The purpose of the Synod is not to produce documents, but to plant dreams, draw forth prophecies and visions, allow hope to flourish, inspire trust, bind up wounds, weave together relationships, and awaken a dawn of hope. As the global Church officially enters this process of synodality, I sat down with modern theologian and social scientist Diarmuid O'Murchu to explore what it means to structurally bind up our institutional wounds, navigate creative chaos, and explore how an evolutionary, quantum lens can help us move beyond imperial religion.
The Evolution of Collegiality: A Crisis of Inclusion
Yago: Good morning, Diarmuid. Thank you so much for agreeing to have this conversation. The preparatory documents for this Synod explicitly state that its purpose is to plant dreams, draw forth visions, allow hope to flourish, and bind up wounds. To open our dialogue, how relevant is this specific moment in history to you? Looking back at the framework of your book, "When the Disciples Come of Age," can we realistically talk about a Church coming of age?
Diarmuid: Thank you for inviting me into the conversation, and I do like the opening quote that you have given. It certainly is very aspirational, and visionary, and full of hope, and so forth. I think one of my main concerns, however, is for a need for some clarity, and therefore, at a very early stage, I would like this Synod to actually address the title itself, a Synod on Synodality, and the very word Synod, what it denotes, what it means, and what are the hopes that are being built around it.
Now, as I understand it, the concept of the Synod, as we understand it today, and as we're employing it today, came with Vatican II, and it was an important instrument in what Vatican II called collegiality. That was where there was a movement away from the Pope himself, giving very direct instructions to the universal church, and then leaving it—well, indeed, expecting the bishops and the priests to pick up those guidelines, and take them forward, and pass them on to the people of God.
The understanding, as I have it from Vatican II, is that the Pope and the hierarchy, instead of dealing directly with the people and passing the message down in a hierarchical line, would work much more directly with the bishops. They began to see the bishops as key instrumental people in the process of collegiality. I think the intention was keeping with the spirit of Vatican II, that the church is the people of God, that the bishops themselves would enter into a deeper dialogue with the people in this process of collegiality.
Now, to that end, they did set up bishops' conferences around the world, and I guess some of them did try to link a bit more closely with the people, but a lot of them didn't. They were basically in-house conversational bases among the bishops themselves. One of the missing elements, or at least one of the elements that I'm quite unclear about, and perhaps that's where I'm feeling the need for clarity, is what role do the priests have in that entire process? Because I certainly have heard stories from priests who felt very excluded by their bishops, or still had relationships with bishops of the old patriarchal style. The bishop gave a command, you went and you did it, that kind of thing.
The bishop changed you to a new parish and gave you a week's notice, that kind of more hierarchical, patriarchal approach. So where the priests fitted in to this whole collegial approach is something I'm not at all clear about. And consequently then, because the people were seen as relating with the priests rather than relating with the bishops, because of the lack of clarity around the priests, I think the people of God were often left unclear also as to where that process was leading to.
Now, what I find interesting then in the preparation here in Europe, and I'll speak merely from my European experience, of last year, when the people first gathered into these groups and began having conversations, a huge number of people were saying how great and how good it was to be listened to. And so for me that begs the question, then what was the listening that has gone on since Vatican II? Because it sounds like that a lot of people feel they have not been listened to and that they never were being listened to.
So it feels like there's a catching up to be done there and so to get clarity. So I presume then the goal of the synodality as understood by Vatican II was to create a more communal context within the life of the church. So to use the language that's often used in Roman documents, that the church is a community of communities, or a communion of communities, so that there's a communal sense and a movement towards greater consensus around everything that's important for the people of God.
And that's a stage we have not reached. I think it exists in some parts of the Catholic world, so it's quite haphazard. And I think bishops themselves have a whole range of different understandings about it.
Pope Francis and the Dilemma of Pastoral Reform
Yago: It feels like an institutional bottleneck. Pope Francis explicitly desires a Church rooted in greater communication, yet he seems structurally caught in a trap.
Diarmuid: I think Francis himself, who is desperately and eagerly desiring a church in which there is greater communication, in which there is greater sharing, I think is caught in quite a dilemma. And we saw that dilemma a few years back in one of the earlier synods when he became Pope, when a major pastoral issue arose about the position of divorced remarried people in the Catholic church being prohibited to receive the sacraments.
There was a strong desire that that should be changed, particularly for people who are divorced and remarried, but they're deeply involved in their parish communities, and they're obviously people of faith and of goodwill, and they should be given full freedom to come to the sacraments. And it seemed, and indeed Francis himself, very strongly indicated that that was his desire.
What happened in the particular synod where it was discussed and explored, at the very end, Francis said he wasn't going to take up any position on it, he was going to pass it on to the bishops, so that each local ordinary would deal with it in his own guises. And see, that's the theory and the practice of the collegiality, but unfortunately then it turned out to be something of a disaster, because most bishops, it seems, didn't think about it.
Either they were uncomfortable with it themselves, or perhaps those who tried to do something about it met with various degrees of unease or opposition from the priests, and maybe in some cases from the people, particularly these particular human groups that tend to be rather right-wing, as we say. And so the issue really has remained unresolved. And I suppose that's the kind of example that springs to mind, that there are issues there that do need to be clarified around what we mean by synodality.
The other contribution that I feel I want to make to it is this. I'm not an extensive reader of Roman documents, but from the ones I'm familiar with, and I've heard other people make this observation too, that when you look at Roman documents since Vatican II, particularly related to the church itself, they all tend to begin with chapters. Supposing we have a document of five chapters.
Chapter one, the church is about communion and community, drawing on the whole ecclesial dimension of Paul's view and Paul's understanding. Absolutely right, in my opinion. Then chapter two, and this is where things begin to go desperately wrong: how to be in communion with the Pope, with the hierarchy, with the bishops, with the magisterium. And chapter five, what would communion mean among the people of God?
Now in my opinion, the material in chapter five should be in chapter two, and the material in chapter two should be in chapter five. In other words, communion, yes, is the essence. And since the church is 99% about people, what would communion among the people look like? And how would people exercise their place and their responsibilities within that sense of community? And then what kind of leadership would we need to reinforce and to support that universal sense of community, universal in the sense of church? Now to my mind, that's what I want to see this synod try to address. Can we get some clarity on all that?
The Disciples Come of Age: A New Class of Theologians
Yago: Following what you are saying, you wrote a book called 'When the Disciple Comes of Age: Christian Identity in the 21st Century'. Can we talk also of a church coming of age? Are we there, and how prepared is the church for this event?
Diarmuid: Yes, in my own workshops, I often alert people to the fact that back in 1970, theologians in the Catholic Church, we reckon that 95% of them at that time still were priests. In other words, theology was mainly the reserve of what we call the clericalized church, and about 5% were lay people, and those were mainly sisters.
Now today, we reckon from the broader general research being done, that the lay proportion of theologians in the Catholic Church is somewhere between 60 and 70%, and so the priest-theologian is a declining entity and reality.
Some of those people are every bit as conventional and traditional as any traditional cleric would have been, but by and large, these lay people are bringing affirmation into theology, into scripture. They're asking deeper questions. They are asking the more adult questions: What does it mean to be an adult in the church?
And that approach, they're also trying, I think, to do theology and to discern scripture more in the context of the world and not just the church, and so they are about an expanded horizon, and indeed, it is about a horizon of community, but in this case, including creation as well as including people.
Now, in their research, they are also surfacing new understandings historically, which are quite important for us, and I just want to draw your attention and the attention of people to this book, which came out in 2021, After Jesus Before Christianity. The contributors to that book are mainly lay people. They're all scripture scholars, mainly in America, and what they're looking at is the development of the church in the first 300 years before Constantine came on stream and began to give a new direction to the church in terms of the imperial consciousness of Rome at the time.
They're critiquing the way we read and interpret the early history of the church, which, of course, has mainly been done by priests, historians, and theologians, in which, quite rightly, they do highlight the beginnings of a clergy, the beginnings of bishops and other leaders, and the beginnings of a more formal structure, and yet that was a dimension of what has not been given credit.
These people claim that in those first 300 years, there was a people's movement which was very dynamic, it was very creative, and it was focused mainly on a whole range of small groups, and many of those groups were fully eucharistic without necessarily having a priest.
When Constantine came along in the beginning of the 4th century, then he began to change all that by adopting the more imperial model, and within 100 years, then you had a more clericalized side of the church growing and developing. So, when we talk about the disciple coming of age, there's something about revisiting our scriptures and prioritizing the kingdom of God, which is the foundation of all authentic Christian community, it seems to me, but there's also something about revisiting our history, and beginning to see the history in a more inclusive way, and in somewhat a deeper way.
And I think a number of the lay participants at the Synod itself will certainly be coming from that background, and a lot of the lay people that are looking to the Synod for some life and hope, I think it is around this desire for a more participative sense of the church as community, locally, regionally, and globally.
Wholearchies vs. Hierarchies: The Illusion of Cosmic Pedestals
Yago: In the preparatory document for this Synod it is written: 'this is an ecclesial process that can only take place at the heart of a hierarchically structured community. It is in the fruitful bond between the sensus fidei of the people of God, and the magisterial function of the pastors, that the unanimous consensus of the whole church in the same faith is realized.' Is a hierarchical structure truly compatible with a synodal one?
Diarmuid: I think that's a very critical question for the Synod itself to look at, and certainly among a growing body of these lay theologians that I'm talking about, and I think a lay consensus within the body of the people themselves are beginning to feel more and more an incongruence, is the word I would use, between the emphasis on hierarchy and their desire for something more communal.
Now, this is where I think also the other sciences can have something quite important to contribute here, and I think a lot of the lay people that are desiring something different from the Synod would be influenced by other sciences, whether it's quantum physics, whether it's cosmology, or whether it's the insights coming from the social sciences today.
So, for instance, if you look at contemporary biology, and even the training of our biologists to the present time, biologists are told to look in the natural world for nested hierarchies. In other words, the Russian doll, things within things. To understand me, you need to understand my family, the next better whole. To understand my family, you need to understand the culture of the country I come from, and so forth. That everything belongs to a set of holes, W-H-O-L-E-S. And the biologists call those nested hierarchies. That's because their whole training has desired that they think that way.
But in actual fact, what they're looking at, a lot of modern scientists would say, they're not looking at nested hierarchies, they're looking at what we call whole hierarchies. W-H-O-L-A-R-C-H-I-E-S, whole hierarchies. Now, whole hierarchy comes from the concept of the whole, and it is what I've just been saying: to understand me as a person, you need to understand the series of holes, W-H-O-L-E-S, to which I belong. That's what's known as whole hierarchy.
My personal opinion on this matter, and I think a growing number of biologists are moving in this direction, is that strictly speaking, there are no hierarchies anywhere in nature, or anywhere in God's creation. When the biologists talk about nested hierarchies, they're actually looking at whole hierarchies. And therefore that creation, as the creation of our God, is programmed primarily for whole hierarchies, not for hierarchies. And therefore, our spirituality should be exploring primarily what would whole hierarchical structures look like, whether among humans, or in the wider world of nature.
And therefore, I think for our church, our church here needs to listen to the insights and the wisdom of some of these other scientists, and therefore maybe begin to correct the language that they're using there in the preparatory document. They're almost saying, which would be a very unhealthy thing now to say, we must not touch or interfere with the hierarchical reality of our church. It's a God-given reality. Well, if it's not a God-given reality in creation, then why should it be a God-given reality in the life of the church? I think this is a very sensitive, delicate, but important question that does need to be looked at.
Beyond Democracy: The Companionship of Empowerment
Yago: The preparatory document also claims that the consultation of the people of God does not imply the assumption within the church of the dynamics of democracy based on the principle of majority. It is often said that democracy does not exist in the Catholic Church. Do you agree with this, and how does this mesh with synodality?
Diarmuid: I think the issue of democracy is actually becoming increasingly problematic around our world, politically and economically. Because for so much of our history over the past few thousand years, what we mean by democracy embodies hierarchical structures. And as we try to move more and more towards a more communitarian, wholearchical way of operating, democracy itself in several parts of the world is becoming more and more problematic. So, no, I wouldn't want the church to say we must become a democracy. Because the whole history of democracy itself, I think is somewhat tainted and problematic.
What I would want to say is we must become more communitarian. And by communitarian, and therefore, in terms of communitarian or communal process, we're looking, therefore, at decision making, primarily through consensus. And that's a very skillful art, and not an easy one to achieve. But it can be learned. And there are many people from the social sciences who are trying to refine the skills of what consensual processes look like. It can be messy at times, it can be very time consuming, but it is the more adult way of involving people.
And then, of course, if we're talking about consensus among people, we have to look at consensus with a wider web of life as well. So, no, the word democracy is not the right word here. The word community, communal process, and then tracing back the roots for that understanding of structure to the notion of the kingdom of God in the Gospels, but kingdom of God understood as the companionship of empowerment. That's the source. So, in this desire for a more democratic church, I think it's a desire for a more communal way of being church. But that's not just for the sake of being nice to each other, or for the sake of including each other. It is based solidly, I believe, on the Gospels and on the vision of Jesus.
The Misuse of Power and the Reality of Clericalism
Yago: In this line, how meaningful is the expression 'companionship of empowerment' that you use as an original translation of the Kingdom of God, especially when dealing with the abuse of power?
Diarmuid: Throughout the history of the church, and I suppose, particularly since the time of Constantine, power, patriarchal power, hierarchical power became a very central issue on the understanding that our God is a ruling king and rules down through selected people for the benefit of the whole. And I think that model is the one that's not merely in the life of the church, but politically, economically and socially, that model is becoming more and more dysfunctional.
And of course, as many of your listeners will already know, the unfortunate issue of sex abuse in the life of our church has nothing really to do with sex. It's the abuse of power. And all the research shows that very clearly. And so we do in our church, and this is not merely a Catholic problem—I think this is a problem right across the major world of religions, and a serious problem, for example, in the Muslim religion of the present time—this perception and understanding that God rules through a particular type of power, and that we must be receptive and respectful of that.
Whereas it seems to me that the whole vision of our gospel as a Christian people, and particularly through the parables, through the Sermon on the Mount, through the healing miracles, is an orientation towards empowerment. And therefore, how do our leaders and how do our people begin to work together to create a church and a world where mutual empowerment becomes more real and more fulfilling to the benefit of everybody, and indeed to the benefit of the wider creation as well. So I'd like to see a move away from the emphasis on a unique spiritually mandated power to the call for empowerment for everybody.
The Crucifixion of Clericalism and Reclaiming the Sacraments
Yago: The preparatory documents note that the entire Church is called to deal with the weight of a culture imbued with clericalism inherited from her history, out of which forms of abuse are grafted. This synodality will likely expose old wounds. Is the Church truly ready to humble herself, listen, and engage in genuine reconciliation?
Diarmuid: I think there's a double part to that question. Is the church ready? I would think there's a lot of people in the church who are ready, and I guess there are a lot who are not, and maybe are very resistant. One, there are two issues I'd like to see the synod address, but I don't think the readiness is there yet for it. But if we could create a readiness even to address it, would be a major step forward.
You mentioned the word clericalism. Now in the history of our church, I think clericalism became a major problem after the Council of Trent in the 16th century, when we took the priest and put him up on a pedestal as this kind of supreme model for all Christian life. And the study of theology then became a reserve for the priest or the clerical student for the next 400 years down to the middle of the 20th century. And so I think it was that over-exalted status that has led into an enormous amount of the abuse in the life of our church over the past 300 to 400 years particularly.
We're now at a stage where priesthood is understood as clericalism. So I like to draw the distinction between priesthood, which in its oldest understanding is the servant of the servants of God, with all the emphasis on service, as distinct from clericalism, which is that kind of mandated or specific divine power, which was particularly emphasized from Trent on. So to my mind, the crisis we have in priesthood today is, number one, can we make that distinction and try and get clarity on that distinction, because we're in danger of ending up with more clericalism than genuine priesthood.
And so there is, again, a crucifixion—that's the word I use, and I think that's the word that needs to be used. There is a crucifixion of clericalism going on, and I think priesthood as we know it today, certainly in Europe, and probably right across the world over the next 20 to 30 years, is going to virtually die out completely. And we need to face that as a Christian people, because certainly already for us in Europe here, we have a dire shortage of priests, and we're doing things like coupling, or creating what one bishop here now calls families of parishes, so that we try to ensure people will have a Sunday mass.
But what we're doing in the meanwhile is, we're undermining and we're eroding any sense of local faith community. So we are doing something quite damaging in order to try and hold on to a priority of clericalism. And then that leads to my second observation: if priesthood as we know it is dying out, and is going to diminish very seriously, where does that leave people with their sacramental life?
Our understanding of sacrament actually arises originally from our human capacity for ritual making. We're all born with that capacity, and you see it wonderfully lived out at times in the rites of passage of many indigenous peoples around the world. And of course, the missionary Vincent J. Donovan, when he went to work with the Maasai people, that was one of his great insights: they already, in his view, had all seven sacraments in their very rich rites of passage.
Therefore, I think we need to start making the statement—and I've been making it for about the past 10 years in various workshops—sacraments belong primarily to people. They do not belong primarily to priests. So what do we need to do to begin handing the sacraments back to our people? Because our people have great difficulty; they don't even know how to begin reclaiming. There's a huge re-education to be done.
And I think those two dimensions are closely related. Whatever priesthood of the future will look like, I think it might look like the priest in the future being the leader in the process of ritual making. Not monopolizing it, but obviously having something of that deeper, discerning wisdom to help the people themselves to rediscover their capacity for ritual making. And in saying all that, I'm talking about empowering. But yes, it is a Calvary moment. It's a Paschal journey moment.
How do we allow something to die that has become so dysfunctional? Can we let go of it and trust that the Spirit will bring about the new in due course? And meanwhile, begin exploring what would it mean to begin handing sacraments back to the people? And inviting people to take responsibility and enter into their own training to be able to reclaim their responsibilities as sacramental people. To me, I'd love to see the synod address those issues, or even just somehow prepare the ground where we could begin to have a conversation along those lines.
Navigating Chaos: Spiritual Bypassing vs. Discernment
Yago: You speak about the evolutionary logic of birth, death, and rebirth. This synodality seems to require entering a space of deconstruction, disorder, and mourning. One major risk when dealing with these unpleasant dynamics is spiritual bypassing—using spirituality to avoid facing systemic shadows. Are we in danger of doing this?
Diarmuid: We're not really ready. And I speak here for the moment, part of my background is in grief therapy. I think the challenge here for all of us as a Church, and this includes lay people—this is not just about priests or bishops—is it's almost an invitation to enter into a grieving process. And that means can we rise above the denial? Can we face the fact that there is a crisis? And the crisis is not just about sex abuse. I think that can be a bit of a distraction because as I've already said, the research shows very clearly that sex is not so much the problem, it's the abuse of power that is the problem.
So can we allow a grieving process to take place whereby we acknowledge that there is something that served us well, served us very well for much of the 2000 years of Christendom, and is now itself declining. Historically, the whole notion of a formal priesthood, and particularly as an exclusively male structure, is little more than about five or six thousand years old. There are people that have been kind of indoctrinated in the fact that it's the past 2000 years that are important and it doesn't matter what happened before then. This won't necessarily mean a great deal. And therefore, again, we're back into the need for re-education.
After the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, there was that gradual movement towards more patriarchal ways of doing things. First, it happened with the creation of kings. Kingship is only about seven or eight thousand years old. Then came warriors on horseback, which brings in the whole violence of the patriarchal system. And then the third institution was that of male priests, whose primary role was to create sacrifices to appease the God, who was getting perceived as being identical with the king. So that was the beginning of priesthood, with the emphasis on sacrifice.
Now, when you begin to realize we as a human species have been on this planet for seven million years, and we have evidence to show that we were burying our dead with elaborate rituals 70,000 years ago, then, against that background, this particular understanding of priesthood is very recent. So why should it be around forever? The fact that it's now in deep trouble is part of an evolutionary process. How can we allow it to die? How can we help it to die? And how can we become more responsive, more adult ourselves, facing up to that? I think that is the more adult, discerning conversation that will need to take place across the Catholic world over the next 20, 30, 40 years. This affects all the Christian churches, and in due course, will become problematic for some of the other monotheistic religions as well.
Yago: To handle these hidden layers, Arnold Mindell speaks about deep democracy—validating non-consensus realities like emotions, feelings, and the dreaming process. How can we honor these dynamics during institutional shifts?
Diarmuid: I think there are two metaphors at play there, because a lot of people facilitating religious orders today use these two metaphors: one is the midwife and the other is the hospice care. The midwife is all about how do we help bring something new to birth? And of course, we'd all love to be in the place of the midwife. But very often the midwife cannot do her work until we first attend to the needs of the hospice carer.
And the hospice carer is the one who sits with the dying and tries to allow and facilitate as much dignity and peace for the dying person or the dying reality. Now, that's an area where you talk about emotions. Obviously, there are a lot of very deep and difficult emotions at stake. The emotions in the midwife tend to be a bit more exuberant and joyful and outgoing, but we also need people who have the skills and the wisdom and above all the discernment to be with the hospice carer and to also know that that is right too and has its time and has its place.
And emotionally there, as every hospice carer knows, one will need regular supervision and a lot of regular support because the emotions are more difficult—about loneliness, about anger, about helplessness. But these are human emotions too. And so I think that's the challenge facing us in religious life and in the church generally over the next number of years: how do we try to honor the hospice carer while awaiting the right time to honor the midwife?
Yago: When church leaders emphasize that the synod is an act of prayer rather than an ecclesiastical parliament, does that sometimes skirt on the edge of this spiritual avoidance?
Diarmuid: Yes, I think there is a great danger there. And of course, any of us in religious life, I think, would have encountered that in the past from well-meaning but not very helpful superiors who said, 'Well, go away and pray about it and everything will be fine.' But maybe we should have been told, 'Go and get some professional help with that particular problem,' whether it had to do with an addiction, a sexual problem, an authority problem, or whatever. The tendency to over-spiritualize is a real danger for us.
I was just reading yesterday in the magazine called The Tablet, Vincent Nichols, the Cardinal in England, had a pastoral letter last week, again saying that the synod is not meant to be an ecclesiastical United Nations assembly, not a church parliament, not a church convention, not a referendum on the teaching of the church. He said, quoting Pope Francis, it will be a grace-filled event, a process of healing, and will be guided by the Holy Spirit. Beautiful, noble aspirations, nobody would doubt that. But I read there a tendency to sort of say, 'Well, if everybody is nice to each other, and we keep a spirit of prayer, it will work well.'
Whereas, in fact, we have some very difficult issues to face, and even naming them will not be pleasant. But they need to be named, if we're to be people of integrity, in a church of integrity. And so, yes, there is that danger that we over-spiritualize, or spiritualize in a way that is not healthy. And that's why I keep coming back to this word, discernment. Because as I understand Christian discernment, it's looking at all the factors that are involved, the pleasant ones, as well as the unpleasant ones. And then trying to, in an atmosphere of consensus, begin asking, where is the spirit leading us here, or inviting us here? And maybe reminding people that often the spirit is most fertile in the midst of chaos. We see that in the opening verses of the book of Genesis: the spirit drawing forth order and creativity from the chaos of creation itself. And I think, on that note, if we use the word discernment more frequently, we'd be on more authentic grounds in dealing with issues.
Collaborating with the Great Spirit: Lessons from First Nations
Yago: The preparatory documents urge us to let ourselves be educated by the Spirit to develop a truly synodal mentality. In your books, you write extensively about how First Nations peoples collaborate responsibly with the Great Spirit. What can the institutional Church learn from them?
Diarmuid: I think we have something quite important to learn from our First Nations peoples in terms of their spirituality, though many of them struggle themselves because they're influenced by modern factors like the rest of us are. Firstly, in terms of their spirituality, they use the phrase the Great Spirit; they don't use the word 'God' usually. And what they mean by the Great Spirit—again, they tend not to speculate or what we would call theologize about it.
For them, their sense is that the Great Spirit is there in the soil, in the earth, in the land, in the material creation itself. And it's important for the hearers to realize they're not talking about pantheism; they're not saying that God is confined to the earth and to the soil. It is panentheism. And therefore, through a more organic relationship with the land, with its fertility, with its cycles, with its seasons, they come to understand and internalize a sense of the Great Spirit at work in the whole creation, including themselves.
And therefore, their rituals—and again, I think we have a lot to learn from them about what good ritual could mean—their rituals are not about trying to pacify God but rather to enable them and empower them to try and enter into a more organic, meaningful relationship so that they can work more collaboratively with God to have more appropriate and responsible care for the earth. I'd love to see theologians incorporate some of those insights into how we do theology, particularly when it comes to dealing with the Holy Spirit.
Why, therefore, do we find among some of our indigenous peoples around the world today that they also have huge problems around drugs, around other abusive substances, around power struggles? Indeed, a lot of the same issues that we have within the church itself are among other peoples and other cultures. And this is a factor that sometimes, again, in the history of the church, we have not given much attention to. And that may be because the social sciences are more a development of the 20th and 21st centuries. And it's this word, systemic, that we humans are not just creatures who operate on our own, as if only the human reality mattered. We are all part of systems. We're all part of structures—political, economic, social, and so forth. And these structures and institutions can have a far bigger influence on us than we care to acknowledge.
A religious community is a system. A family is a system. A parish is a system. And in every system, the principle of quantum physics works: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, to really understand—so for example, in a parish council, a parish council is not just about 10 individual people. It's when those 10 people come together, they become a group; they become a system. And often things can be going on, what we call group dynamics, in that group, which can stymie or undermine seriously the work of the group, unless the group has the skills to be more aware of the dynamics going on, and can have the maturity, and sometimes the aid and support of a facilitator to address those dysfunctionalities.
And in that way too, I don't doubt for one moment the divinity and the divine power of the spirit. But we, through our human behaviors, particularly our collective behaviors, and the behaviors that we're often not aware of, we can seriously block the spirit at work, particularly in our group processes, whether that be a parish council, a parish, a school, or a workplace. And the work of the spirit—I've no doubt about the creativity of the spirit, and the ability of the spirit to draw forth creativity and potential from chaos.
Now, as human beings, particularly in our group contexts, we tend to ward off anything that feels a bit chaotic or over-challenging. And we can have some very subtle dynamics through which we do that, by keeping silent, by not speaking directly to the issue, or by distracting ourselves from the issue by cracking jokes or something like that. These are all the kind of dysfunctional dynamics. Fortunately, today, in the world and in the church, we now have a lot of good people who are well-trained with the skills that can help and support us in these matters.
I think myself that every dynamic parish council should bring in an outside facilitator, maybe once a year, to help the group itself to look at the dynamics and work with it. And in that way, face the difficult issues, face the chaos, and that will make us more creative and productive at the end of the day. So, yes, I've no doubt about the energy and the potential of the spirit, but we also need to be much more aware and much better educated on how we, not merely individually, but particularly systemically, can block the work of the spirit.
Naming the Elephants in the Room
Yago: One way of blocking the Spirit is by avoiding the 'elephants in the room'—those enormous, controversial issues that everyone knows exist but nobody names out of discomfort. Do you see any specific elephants in this Synod process?
Diarmuid: Well, I think I've already named one, and I'll name it again, and that's clericalism, and the various shapes and forms that that can take. So, a very personal example—and I hope this is not offensive to my friends in the Philippines—I have challenged people at times in the Philippines, when they keep calling me father, to call me by my first name. And I even say, 'I wasn't baptized father, I was baptized Diarmuid.' So, can you not honor me as a person, rather than someone in a role? And the answer they'll always give: 'Well, that would be disrespectful, and we've always been told to respect the priest.'
Now, you see, what's going on there can be quite unhealthy, because, and in a sense, that's been one of the contributory factors to the sex abuse, and indeed to other forms of abuse, too. We put a person so far up on a pedestal, that, you know, we don't know how to challenge the scenario that often happened, unfortunately, with the sex abuse. So, the priest took the boys away for a camping holiday, or they were going up to his house frequently, and the community was naive there and said, 'But he's a priest,' as if that means it's 100% safe. In other words, there was no acknowledgment that we priests are human beings, first and foremost.
We have all the basic needs that human beings have. And because we're human, we also have a lot of the fragilities of the human condition. So, that's what I mean by the elephant in the room: that we're afraid—it's almost like, yeah, again, maybe it's over-spiritualizing—can we regard our priests as human beings? Okay, they have a special vocation, but so have 110 other people in other professions. They have a unique vocation, we're not doubting that, but they are human beings. And at the moment, we are exhausting many of them, because of the demands we're putting on them. And that would be one way of trying to name the elephant in the room: let's look at our common humanity as we gather in this gathering, the synod, or whatever gathering it may be. First and foremost, we're all human beings in this room. Let's start there. There's also something about an adult honesty about this. That would be a way of naming the elephant.
Unprocessed History and Cultural Blindspots
Yago: Leonardo Boff beautifully noted that Jesus was so human that He could only be God. In our multicultural communities, we often carry hidden historical baggage—the trauma of colonizing or being colonized. Can this unprocessed history be another major elephant in the synodal path?
Diarmuid: Yes, again, it's something about—I mean, for example, I often find myself saying, talking about the story of Jesus, we say Jesus was fully God and fully human. Well, you can't be fully human unless you make mistakes. Therefore, Jesus made mistakes. The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman: he made one awful blunder on that one. Or when he says, 'You won't have gone round the towns of Israel till the Son of Man appears in glory'—if he said that, well, he made one big mistake as well.
And so there's something about: can we acknowledge the greatness of our humanity on the one hand, and the great potential in it, but also acknowledge that we're all frail human beings who can make mistakes, who can get things wrong, and then can we learn to forgive and forget? And so again, the elephant in the room there would be something about treating certain people, whether it's our priests or our bishops or whatever, as if somehow or other, they have a perfection or a holiness that the rest of us don't have. Putting them on this pedestal, at the end of the day, is no good for them, nor for the church at large.
And therefore, by bringing everything back to that more human level and trying to keep the conversation at the human level. Be vigilant when the conversation tends to veer off into over-spiritualizing, claiming 'The Holy Spirit will guide us through that.' Okay, but what are some of the challenges of that? What are the blocks that we are likely to put in the way? What would be the discerning skills we would need to be more open to the Holy Spirit? So, yeah, that elephant in the room is the tendency to over-spiritualize. Can we call a halt to that? Can we speak to it? Can we challenge it? So in a sense, I've named three elephants in the room already: clericalism, avoiding the basic human level that we all share and honoring it, and then the tendency to over-spiritualize.
Vulnerability and the Multi-Level Architecture of Accountability
Yago: What is the practical role of accountability and structural vulnerability in making this synodal conversion real?
Diarmuid: Taking first the vulnerability one, I find myself as a counselor—and I think a lot of parents could speak to this in dealing with their children, for example—when we allow a person to tell their story and we create a context where the story can be heard non-judgmentally, that can be extremely freeing and liberating for people. In other words, the warts and all, it all comes out. There's no judgment. And we shouldn't be quick to run in and offer solutions; there's something about honoring a story, giving us a story with its dark side and its light side. The 'Jim would fix it' attitude tends to come in. So, just listening to the story, listening particularly to the difficult bits of a person's story or a group story, and just simply holding the story and honoring it—I find that a helpful way of dealing with the vulnerability.
Now, the accountability is a much more complex question. For instance, here in my home country of Ireland, we have this clustering of parishes. And the basic line is, 'Well, the people must have a mass.' So, there's little or no recognition of the damage being done to local communities. And there's no attempt at all at giving the skills to local communities to be able even to conduct Eucharistic liturgies in more creative ways. So, the only accountability is from the top down. There's no facility in place there for a mutual accountability. And unfortunately, in a traditionally strong Catholic country, that's what a lot of people want: they just want it that way, and they don't want to be involved in some new way.
Now, presumably most of the lay people at the Synod are people that really do want to be more involved in their church. So, we do have a problem about trying to encourage more people with a desire to be involved. And an education will be required that that involvement needs to involve a sense of accountability. So, it's not just accountability from priest to people; it's also accountability among the people themselves. And then it's accountability among the priests themselves, obviously, with their bishop. So, it's accountability at a whole range of different levels.
And it's an attempt at accountability that will make consensus work better, that will make the building of community work better, that will help the church to become that kind of empowering community that would better reflect the new reign of God. So, the accountability has a whole range of practical dimensions to it. But I think for me, there's also a deep theological scriptural dimension to it: without a good, healthy, and dynamic structure of accountability, we can't claim that we're being accountable to the new reign of God, and to the sense of mission that arises from this.
The Metamorphic Cycle of the Butterfly
Yago: This platform is named the 'Butterfly Framework,' tracking the metamorphic logic of order, disorder, and reorder. In the autumn of our structures, how do we learn to flow with terminal decline without panicking?
Diarmuid: It's interesting that when the caterpillar reaches a certain critical stage, it's almost like it has to die before it can give new life. It's a death-resurrection process. And then the new life looks almost completely different from what the caterpillar was, but there's obviously a continuity there. And the more holy example that I often share with people, outside the window of the room from which I'm speaking now, is this wonderful sycamore tree.
Going into our autumn time here in Europe, that tree is beginning to shed its leaves. And within about the next six weeks, all the leaves will fall off and the tree is completely bare. It often leaves me with a kind of feeling of bareness or barrenness. But I need to keep reminding myself that if the tree doesn't go through that process in the autumn time, there won't be any beautiful, luscious green leaves next spring. And again, that's an example of that same paradox of death and resurrection at work throughout the entire creation. And at work in our own lives too, at different levels.
Therefore it is something about—and we're back to discernment again—when is something in kind of terminal decline, and that we need to somehow learn to flow with it, rather than try to reverse it? Because I go back to the example of the tree again: I can't stop the tree shedding its leaves, no matter what I do, no matter how I try. So there is something about learning to flow with that process. There's something about learning to accept it, and feel okay about it, despite the fact that I'm feeling very sad, or feeling vulnerable in the face of it. And that, in a sense, is a prerequisite to be able to go through those difficult feelings and emotions, to go through the losses, as I anticipate the birth of something new.
Again, I won't necessarily be the one that will give birth to something new, but I can anticipate it and facilitate its happening. That's the metaphor of the midwife, when it comes about. And I think that is particularly apropos the issue of clericalism in our church today. And that's why, as I've already said, I dearly would love the Synod to make some attempt to begin addressing it. But unless people have some sense of openness and receptivity around the need for chaos, the need for disintegration at times, and the need to be able to somehow flow with it, and be patient with it and gentle with it—but also acknowledge the very untidy, messy feelings it can leave one with—to me, that's all part of what we call discernment.
Embracing the Cosmic Rhythm of Destruction
Yago: The caterpillar falls completely upside down during its chrysalis transformation—a striking paradox. How does the new cosmology make sense of this recurring cycle of creation and destruction?
Diarmuid: Yes, I think the best way to work with that, in my experience, is to keep giving people examples. You're taking the example of the caterpillar; I take the example of the tree. The theory behind it—my access to it—is new cosmology, where they talk about this recurring cycle of creation, destruction, creation, destruction. If we look at the outer sphere of our cosmos at every stage in its history, in the galactic world, in the planetary world, there's huge destruction going on all the time. And if that wasn't going on, we wouldn't have the beauty of creation that we have.
The other frightening and disturbing example for a lot of people is earthquakes. Earthquakes are absolutely essential to the well-being of planet Earth. And so how to make sense of earthquakes then, in terms of the terrible destruction they can do to human life, as well as to nature. That's another example of the paradox. I think it's when we take examples from the big scale, but also from the more personal or more intimate level, that we can help people to see paradox is an innate, God-given dimension of life.
I think the problem here, I suppose, in terms of the history of the church, and maybe in terms of the formation, particularly that we priests get with the study of scholastic philosophy, is that there's a huge amount of emphasis put on keeping everything very rational. Now, rationality is the opposite of paradox, in a sense. When you're dealing with paradox, there isn't much rationality; rationality doesn't help you to make sense of it.
And so if we're over-trained, as many of us are, in trying to keep everything very rational, then I think we'll struggle to make sense of paradox. I think the mystics were among the people that embraced paradox in a more experiential and direct way, and many of them talk about it in their various writings. The dark night of the soul, the dark night of the senses, are all ideas that help us to live through those times of paradox, when the going is not easy, or when the landscape is not very clear. And so it's a bit, maybe, like the birth pangs awaiting the new life to come.
Evolutionary Growth, Change, and Complexity
Yago: In the framework, once the butterfly emerges, its wings are too humid to fly; they require a quiet, restorative window to dry out and fill with energy. How does this link back to your evolutionary definition of complexity?
Diarmuid: I would take that back now to our understanding of evolution. One of the more simple definitions of evolution is it's about growth, change, and complexity. Those three words. So everything in creation grows around us, and we love to see things growing, but change involves things dying at times, and even dying out. And that's the bit we don't like, but that's also necessary.
And of course, in that context, unfortunately, we have even to disagree with St. Paul, that death is the consequence of sin. It's not. Death is an integral dimension, and a very necessary dimension of this process. And then the complexity. So your four wings—that often the outcome will never just take us back to what was there before. The outcome will be to be more all-embracing, to have some new dimensions to it, which will require adjusting, and it will require us to have the eyes that can see the four wings, or four new dimensions, where maybe before there was only one.
And so going back to the issue of returning sacraments to people, they require that people will do sacraments quite differently from the way a priest might have done them, honoring the complexity of the reality in which people will find themselves. So that's where I would draw a parallel with your example of the four wings. The growth, the change—which will involve some letting go, and maybe even dying—and then the opening up to the new possibility, which will have unexpected elements of it, unforeseen elements, maybe elements of sheer surprise. Some will be very joyful, and some may be very perplexing. But if there's only one wing, we might be able to come to terms more easily with it than four; how do we get attention to all four? That's what I would understand by the complexity.
Growth Wholearchies vs. Domination Hierarchies
Yago: Richard Rohr quotes Ken Wilber making a distinction between growth hierarchies (which are needed to protect the vulnerable) and domination hierarchies (which serve only to protect corporate self-interest). Do you agree that power can be segmented this way?
Diarmuid: I would slightly reword all that, in the sense that I'm disagreeing with him, because I would say to protect and promote more meaningful power, we need to have a culture of empowerment to do it. And rather than looking for key people to be the primary activators of all that, the more we can mutually enrich and skill different people to contribute to it, the better it will be.
I can look at my own family life, in which my parents would have given very direct orders to our children, and sometimes would have even hit us physically, because that was accepted at the time. And nowadays, in terms of parenting skills, parents are encouraged to do things very differently. And a small example of that in my own family, which I found quite informative, was some years ago when my niece, who was about six or seven at the time, asked her mother, my sister, a question.
My sister answered it, but kept on cooking the meal or doing whatever she was. And my niece—which I very much admired her for—said, 'Mammy, when I'm speaking to you, would you please look at me?' And to me, that's something about the desire for mutuality. So in other words, my sister, probably being busy doing other things, answered her and gave a meaningful answer, but did not look at her. And so she was expecting her mam to look at her as a person to person in that regard.
So again, I'd come back to that distinction between the wholearchy and the hierarchy. I think the concept of the wholearchy is much more innate to our world. It's much more liberating, it's much more empowering, and so there's a part of me that would like to move away from the notion of hierarchies.
Now, even another little interesting story here: of course, in the practical world, we will still need people in what we would call hierarchical positions. There's a famous story told here in my home country of Ireland of a Japanese factory, which has been on the go now for about 60 years, making computer parts. And every Monday morning, they have a very interesting ritual in which for about two hours, everybody gathers in a meeting room and they have cheese and wine.
The first hour is the managers, who for the rest of the week will be way up on the top of the building—so if you like, they are the hierarchy—they're down there milling among the workers, just chatting informally. And then the second hour is where the workers are given a state of play about the finances, the issues going on in the factory and so on and so forth. And so they're very much involved; they have one of the highest records in Ireland of a workplace where there's virtually nobody outside at any time. Huge level of engagement, participation, and it's all because of just that one event on a Monday morning.
So if you like, there is a hierarchy there for the rest of the week, but on that Monday morning, it's almost like the hierarchy collapses completely, and it makes a huge difference to the quality of what goes on there. So I would say politically, economically and ecclesiastically, we need to be moving away from hierarchies towards something more of a wholearchical paradigm.
The Illusion of Protection vs. Creative Scope
Yago: Butterflies naturally possess markings on their wings designed for camouflage and protection. In this synodal journey, what are we trying to protect, and how do we balance boundaries with the freedom to transform?
Diarmuid: Well, I think I will be asking the question, therefore: what are we trying to protect and why? If, going back to the statement from Vincent Nichols, are we trying to protect hierarchy so that we mustn't ask any critical questions about it or serious, genuinely serious questions? Are we trying to protect clericalism so that we don't even begin to speak about the vulnerability of the present situation?
In other words, when we talk about protecting, are we protecting with a view to allowing life organically and in more evolutionary terms to evolve towards greater complexity, which will be at times messy and untidy? Or are we trying to protect so that we're trying to keep just law and order all the time, which is not going to work? And particularly in a world of mass information in which we're now living, with so much talk even about artificial intelligence and all that at the moment—this world of mass information—more and more people are now asking questions.
More and more people are developing a critical mind. More and more people want to be involved and, with some extra skills and education, can begin to see that involvement can be messy at times and can be untidy. And so if we're rushing too much for protection and for order, we're going to miss the richness of the process. And we're also going to inhibit the spirit which, as we have already said, will often work through chaos and bring creativity out of it. So it's something about: can we step back a bit from maybe our compulsion for protection and allow a scope and a freedom for creativity to evolve and emerge?
Yago: Vulnerability cannot be rushed. Protection makes sense if it prevents us from destroying a fragile system abruptly, but it becomes toxic if we get completely stuck there.
Diarmuid: Right. And that's where I think we're back into discernment. And that's where the skills that we use in training spiritual directors and people like that can be extremely valuable: when to know when to move more gently, when to know when to push, when to know when to challenge. I think these are all parts of that process.
Reclaiming Silence and the Wish for Honesty
Yago: We are bombarded by noise, text, and competitive verbiage. What is the fundamental, quiet power of silence in transforming these deadlocks?
Diarmuid: Oh, I think it's crucially important. Somebody has made the observation along a slightly different line, but it could have a lot of relevance for the Synod. Back in 2019, I think it was, when this awful problem first started happening of these boats coming across the Mediterranean and huge numbers of people getting drowned, the European Union met on 10 occasions in the course of 15 months. And they resolved nothing in terms of coming up with a solution for that awful problem.
And I suspect myself, and other people have said this, the reason why they weren't able to come up with a solution is they probably went into the meetings and started debating and arguing and bargaining straight away. In other words, if they'd gone into those gatherings and maybe sat silently for 10 minutes to begin with, I think the outcome might have been very different and hopefully more constructive. I think we are bombarded with so much noise and with so much verbiage. And I think silence is crucially important for all of us at every level.
Yago: Let us take a brief half-minute window of absolute silence right now... [Silence observed]... Diarmuid, as we close, what is your ultimate wish for this Synod on Synodality?
Diarmuid: My wish is for honesty in dialogue—a dialogue in honesty, to face some of the real issues that need to be faced.
Yago: Thank you so much, Diarmuid, for your profound generosity and prophetic wisdom today.
Diarmuid: You are very welcome. Thank you for having me.
