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| Saint Charles Borromeo and one of the Diocesan Synods he presided in Milan |
One of the most pressing and certainly most complex issues that Pope Leo will have to resolve is that of the famous synodality. He is a canonist and a man of government and he knows, therefore, that continuing along the path of a synodal church that Francis had irresponsibly opened would lead to a catastrophe. For those of us who are laymen in theology and canon law, I recommend this article ["The Pope and the Prefectress"] published in Infovaticana. And I summarize the issue: the ius regendi, or the power to govern, is given by the sacrament of Holy Orders. That is to say, only those who have received that sacrament can perform valid acts of government within the Church. Consequently, neither laymen nor nuns can govern. And it is not a question of fashion; it is a profoundly theological question that was strongly reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council.
Continuing with Franciscan synodality will mean the democratization of the Church at all levels. For example, it will be the laity, or the ladies of the parish, who will establish what the priest must preach at Mass and to whom he may or may not give communion; it will be the committed laity who will determine, together with a group of progressive and frightened bishops and priests, what is sin and what is not, and so on and so forth: we can add a good number of examples. Pope Leo knows this much better than any of us and I sense that the correction of this “mess” that Bergoglio left us will be one of his immediate priorities.
And I base this on some signs which, of course, I may be misinterpreting, but I risk my opinion here. Although in the three weeks since his election the Holy Father has made a few mentions of synodality, they have been few and of much less intensity than many expected. And let us recall a significant fact. He was elected on Thursday, May 8; on Monday, May 12, he already had on his desk an open letter from the Secretariat of the Synod in which, in a flattering way, he was “asked” to continue with the “synodal Church.” This was obviously a strong public pressure. However, the following Sunday, in his homily at the Mass at the beginning of his Petrine ministry, which in a way was a programmatic sermon, he never mentioned the word “synodality.” He did it the next day, it is true, in a much smaller meeting and in another context - he had to throw some bone to the synods - but it is very significant that no reference to it appeared in the homily.
The other fact, which is rather an exercise in futurology, is what happened with the appointment of the nun of the eneagram as secretary of the dicastery for religious. What is strange, and very strange, is that the “prefectress” in this organism is already a religious woman. The head, then, is in the hands of two women who have not received, nor will ever receive, the sacrament of Holy Orders. And the question is very serious: if the law establishes in canon 129 §1 that: “Of the power of government, which exists in the Church by divine institution, and which is also called the power of jurisdiction, those sealed by sacred orders are capable subjects, according to the norm of the prescriptions of law,” and Vatican II in Lumen gentium (dogmatic constitution) states that "Episcopal consecration, together with the office of sanctifying, confers also the offices of teaching and ruling...,"and it follows that all the acts of government exercised by Simona Brambilla, "prefect" of the dicastery, are null and void. And anyone who feels affected by them can have recourse to the canonical tribunals. A real disaster; a “mess” of which Francis irresponsibly gloated.