SYNOD 2023: Metaphors are hard.
I consider this essay, in many ways, to be my personal Super Bowl.
“Did you guys see Notre Dame choke last week? Literally the last play, Ohio State punched it in, absolute heartbreaker. Wait, what? Ten players? They only put ten players on the field? For a goal line stand against a top ten team they couldn’t get the right fucking number of players out on the field for the last play? The last TWO PLAYS? What the fuck is going on over there?”
-Cardinal-Designate Victor Manuel Fernandez, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith
Next week we’re going to see the start of what could be a very significant event in the modern history of the church: the 2023 and 2024 Synod of Bishops, the “synod on synodality”, the “meta-synod” (I’m the only one that uses this name for it), the massive gathering of bishops and laity at the Vatican, after years of listening and discernment sessions that included millions of people in the worldwide church, to understand how the Catholic church moves forward in its mission work and decision-making, especially after making an effort to listen to those the institutional church has historically excluded. Over 400 Catholics are official voting members of the Synod, and that includes lay men and women, which has never happened in the history of the church’s synodal process (which, to be fair, really didn’t become a major part of church life until the second Vatican council). This has the potential to significantly change how the church listens to its members and makes its decisions - real, meaningful, material decisions - in this new era. In other words: it is the Super Bowl.
How is the Synod the Super Bowl? Well, the Super Bowl is, of course, one football game played on one day, and the Synod is actually a continuous four weeks of meetings and prayer and events at the Vatican. The Super Bowl pits the best AFC and NFC team against each other at the end of the season, and the Synod isn’t actually a game or competition of any kind, nor does it reflect the standings at the end of some sort of “season”, nor does it involve any sort of physical contest, nor can you really sort people neatly into two “teams” given the wide breadth of topics being discussed and the wide range of Catholic experience being represented in the voting members. The Super Bowl happens annually, and the Synod, well, there’s a big meeting this October and a big meeting next October, but that’s really all that has been planned. The Super Bowl awards the Vince Lombardi trophy to the winning team, and the Synod, to my knowledge, will not be awarding any trophies. People pay thousands of dollars to secure tickets to the Super Bowl and watch the Pepsi Halftime Show, and the Synod will not be in a stadium, or generally have a large group of spectators watching, and Usher is not slated to perform. The Super Bowl is usually the most watched television event of the year, and it’s still not clear which parts of the Synod the broader church will be able to watch at all. I think you see where this is all going: the Synod is the Super Bowl of church events, and if you don’t believe me, you can just look at what John L. Allen Jr. wrote in Crux yesterday, in a piece titled “Rome readies for pre-game frenzy ahead of the Super Bowl of Synods”:
“As Americans know well, the Super Bowl is no longer just a football game. It’s an entire fortnight of pre-game festivities, collectively creating one of the most frenzied periods on the country’s annual calendar. In a similar vein, if the Synod of Bishops on Synodality is this fall’s Catholic equivalent of the Super Bowl, the next few days are similarly chock-full of what might be described as pre-game activities, creating a extremely busy period in and around Rome. Things kick off Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m. Rome time, when Pope Francis will preside over a consistory ceremony to create 21 new cardinals.”
I have, perhaps, never seen any clause in the history of Catholic media do as much heavy lifting as “if the Synod of Bishops on Synodality is this fall’s Catholic equivalent of the Super Bowl”. The only thing that the Synod and the Super Bowl appear to have in common at all, even taking all of Allen’s argument at face value, is that both events assume a linear theory of time; the comparison really starts to fall apart after that. Yes, things are happening “before” the Synod, just like things happen “before” the Super Bowl, just like all things happen “before” other things happen in the normal passage of time.
Metaphors are hard. I don’t know Allen and I don’t really have anything against the guy, and I’m going to even be charitable and assume he was up against a deadline and had to pull some sort of broadly appealing metaphor together at the last second to describe the Synod, and figured something from the world of sports would work. But let’s be honest, there’s no sports event that would work as a metaphor for the Synod; you’d need something that lasted multiple weeks and multiple events, and would have a significant economic and social impact on its host city, and bring in important people from all around the world, and require careful coordination and collaboration between different nations, that could represent us at our best but often failed because it was run by an institution with a reputation for being corrupt. I guess the only sporting event would fit every single one of those criteria perfectly while also being incredibly broadly appealing would be the Olympics, but it did take me a whole minute and a half to come up with that example, so I can’t be too hard on Allen here. Also, it’s not Olympics season, so the metaphor isn’t really relevant, as opposed to the Super Bowl, an event from which we’re basically at the furthest possible point in the year between both the previous and next iteration.
But right as things are “kicking off” in the Vatican and Pope Francis prepares his “bubble screen” of doctrine, I want to draw your attention to another world-historical event happening this weekend: the Jaguars are playing the Falcons, and the game is in London so it’s airing relatively early stateside on Sunday morning. Now, I don’t give a shit about the Jaguars or the Falcons like most Americans, but something different is happening for this game: there’s going to be a Toy Story version of it also airing live:
This is real: Disney+ and ESPN+ will be streaming the actual football game as it happens (with a few second delay), but as a Pixar-style animation set in Andy’s room, and with the characters from Toy Story making appearances throughout. This isn’t even the first alternate re-skinned animated stream of an NFL game we’ve seen: Nickelodeon and CBS have been doing slime-and-Spongebob-themed NFL broadcasts for four years now and will use a similar simulcast presentation for this year’s Super Bowl, although the Toy Story approach coming this week looks far more immersive and, given that the CGI players don’t appear to have faces, far more terrifying. The intent - I think? - is to introduce a younger generation of viewers to the basics of football, similar to what Pop Warner leagues used to do but with a far lower concussion risk.
So if you want another way that the Synod is not the Super Bowl, the Synod will not have a CGI livestream where all of the participants are Toy Story characters. Like I said, it’s not clear at all whether the church in the rest of the world will be able to see the goings-on of the Synod at all; Pope Francis certainly doesn’t seem interested in opening things up to a wider audience, although parts of the Synod are going to allow access from Vatican press and be available to stream. And while I understand wanting to give the Synod participants room to speak and pray freely, things don’t often work out well for our church when we give our bishops extra privacy and benefits of the doubt, when we tell the rest of the church “yes things are going to be different this time, we promise, but don’t bug us about it, just count to 17 and close your eyes”. If this whole Synod is an exercise in listening, I do think that the rest of the church should be able to listen, in some form, to an awful lot of it. The people who participated in the listening sessions at every stage of the Synod for the past two years had to trust the church to listen to them, and the church - at least in my country - has not done very much at all to earn that trust in the past several decades. I do think that the institutional church can show the laity around the world that they also trust us to listen to them by letting us see more of what’s going on in this very important moment of our church’s history.
But I don’t know if they actually trust us, of course. It’s not the first time we’ve talked about this: there’s this mistrust between the church and the laity, mistrust in both directions, deserved on one side and not exactly deserved on the other, and the institutional church is still resisting taking some steps towards transparency, even for something as important as this. So, more people leave the church - especially young people - more people give up, more people don’t care. But there’s another very big, very important institution that is trying something new, in order to get young people to care about what they do. And so, with great humility, I would urge the Vatican: livestream the entirety of the sessions for the Synod on synodality, but also re-skin the entire livestream as a scene from Toy Story.
I want to be very clear on what I’m asking: when USCCB president and Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio gets up to give a speech about how the abuse crisis is a giant conspiracy by The Gays or whatever, I would like to see that happen live on the internet. I want him to say it to my face, and to the faces of every Catholic in the world, and I want the church to trust us enough to say “this is what your leaders care about and talk about, and now you know that, and now it’s up to you to decide if this church is on the right track and if you need to do something about it, and maybe we’re gonna let this guy be an asshole and put him in a position of power, but we’re not going to let him be an asshole and keep you from knowing what an asshole he is”. And, to be absolutely clear, as Broglio is giving this speech, I would like to see him motion-captured specifically as the baby-head-with-erector-set-spider-legs that Sid makes in the first movie:
Pope Francis, of course, can choose to be either Woody or Buzz, whichever he thinks will make a better impression, although we’re going to need to get either Tom Hanks or Tim Allen to do the dub, and I think it’s pretty clear that one of those actors is a lot easier to book than the other.
Or, I guess, Pope Francis could be Andy. Maybe that would make more sense. Or is Andy the Holy Spirit, and we’re just all the Holy Spirit’s toys who have to play dead when the Holy Spirit shows up? You know what, I was right, metaphors are hard. My point is this: Robert Barron is also going to the Synod, and he can literally, finally, be the hamm that got surprised:
Vatican, if you’re reading this, and I think we all know that you are, this is your answer. This is how you bring young people into the church, with a brand far more beloved and trusted than Catholicism1. This is how you increase transparency. This is how you get the eyes of the world upon the Synod so you can point the way forward for the church and the world. Catholic and secular media will not be talking every day about discussion groups and listening sessions, but they will talk about that cowboy and that spaceman going on wacky adventures; the four existing movies are the third highest-grossing animated film franchise of all time, Toy Story 4 alone grossed over a billion dollars despite having the obviously weakest plot in the series, and Disney is still so desperate for more Toy Story that they announced a fifth film on the same day they laid off 7,000 employees. This is how the church can enter its next era. But, most importantly, this is what will retroactively make John L. Allen’s terrible metaphor actually work, and ultimately I’m just looking out for the guy, we’re both writers or whatever.
I mean, the early days of the franchise are still connected to noted pieces of shit John Lasseter and Joss Whedon, but Toy Story is still way ahead of Catholicism on the scoreboard.