“Here is an opportunity to move together in a civil and Christian manner,” Czerny told theologians and Church leadership gathered at the Swiss university Oct. 14. “It’s a chance for our Church here in the middle of the continent to become an ever more missionary and evangelizing force in the reconstruction of our common home in Europe.”
Delivered in French, but with an English text provided to The Catholic Register, Czerny mounted a defence of the entire program of openness, dialogue and discernment that Pope Francis has advocated since his election in 2013.
“Nine hundred years after the poverello of Assisi, we have a new ‘Franciscan’ program, suited to the particular issues of our times and in response to the timeless call of the Spirit,” Czerny said.
“He’s really making the case of Pope Francis,” Vatican observer and Villanova University professor of historical theology Massimo Faggioli told The Catholic Register. “Czerny is one of the point men of Francis on this…. He is the alter-Francis, the substitute or surrogate for Francis in a good way. There are not many others that you can see there who are really that close to him. Most of the cardinals are not as invested as Czerny is, so that is why his role is important.”
Czerny’s speech was the first major intervention by a cardinal on behalf of the synod since Pope Francis officially opened the two-year process on Oct. 10.
“I hope next time he will come to the United States or Canada, because that needs to be done. That needs to be amplified,” Faggioli said.
“There’s a huge work of convincing that is necessary. The biggest obstacle is that if most Catholics worldwide don’t start hearing about this from their bishops, they will give up.”
The author this year of Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States (distributed by Novalis in Canada) and of The Liminal Papacy of Pope Francis: Moving Toward Global Catholicity (Orbis Books), Faggioli sees a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the synod from overly cautious bishops across North America.
“The bishops who are clearly on board, it seems to me that they are a minority,” he said.
The current synod should build on the experience of the 2019 Synod on the Amazon, Czerny said.
“This mingling of priests, religious, lay and Indigenous participants with bishops from throughout the Amazon reminds us — doesn’t it — that ‘ecclesial’ definitively means the entire People of God!” Czerny declared.
The times require that the Church be able to speak with and for people beyond the tight borders of its comfortable insiders, Czerny argued. Catholicism today has “a comprehensive set of problems to face, plans to make, actions to undertake and — even in the face of the most daunting challenges — hope to share,” he said.
In Czerny’s view, the Synod on Synodality won’t be a synod of half-measures confined to narrow purposes. At the same time, Czerny was careful to reassure that it wouldn’t be a free-for-all open season on established Catholic doctrine.
“We anticipate with joy the Synod on Synodality,” he said. “Turning the word ‘Church’ into verbs: encountering, repairing, functioning, serving, praying.”
“This could be the beginning of a marketing tour, not just for Czerny,” Faggioli said. “This needs to happen. It needs to happen because in North America we are barely hearing about this. If no one comes here and ruffles some feathers, I’m not sure anything will happen here.”