This is part two of a two-part conversation. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
In October 2024, I had the chance to join seven other students from the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University on a pilgrimage to Rome during the Second Session of the Synod on Synodality. Upon returning to the US, I have had the opportunity to continue the conversation on synodality with numerous people, but the person I most wanted to talk to about it is my dad.
My dad has taught theology at Saint Louis University for several decades and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the sensus fidelium (sense of the faithful), a theological concept central to synodality. I thought that we could have a conversation that introduced a wider audience to this and other key concepts of synodality. The following is a transcript of our conversation, recorded on December 24th.
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Dan SJ: There seem to be a lot of people who are disappointed because the Synod didn’t make huge changes or people felt like there was too much change. Your description helps explain why people are dissatisfied on both sides. On the one hand, this is a long process and it takes a long time, it needs testing, it needs discernment. While on the other, you can’t just stand still.
There’s a development that is ongoing and incremental, even if that’s just saying we need a study group , as the Synod has done for a few issues. There are moments of clarity, but there isn’t always an obvious trajectory and to me that invites more trust in the Spirit. Synodality is, in part, about developing processes, but even before that it’s about learning to listen well.
Dr. Dan: And having the guts to take stuff on too.
As I was thinking about doing this conversation with you, one of my favorite scripture verses came to mind. In the early Church, they had this huge challenge they were facing. This Jewish group starts off as followers of Jesus, and then rather quickly, they start letting Gentiles into the group. Early Jewish followers of Jesus had continued to do stuff like keeping kosher and going to the Temple. But now these other people are coming. Do they have to be circumcised? Do they have to obey all of the Jewish law? And Paul the Apostle is saying, “No, they just have to be baptized.” And if you look at his Letter to the Galatians, he’s really upset about this. He’s seeing one Jewish-Christian subgroup of followers come to his community and mess with the Gentiles. So he’s fighting with them.
But then later on in the Book of Acts, there’s this wonderful description of how they all get together. It’s sometimes called the Council of Jerusalem. It’s a meeting where all the Apostles, all the leaders get together and they argue about these issues.
But then they decide what they’re going to do. They decide that no, you don’t have to obey all of the Jewish law to be a Christian. You have to do certain things, like honor the ten commandments, for example. But the key line is, “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” (Acts 15:28) That’s either really arrogant or just really amazing that we have – and they don’t use the term there, it’s not around yet – the consensus fidelium at work. The sensus fidelium was the process of working it all out. The Holy Spirit is in this and we can tell because of the unity that comes as a result of it.
But that’s a huge shift. It’s a deeply rooted shift in apostolic teaching, and yet it happened. It’s almost like God lets us have that example and says, “When you’re working on big stuff later, you can do this. You can work on big stuff.”
Dan SJ: Another thing to highlight here is the tolerance for disagreement. An image that a Synod delegate shared with me in Rome, was that of the Church being like a home that’s being renovated. Everybody has opinions and feels strongly because it’s their home. So it makes sense that disagreements would happen and we should not be worried about that. But we should ask: how do we continue to do this together?
Dr. Dan: Yes. The other thing is that for all these topics, including the question of synodality, people have to go back and read history and theology. And that’s true for the whole topic of the development of doctrine. After the Council of Trent, we have gotten to the point where we say the Church never changes, which is true in a certain sense. We’re not redoing the creed. But we do change in areas that are really important. Some of the examples would be usury or the way we read scripture.
If we are open to these questions, we can also look at a tradition in the Church that is giving us a lot to help us think about them. I think about women in the Church. Right now the big study is about what deaconesses were up to. We had them. So what was the nature of their work and their standing? That we can study. And that can help ease some of the worries of people who aren’t used to that question, while giving them something strong to work with. Asking these kinds of questions is not just a cultural fad. It’s something that is part of us as a Church, that we can dig around in and deal with. And it will take a while.
But the people that study this stuff need to make it accessible so that in parishes and study groups can have Church history studies. So you get a chance to dig around in these issues and see what actually happened.
Dan SJ: We’ve talked a lot about synodality. If you were to give a simple definition of it, how would you define it?
Dr. Dan: Well, isn’t the basic meaning of it walking together? I like that because the word ‘together’ is in there and ‘walking’ means you’re moving. It leads to questions like, where are we walking to? How fast are we walking? What are we carrying?
I was reading reviews of how the synodal process has been going here in the US. Some dioceses have not responded. Some have done well with it. For other dioceses, it’s more in-between. I think these different responses are indicative of the fact that it’s a paradigm shift. We’re doing something different and it’s going to take a while.
Dan SJ: Let’s move to our final question. When you look at all of this, your own study, teaching over the years and then looking at where the Church is now and where it’s headed, where do you draw hope from?
Dr. Dan: My family, the person I’m married to, my two sons. They make me very hopeful. My students. My colleagues. I have a really nice gig. I get to teach theology at a university. We have people who show up in August thinking, “I’m here because I have to take this class.” But in December, I want them to be able to say, “Hey, I’m glad I took this class. It wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be. It made me think, it made me wrestle with the right questions.” For me, a tremendous amount of hope comes from what I get to do.
I work in a Jesuit University. Some people initially don’t know it is a Jesuit University, but a lot of people do. They go there on purpose and have a sense of what the mission of the place is. That includes a holistic view of what they’re studying. And there’s a way of looking at how you study and create your worldview that comes in that kind of a context. We get to work on stuff that’s not just about doing good and changing the world, but also reflecting on it, too. It isn’t just service, but service learning. That’s a huge part of it as well. That process is really hopeful.
I’m older, so I wonder: how much longer will I be working on this? But I know that there are people coming through who engage with things coming out of the Church. I believe that you can grapple with real questions as a believing person. I start every course with the passage in Genesis where Jacob is wrestling in the middle of the night with something (Genesis 32:23-33). That’s a paradigm for doing theology. We wrestle, we work on hard stuff. But it also means we have real resources as we do that. We’re not just in the dark. When people respond to that – and they do – that’s gold.
I also get hope from what Pope Francis is up to and the fact that other people have come into it too. With synodality, Pope Francis is calling on us, as a synodal Church, to live out Vatican II in a really dramatic way. We’ll see where it goes from here. I don’t think we’re going to be done with this after Francis is gone.
Hope is tempered by several decades of knowing how hard it is to work on this stuff. But we can do this: we can be hopeful as we work on this. That’s a long answer. But that’s where I find hope.
Recommendations from Dr. Dan for further reading on sensus fidei, sensus fidelium, and consensus fidelium:
- International Theological Commission, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church” (2014)
- Ormond Rush, The Eyes of Faith: The Sense of the Faithful and the Church’s Reception of Revelation
- John Burkhardt, OFM Conv, The Sense of the Faith in History: Its Sources, Reception, and Theology
- Bradford Hinze, Learning from All the Faithful: A Contemporary Theology of the Sensus Fidei
Dan Finucane, SJ is currently studying theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University in Berkeley, CA.
Dr. Dan Finucane, PhD teaches historical and systematic theology in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, MO.
Photo by Harli Marten.
