Synodal Origins

111 - 21 Dec 21 - Synodal Origins

Dr dear Dr: Our local Plod in the Diocese up here in the North has signalled that we are now entitled to prepare our parish for participation in a Diocesan Synod, and I was wondering if you had any more background as to the early vv early history of this strange new institute, to boldly go where no secular historian has gone before?

Well, am pretty sure that members of Her Majesty's Forces of Occupation up north do not have a lot of views on such intensive ecclesial institutes as Diocesan Synods, but much in the manner of a scribe at the old Temple of Jerusalem, before it was shut down, torn down, and burnt down in +820 AUC, we shall endeavour to persevere with this interesting Quaestio even at the same acknowledging to full acclamation of the background chorus of canonical historians that this is a Quaestio nova Disputata. This is a new institute for the majority of parish believers and presbyteral practitioners though there were some Dioceses to the south that attempted to hold such things as Diocesan Synods in the 1980s and 1990s in the fresh young days when the fair winds of a new Valhalla swept over the Church here in Eastern Empire Britannia and the liberating breezes of the Eastern Code blew over the old cobwebs of the old Occidental Codex of 1917, and one of the things it promoted was the celebration of a Diocesan Synod. Our own Diocese too back home in Dublin tried this one, and my new adopted Diocese tried one in 1987, so it is all very much a trendy thing to look at, at the moment, now that the new pope has signalled the birth of the Synodal Way with the help of the German episcopate and an obscure Germanic cream jacketed Spanish theologian best known around Neu-Schwanstein Castle in Bavaria and Austria. He it was who first placed the thought of a Diocesan Synod in the mind of the local Bishop at that time. Dave McLoughlin theologian thereafter affirmed the feasibility of the idea.

Anyway, there is some debate about the precise incept point of the institute of the diocesan synod. Prospero Lambertini, known nowadays as Benedict XIV, in 1748 opined that the best place to start for such a concept was the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 (see Ben XIV, "De synodo diocesana", Roma 1748, I, 5, 5-6), though here too the notion is not without its query since Acts 6 and the selection of the 7 deacons is also a possible incept point for a diocesan synod. Indeed why stop there, there are some theologians who venture to suggest that the Last Supper was a form of the early proto-synods of later times, and so on. To this end such beginnings offer something to ponder on - since the word of the later christians simply emanates from the Israelite word synedrion or sanhedrin, itself a construct and concept of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. Eugenio Correcco the well known theologian-jurist also opines that the precise contours of the later institute of the diocesan synod can be found in the 2nd and 3rd centuries when ecclesial provinces emerged in the Eastern empire, and that these followed the institute of the bishop and his elders or presbyters and deacons, the latter deacons following tradition and limited to 7 per diocese (see Correcco, v. synodalita, in "Nuovo Dizionario di Teologia", Alba 1977, pp. 1466-1467).

I Nicea in 325 and Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451 all feature some norms on provincial and diocesan synods. Andrea Foglia argues that the move to unite the rural and urban clergy under a single over arching metropolitan bishop, following the schema of empire to which incidentally the Eastern Codex of 1990 is more faithful at canons 102-113, was what emerged in the early years of the Romano-barbarian kingdoms say of the Romano-visigoths following indicators in the Lex romana visigothicorum produced by Alaric II around 506 AD (Foglia, "Brevi note per la storia del Sinodo diocesano," in QDE IV [ 1991] 51). The Lex Visigothicorum sought to apply and interpet the older titles of the "Codex Theodosianus" as it also recalls synods celebrated in France in the 6th century such as that of Orleans in 511, Tours in 567, and Auxerre from which about 45 canons relative to ecclesial life have been preserved (see the skilled scholastico, Corbellini, "Il sinodo diocesano", Roma 1986, 17-18). Foglia notes that from the 6th century onwards often the rubric appears in dioceses to celebrate a synod in the diocese at least once a year, just to hear from the people. So an institute that is tied to a public and ecclesial "hearing" of the christian faithful, a species of catching up with the developments and innovations among the flocks. In the Carolingian period under Charlemagne other similar norms appear which effectuate a transition between empire and local kingdoms. So that is the early history up to Charlemagne and II Nicea of 787 AD. The rest is history.

All these early indicators of the early christians right up to the liberation from persecution either from the Jews or the Romans or the Arians and they point to regular celebrations of synods so as to "hear" and "consult" with the christian flocks. An incumbency placed on the shoulders of the clergy especially after the debacle of the Arian Crisis in which many if not most of the clergy actually defected to the heresy of Arius abandoning their catholic flocks to the whims of emperors and governors and their chaplain bishops of an Arian kind throughout the 4th and 5th and 6th centuries while the heresy of Arius raged on just among the intellectuals - no promises there. So a sudden topsy turvy manoeuvre organised by the Spirit in which the clergy learned something from the flocks and not the other way round. Later in the 19th century we have works by the learned doctus Dr Newman on "consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine", a new position relative to the times which the victorian churches struggled to recover from when first proposed by the young cleric from Oxford St Clements. But any church historian of the 3rd and 4th centuries would have spotted where all such horizontal concepts came from, from the diocesan synods of the early churches - some people, some clerics of the younger kind under-estimate the importance of this horizontal dimension. "Hearing" the christian flocks was an important step to updating one's own magisterium, since the Spirit oft walked amongst them - if one were a good clergyman most of one's good up-to-date ideas would emanate from the flocks. An important woke and awake christendom insight of the provincial and diocesan synods. That is a brief summary of the early history among the early christians of the story of the institute of the omnium gatherum in synod. Newman our guide.