Getting Serious about the Synod, by Robert Royal

In the heyday of Liberation Theology, the movement’s theorists often argued that it wasn’t enough for the Church to care for those wounded by political and economic injustice – roughly what Pope Francis has called a “field hospital.” Liberation demanded inquiries into why bodies are floating downstream and forays upstream to find, and deal with, causes. Liberation Theologians weren’t very good at this. (Most Church figures aren’t, because their training is not in political philosophy, economics, or security matters.) They often applied what were already clearly simplistic, discredited Marxist categories to situations in Latin America, and elsewhere in the developing world, where Marx’s “scientific” socialism didn’t really fit.

All this came back to mind as I was thinking about the Instrumentum Laboris, the “Working Plan,” for the October Synod on Synodality, which is being written over the next several days in Rome. …