes from someone who doesn’t understand what you’re facing, what you fear and hope for and believe, is likely to be irrelevant, alienating, or misunderstood. Catholic leaders seek out BCF because they know that we have some portion of the knowledge they need.
And third, I realized that our own process at Building Catholic Futures was based in something like synodality. My co-founder, Keith Wildenberg, and I had racked up a couple decades each in various forms of gay Catholic leadership. I’d done a lot of speaking and writing. Keith, more quietly, had evangelized in the gay communities of San Francisco, mentoring people drawn to the beauty and practical wisdom of the Church. But we wanted to ensure that BCF didn’t just reflect our own bespoke opinions and preferences. We organized a retreat for ten Catholics, from a wide range of backgrounds, who identify as gay, bi, or same-sex attracted, who embrace Church teaching, and who had at least some leadership experience in either gay or Catholic circles.
I would never have imagined that the raising of Lazarus would have special resonance for someone discovering a new life after the “tomb” of the closet.
Our goal was to reach beyond our own experiences: to hear, if only by proxy, the people Keith and I had never met, but whom the other retreatants had mentored and accompanied. We had all accompanied LGBT/same-sex attracted people on spiritual journeys, sometimes guiding them to greater participation in the life of the Church and sometimes remaining a faithful friend as they explored other paths. We knew we wouldn’t be able to help Catholic leaders serve queer people unless we could articulate both the uniqueness of every individual story, and the patterns in what strengthens faith and what makes it harder to sustain.
As those patterns emerged, it became clear that what we produced would not look like what was being done elsewhere in the Catholic world. Part of the reason people in the synodal listening sessions don’t know what the Church has for gay people is that nobody has asked gay people what the Church has for them! We found that the vast majority of Catholic outreach to gay people missed the things that actually made the faith intriguing, compelling, or possible.
For example: we developed five principles, or Building Blocks, of which the third is, “Tell good stories.” There are historical figures who we know experienced same-sex desire, sought to live as obedient Catholics, and discovered unexpected joy on that path. There are saints who inspire contemporary gay people. There are aspects of the life of Jesus, the model for all Christian lives, which speak to queer people in a special way.
I would never have imagined that the raising of Lazarus would have special resonance for someone discovering a new life after the “tomb” of the closet. Others might be surprised at how deeply I respond to Jesus’ depiction of friendship as the model of selfless love: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down his life for his friends.” Jesus’ tender love for one disciple, John, redefined John’s identity—in his Gospel, he is always “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” I’m currently preparing for a covenant of kinship with the woman who is my beloved, taking the promises of Ruth to Naomi as a model. One day we realized that we’d begun discerning this path together on December 28—the feast of St. John the Beloved Disciple.
When I became Catholic, my mentors taught me about theology and asked me about morality. They didn’t know to ask me, “Which parts of Jesus’ life do you think might resonate with you as a gay woman?” This is a kind of thinking BCF could only do because we sought to hear so many queer voices. Between the two of us, Keith and I have spoken with thousands of LGBT/SSA+ people about their spiritual journeys; we’ve read hundreds of books, from historical scholarship on the development of the Christian sexual ethic in antiquity to contemporary novels of queer faith. We do it because we love it. We also do it because it’s the only way we can bring queer experience into contact with the truths of our faith.
There’s no way around it: I’ve become synodal despite myself.