This Synod is Wide, Shallow, and Contrary to Vatican II, by Dr. Larry Chapp

By Dr. Larry Chapp, Catholic World Report, October 26, 2023  

Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology. He taught for twenty years at DeSales University near Allentown, Pennsylvania. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. …

I am now home from Rome and want to try to summarize what I had learned while there and my overall impressions about the Synod.

Let me start with an anecdote.

Fifteen years ago, I was hosting my eight-year-old nephew on a vacation to my home in Pennsylvania. We were driving to Gettysburg and as we were crossing the Susquehanna river I said to him that the river is very beautiful and “wide and shallow”. To which he responded with an impish grin: “You’re wide and shallow.”

Those words came to my mind as a most apt description of the big Meeting on meetings that the Vatican has strangely decided to call a “Synod on Synodality”. I say “strangely” because we still do not know what synodality means in any specific theological sense. And the various synodal spokesmen have even insinuated that the very attempt to pin down a precise theological definition is a violation of the open-ended and wide-ranging dialogue that is the very essence of the thing. …

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