On March 3 and 4, the largest gathering of bishops and lay people ever held on a Catholic college campus in the United States will take place at Boston College. The attendees, about 80 in total, include 5 cardinals, 6 archbishops, and 21 bishops along with numerous theologians and public intellectuals, as well as some journalists.
This gathering, entitled “Pope Francis, Vatican II, and the Way Forward,” is in its second iteration, following the success of last year’s inaugural event of the same title held on March 25 and 26 at Loyola University Chicago. Once again, Chatham House Rules will be in effect for all participants.
The event is co-sponsored by centers at three Jesuit universities: The Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Fordham University, and the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.
The directors of those three centers serve as co-coordinators of the event: Fr. Mark Massa, S.J. of Boston College, Michael P. Murphy of Loyola University Chicago, and David Gibson of Fordham University. The three have been meeting weekly over Zoom since June of last year to plan for this year’s summit.
Speaking on the second staging of this event, Fr. Massa said, “We’re building on the strength of what happened last year in Chicago … something like 32 of the 35 bishops wrote ‘please invite me back.’”
According to Fr. Massa, himself a historian of U.S. Catholic culture and thought, the guiding question of the event has been, “How can we address and evangelize our culture more successfully and be less divided amongst ourselves ideologically?
“I knew it was working [last year] when … I saw one of the reporters of the National Catholic Reporter talking to a cardinal right on Michigan Avenue.”
Fr. Massa also mentioned that a cardinal said to him at lunch last year at the Chicago event “We would never talk about this at the USCCB.” Fr. Massa said that at the USCCB, “The bishops don’t talk that honestly to each other because there’s huge divisions politically.”
“Unlike last year, this is a more focused event because last year we were talking about problems to achieving inner unity in the American church,” said Fr. Massa. “This year we’re actually using Pope Francis’s call to synodality as sort of the focal point.”
“Synodality is neither conservative or liberal,” continued Fr. Massa. “It goes back all the way … to the beginnings of Christianity.”
“That we even have a second year is I think a gift of the Holy Spirit,” said Gibson. “We thought something needed to be done to give another space for conversation and for sharing … and the reaction was so positive to it … I think this will maybe be an annual thing for the foreseeable future.”
“The first year was setting out the stakes of the problems and the challenges … the first year was framing. And now we’re going into implementation … for example, synodality.”
Murphy emphasized the importance of the theme of synodality, describing it as “part of the way forward vision that we have, which is to inhabit and live the Second Vatican Council and what its documents called for more faithfully in the 21st century.”
Speaking on the process of synodality and its listening component, Murphy commented, “Where does that listening go? Well, certainly it’s prayerful and it’s in that tradition of being Church together, but it’s also living things out, helping solve complex social problems that are outlined.”
Murphy, reflecting his background in literary and political cultures of Catholicism, also provided an angle on the role that tradition will play at the summit.
“The bishops and the academies, the universities, have been apart for a while, and so we bring them back together and we have journalists as well. We get all these groups together to help depolarize and inhabit our tradition, which is a faith and reason tradition, to talk, pray, and work.”
Emphasizing the work ethos of Catholic tradition, Murphy added that the event has “a summit quality, but it doesn’t want to stay there in the clouds … these bishops need to be the nodes of action.”
Gibson, a journalist by trade, grounded the event in the broader Catholic space of dialogue.
“There have been a lot of other movements of the Spirit, almost capillary, peripheral initiatives: Common Ground Movement, Voices of the Faithful, other things where Catholics have been able to have these conversations. And ours, I think, is one of those.”
“Like society at large, we in the Church are in trouble when it comes to healthy conversations,” Gibson continued. “At the same time, I think the division or polarization is exaggerated, and it’s very often confined to a very angry segment on the Catholic ‘right’… it’s an angry, vocal segment of one particular type of Catholic.”
“For one thing, all voices need to be heard. But, it’s also other voices, voices not associated with that angry, polarizing cohort, [that] need to organize themselves … That’s what we’re doing … We would rather, as they say, light a candle than curse the darkness.”
Speaking on their hopes for the reception of this event, which drew some scrutiny after last year’s rendition for being secretive, exclusive, and divisive, the co-coordinators each expressed their vision.
“We had a website last time, we had public liturgies, so the charge of secrecy was rather absurd,” said Gibson. “We’re proud of this as a sign of one of the many initiatives in the Church to incarnate that kind of synodal spirit.”
Fr. Massa added, “The reason why we’re so eager to invite most of the bishops from last year is that they proved themselves in the process, they’re very good listeners, they genuinely want to talk to theologians but also address theologians when they think theologians are wrong on things, so it’s a learning process on both sides … there’s precious few places in the American Catholic Church where that can happen.”
Murphy said, “This idea was never meant to supplant the Common Ground initiative, which still lives, but we were just drawn to restoring these relationships out of the context of self-evident hyper-polarization; we had to fix it in our church first … we’re trying to do what we can to serve the Church from our location and bring the people together.”
The keynote speakers include Rafael Luciani (Boston College) on “Synodality: A New Phase in the Reception of the Council,” Robin Darling Young (Catholic University of America) on “Synodality in the Early Church,” Hosffman Ospino (Boston College) on “Practical and Pastoral Theology,” and Bishop Daniel Flores (Diocese of Brownsville) on “Collegiality, Synodality, and the Pastoral Vision of Pope Francis.”
Gibson said, “I hope people will see it as the constructive conversation we are sure it will be.”
Thomas is a student in BC’s Carroll School of Management, who fittingly serves as the current Business Manager of The Torch in addition to his position as Campus News Editor. Thomas can be found around campus singing at Masses with the Liturgy Arts Group, tabling for the BC Pro-Life Club, deep in conversation while enjoying BC Dining cuisine, or gazing in awe at Gasson Hall and its Collegiate Gothic style architectural neighbors.
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