Cardinal Blase Cupich’s opening Mass for the synodal process in Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral on the evening of Oct. 24 coincided with one of the worst local storms in recent memory.
Amidst the driving rain and echoing thunderclaps, Cupich spoke (without notes) on the synod’s direct connection to the Second Vatican Council. As many people consider the Chicago cardinal to be one of Pope Francis’ closest international collaborators and advisers, his comments provide an insight into the pontiff’s hopes and expectations for the process.
Cardinal Cupich drew repeated reference to “Humanae Salutis,” the Apostolic Constitution issued 60 years ago this Christmas, in which Pope John XXIII formally convoked the Second Vatican Council. Pope John had shocked the world with his intention to do so earlier, on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, which is still an important contextual element in interpreting the council correctly. The phrase that Cardinal Cupich located at the heart of that council and of the current synod process was the hope to “bring the modern world into contact with the vivifying and perennial energies of the Gospel.” The cardinal’s fluency with that particular formulation, repeated from memory more than once over the course of the Mass, proved how crucial he finds it.
This effort is traditionally called “aggiornamento” in Italian, which sometimes clumsily gets translated as “updating” or “modernizing,” but can more accurately be seen to refer to “bringing into today.” Its twinned ecclesiological sibling of “ressourcement” or “returning to the sources” is one particular way that this reorientation and recalibration of the shifting articulations of the eternal truths of the faith in light of the signs of the times takes place. As Cardinal Cupich made clear, recognizing the Church not as an all-encompassing institution but rather as a pilgrim people together on “the way,” as the earliest believers referred to themselves, is one iteration of how this process is a reflection of the first generations of Christ’s followers.
Cardinal Cupich reflected on the Gospel reading of Jesus’ healing of blind Bartimaeus, and how Christ’s actions in that narrative reflected the call to our local and Universal Church in this moment. He pointed out how both protagonists in the story were in fact manifesting the central charges of this current effort: encountering, listening and discerning. Jesus and the blind beggar engage with each other, they hear each other’s needs, desires and capabilities, and they weigh how the Spirit is moving them to affect the future in light of all that has occurred in their exchange.
The process not only heals the blindness of the beggar outside Jericho, but also the initial deafness of his disciples, who attempted to quell Bartimaeus’ pleas for the Master’s attention and urged him simply to remain silent. Like those so many centuries ago, Jesus makes clear that our community today can never shirk away from its responsibility to hear and respond to the voices of the needy, the marginalized and the outcast.
This triad of encountering, listening, and discerning is in some ways itself an aggiornamento, as it recasts the Belgian Cardinal Joseph Leo Cardijn’s “see-judge-act” methodology – sometimes called the “Review of Life” approach – in a new light. That model proved crucial to the development and growth of what would come to be called theologies of liberation in the 1970s and 1980s. Both Cardijn’s and Pope Francis’ formulations call for an intentional willingness to immerse oneself ever more fully in the life of the community, so as to challenge one another to new action spurred by that transformative process of dialogue and understanding.
The Aparecida document, which was drafted under the guidance of then-Cardinal Bergoglio, is one of the clearest expressions of this effort in modern times. What Cardijn sought to encourage among the Young Christian Workers, Pope Francis and Cardinal Cupich are hoping to instill more broadly at every level of the Church in the days and years ahead.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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