Synodality is a word that was popularized by the recently concluded Synod on Synodality (2023) under the papacy of Pope Francis. There is now a substantial literature on this most popular but also controversial concept in the Catholic community.
During the Synod proceedings, one Filipino bishop sent me a text: “If you are allowed one sentence, what for you is the most crucial theme of this Synod?”
I texted him back: “Do not forget the poor and vulnerable. They are the least heard in the structures of the church.” Synodality is not merely about us — our equality, our communion, our participation. No, it is about “the other” whom the mainstream church and society have always marginalized. The socially excluded stare us in the face and put us into question — our structures, our priorities, our theologies, our liturgies.
Despite the 400-year distance between St. Vincent and us, this was in fact the main intuition of St. Vincent de Paul about the church. Let me share two things on present reflections on synodality: Vincent’s refusal of power and his initiatives toward empowerment.
The foremost problem in the church of our times is clericalism, a scourge in the present church. The France of St. Vincent had more than a good share of it. As it was then, power, money, and ambition could be more easily gained through church “service.” Paris had many of these kinds of “high clergy.” They were all in the city and preoccupied themselves with theatrical pomp and pageantry, while leaving the rural areas to ill-prepared “lower clergy.”
St. Vincent’s insistence that his priests and sisters would go to the rural areas is a sign of that protest against the status quo — four centuries before Pope Francis calls all priests and the whole church “to go to the peripheries.”
Many other narratives show how Vincent vehemently opposed political and clerical power based on material display and political ambitions. His brave confrontations with Cardinal Mazarin, the Prime Minister of the Queen, are well known.
But even in his everyday demeanor, St. Vincent refused to follow courtly etiquettes, manners of dress, pomp, and pageantry that marked the level of hierarchical status among courtly bodies. He came to court in his humble soutane even if they made fun of him. Vincent’s non-conventional “courtly” etiquette was an act of resistance to the seemingly formidable dominant power that reproduces itself in courtly bodies. In other words, his simple but self-assured presence unwittingly posed itself as a threat to others who competed for this highly contested courtly space. If you prefer a more religious language, his simplicity of lifestyle posed itself as a challenge to this power-hungry and position-conscious environment.
The second point is empowerment. If we want a synodal Church, we need to empower all its sectors. “To be a listening church” only happens when the person in the pew has the capacity to speak. For to speak out is not an automatic capability for most people. Some have been used to being silenced for centuries. They have been brainwashed into thinking that they do not have such a right. Vincent’s ministry was dedicated to empowering all its silenced sectors.
First, if the lower clergy were the neglected parts of the French church, Vincent directed all his resources and the resources of his Little Company to form them in holistic seminary formation according to the vision of the church in his times. In a letter to the Bishop of Périgueux, Vincent tried to explain why we both engage in the work of the mission and seminary formation: “We also try to help form good priests through retreats for ordinands and through seminaries — not to abandon the missions but to preserve the fruits produced by them” (CCD 49). This is the legacy to which the Vincentian community dedicated itself worldwide from the time of St. Vincent until today.
Second, if the lay people, especially the women, are a neglected sector of the church in our times despite the fifty years plus of Vatican II ecclesiology, so it was during Vincent’s time. The Confraternities of Charity, which were parish-based lay groups, were the first of St. Vincent’s responses to poverty, even before organizing the missionaries and the Daughters. Where the members were women, they called themselves “Ladies of Charity.”
To the Ladies of Charity organized at Hôtel-Dieu, Vincent spoke this critical review of church history: “For eight hundred years or so, women have had no public role in the Church; in the past there were some called Deaconesses, who were responsible for seating the women in the churches and teaching them the rubrics then in use. About the time of Charlemagne, however, by a discreet working of Divine Providence, this practice came to an end; persons of your sex were deprived of any role and haven’t had any since then. And now that same Providence is turning today to some of you to supply what was lacking…” (CCD XIIIb, 432). The rest is history.
In a medieval church where the lay people were relegated to the sidelines, Vincent’s intuition led him beyond his male chauvinist culture to truly empower laymen and women in the church, especially in the service of the poor.
Four hundred years after, Pope Francis goes back to the same early Christian intuition and practice and fights for a more extensive role of women in the Church. Recently, talking to the members of the International Theological Commission, he told them: “This is a task I ask of you, please. ‘Demasculinize’ the Church.”
Of course, Vincent de Paul was very much a man of his times. His ecclesiology was the hierarchical Tridentine church, as his conferences would show. But there are “cracks in the parchment curtain,” as they say.
Beyond the dominant institutional model, we see Vincent’s intuition of a church of communion. While explaining the Common Rules to his confreres on the theme of charity, he points to a communion ecclesiology that only became popular in Vatican II’s image of the mystical body.
“All of us make up a mystical body,” St. Vincent says, “but we’re all members of one another. It has never been heard that a member, not even among animals, was insensitive to the suffering of another member, or that one part of a person’s body may be bruised, wounded, or injured and the other parts don’t feel it. That’s impossible… To be a Christian and to see our brother suffering without weeping with him, without being sick with him! That’s to be lacking in charity; it’s being a caricature of a Christian; it’s inhuman; it’s to be worse than animals.” (CCD XII, 221-222).
These same words can be easily transferred to the texts of Fratelli Tutti. “There are only two kinds of people,” Pope Francis writes, “those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by; those who bend down to help and those who look the other way and hurry off. Here, all our distinctions, labels, and masks fall away: it is the moment of truth. Will we bend down to touch and heal the wounds of others? Will we bend down and help another to get up? This is today’s challenge, and we should not be afraid to face it” (FT 70).
Despite the four hundred years that separate us, the intuitions of St. Vincent still ring true in our century, that is, in order to make people experience God’s presence in the world, we need to condemn the abuse of power and empower those whom this power-hungry society has excluded.
Father Daniel Franklin Pilario, C.M., is the President of Adamson University in Manila. He is a theologian, professor, and pastor of an urban poor community on the outskirts of the Philippine capital. He is also the Vincentian Chair for Social Justice at St. John’s University in New York.
