Sister Nathalie Becquart, a French religious sister in the Congregation of Xavières who currently serves as the Undersecretary of the Secretariat General of the Synod – and thus is one of a recent crop of the most influential women in the history of the Vatican – recently said that we should recognize that doing theology today mandates living out a call to “missionary synodality.”
By this, she means that the commitment to being a listening, learning and discerning Church should not be focused exclusively ad intra, that is to say, concentrating on the dialogues within Catholicism alone, but also on the constitutive element of ecclesial life ad gentes, as it pertains to the nations and peoples of the world.
Living out precisely such a dedication to missionary synodality, Pope Francis traveled as both an ecclesial figure and a global leader to Hungary on April 28-30, a region close to the current armed conflict dominating the headlines in Europe and beyond. Hungary shares a land border with Ukraine, as it does with six other nations. Thus, the pope was traveling to one of the primary historical crossroads where East and West intersect. The pope himself called it “the center of Europe.”
Christianity arrived in the region during the Roman period, with inscriptions of believers (mostly in Greek) being found that have been dated to the second century AD. Eusebius of Caesarea alludes to a certain Bishop Quirinus, a martyr who was thrown into the Gyöngyös River with a millstone around his neck in present-day Szombathely, probably sometime around 309 AD. Thus, the region’s Christian roots, and eventual proximity to the Ottoman Empire, left an indelible mark on this nation’s history and culture.
During the pope’s visit, it became clear that his commitment to the missionary dimension of synodality to which Sister Nathalie has referred led him to make the return to Hungary, after his last seven-hour stay in Budapest during the International Eucharistic Congress in September 2021.
As usual, the plight of migrants and refugees, the centrality of a Christocentric view of the Church, and the thirst for peace dominated his public comments. While there, he took time to meet with young people, Ukranian refugees, Greek Catholics, schoolchildren and the faculty of Information Technology and Bionics at the Péter Pázmány Catholic University. This broad range of dialogue partners and diverse protagonists exemplified the central synodal commitment to engaging voices across many aspects of culture and society – in the Church and outside of it – with both a willingness to learn from them and a courage to name distortions of the Gospel when they are being manipulated for political, economic or nationalistic ends.
The pope’s most significant tête à tête while there came April 29 with Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion, a noted theologian who himself has been much more reserved and hesitant than Russian Patriarch Kirill in terms of vocal support of Vladimir Putin, as Kirill recently referred to “internal enemies” regarding those Russians with insufficient patriotism about the war efforts. Hilarion made clear that he and the pope were “two old friends” and that they had a personal and intimate exchange. After the meeting, the pope raised eyebrows around the world when he referred to an ongoing “mission” unfolding behind the scenes to try to broker peace amidst the ongoing tragedy.
The ongoing commitment to synodality in the Church is authentic recovery, or in technical theological language, “ressourcement,” more than sheer innovation. The missionary component to this communal discernment and lived praxis of the faith reminds us that we are always pilgrims on the way, travelers on a journey, emissaries of the Lord to the ends of the earth; and thus it serves to dislodge an idolatrous posture that would put the structures of the institutional Church or, God forbid, the pope personally, in the place of God, who alone demands the allegiance of our entire heart, soul, mind and strength. (cf. Mk. 12:30)
Pope Francis consistently calls all of us to journey “cum et sub Petro” (“with Peter and under Peter”), but perhaps places the emphasis more on the former preposition than previous pontiffs have done. Whether in Hungary, the Vatican or South Jersey, the apostolic faith is only alive, healthy and efficacious when it is actively received and lived in actual dialogical exchange with the contours of history, the complex reality of current events, and the anticipatory hope in the ultimate horizon of a future known to God alone.
That ongoing work, not of a lifetime but rather of millennia, is authentic missionary synodality in action, and we are each called to contribute to it.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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