“What you have received” (cf. 1 Cor 11:23) is the norm that measures your times. Your times do not measure what has been passed on to you.
By John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., Catholic World Report, July 29, 2023
John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. He publishes regularly in the National Catholic Register and in theological journals. All views expressed herein are exclusively his own.
In the run-up to this fall’s “Synod on Synodality,” I’ve written several essays in this journal relevant to it. I’ve addressed the demand to “welcome” and what welcome has hitherto meant in the Church. I’ve pointed to the call to conversion as the basic posture of the Church. I’ve explored the problem of invoking “experience” as a factor to “discern” what the “Holy Spirit” wants. I’ve focused on factions as providing tribal “insights” as well as how the bishops (it is supposed to be, after all, a Synod of Bishops, notwithstanding Francis’s insertion of non-bishops into its votes) should relate to those factions.
Let’s now consider another relevant problem: how to read the “signs of the times.”
Vatican II put great emphasis on “reading the signs of the times (signa temporis). The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) is largely structured around noting and addressing the “signs of the times” of the early 1960s. ….
