By Brad Miner
The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and to be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church does not invent, revise, or vote on its Magisterium, its authoritative application of that depositum fidei. It receives, guards, and transmits that ancient faith. Doctrine may develop in the sense described by St. John Henry Newman, growing in clarity and application, like an acorn becoming an oak. But it cannot be renegotiated—nor reversed!—by majority sentiment or contemporary enthusiasm.
The claim to have received the Truth and to guard it is the entire reason for the Church’s existence and makes it something other than a voluntary religious association. Yet synodality, whatever its defenders may say, introduces a mechanism capable of dissolving that claim: a permanent, indefinite, and participatory process for generating endless contemporary ecclesial consensuses that function increasingly as rival sources of authority alongside the settled deposit of faith and— from the innovators’ point of view— ahead of it and therefore of the Magisterium charged with guarding it.
The vagueness we have seen so far in the synodal process has not been incidental. It is a feature, not a bug. After multiple synodal meetings, the Church still lacks a fixed definition of synodality: only descriptions of a “style,” a “process,” an “instinct”; and this inability to define synodality clearly is no minor omission.
It recalls the first Barack Obama campaign, which defined its agenda with a single word: “Change.” It meant nothing then; “walking together” means nothing now. Where is our fixed point?
Thomas Aquinas and others, including the early Church Fathers and various councils, have given the Church a fixed point and a shared technical vocabulary, precise enough to allow the adjudication of all real disputes. Synodality has no equivalent. It operates with “individual discernment” and the “sense of the faithful”: categories that are functionally unfalsifiable: whatever the assembled body concludes is read backward through the scandalous claim that every new proposal is what the Holy Spirit was saying from the beginning! At last, we are told, we are listening.
But a process without fixed criteria of correction is not discernment; it is consensus-building with theological vocabulary pasted on, like the stickers my grandchildren slap on almost everything, including Grandpa’s face.
History shows where this will lead. The Church of England is the closest institutional analogue we have, and it demonstrates exactly how the process unfolds over time: synodal bodies incorporating clergy and laity into decision-making, provincial autonomy under a loose central authority, and a steady sequence of changes, each presented as a modest and “pastoral” accommodation—the new marriage after divorce, the ordination of women, blessings for same-sex unions, approval of artificial contraception, ambiguity on abortion—all of which, in time, transform Anglicanism’s doctrines and fracture its unity.
Entire Anglican and Episcopal provinces now refuse to recognize one another’s positions on same-sex “marriage” and the ordination of women. The installation of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury has provoked a schism within Anglicanism.
Yet it is the mechanism, not any single decision, that was and remains the true and permanent danger.
And that same mechanism is inherent in any Catholic version of synodality. Germany’s Synodal Way pushes toward a permanent Synodal Council that would give laity shared governing authority with bishops over doctrine and discipline. Rome has intervened directly to stop it, but several German bishops continue to resist Vatican warnings openly. Who knows what the outcome will be? But a “national” Church attempting to institutionalize exactly the Anglican pattern within Catholic structures has so far been contained only by direct Roman nullification. That is a fragile brake, not a structural guarantee. And “synodality” remains on the lips of Pope Leo XIV.
Meanwhile, the traditional filter that once protected the Magisterium from synodal momentum has been weakened from within: under the 2018 reform of the synodal procedure, a pope may now adopt a synod’s final document directly as part of his “ordinary magisterium,” bypassing the post-synodal exhortation that historically allowed popes to reframe or decline synodal proposals. That filter worked as designed when Pope Francis declined the Amazon Synod’s proposal on married priests. But it did not work that way for the 2024 synodal assembly, whose final document became magisterial teaching immediately, without that intermediate exhortation. The very safeguard that synodality’s defenders point to as proof the system cannot run away is now optional at a pope’s discretion: which means it is no structural safeguard at all, but only a personal one, good exactly as long as the man who holds the office chooses to use it… or not.
And we recall how Pope Francis responded to concerns about the wording of Amoris laetitia (2016) that allowed (with “discernment”) the reception of the Eucharist by civilly remarried divorced couples. He told the bishops of Argentina, who sought clarity, that “there are no other interpretations.” In doing so, he abrogated canon law and gave us a foretaste of the synodal process.
And there is the passive-aggressive Fiducia supplicans, the innovative pastoral mechanism for blessing same-sex couples, extended even while it is maintained that the immemorial definition of marriage remains unchanged. And there you have the precise sequence that has preceded doctrinal change in every Protestant body: practice moves first, under pastoral cover, and doctrine is declared unchanged… until that fiction becomes unsustainable.
That is why the synodal threat is existential. What is at risk is not merely this or that teaching, but what makes the Catholic Church the Catholic Church: an authoritative and non-negotiable deposit of faith, guarded by a Magisterium whose principles bind all believers.
A Church governed by synodal consensus is a different kind of institution from the one that, for two millennia, has existed to hand on what it has received. It may retain its name, its buildings, and even its structural hierarchy. What it will necessarily lose is the claim that made it worth being Catholic. And that loss, once the mechanism has run its course, would probably not be reversible by another vote.