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 A M AT T E R O F S P I R IT
3