The Trinity the Synod Needs

By Robert Royal It's often been said that our civilization is based on a kind of historical trinity - Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome - in addition (it needs saying in an age bereft of a historical sense) to the Holy Trinity. While the deepest roots of any culture are religious - and we have seen all around us in recent decades what happens when we human beings are uprooted from our rich Christian cultural soil - there are other elements essential to nourishing a full human life. And this is as true of the life of the Church as it is of the "secular" world in which we move, in and through, every day. Such considerations shed no little light on the difficulties many people are having about the Synod on Synodality, even those who are confirmed synodistas. One way of understanding the problem is that we seem to want to lean entirely on Jerusalem - the Holy Spirit is often invoked as the guarantor of everything, though who gets to decide what is the voice of the Holy Spirit, and what is not, remains up in the air. Meanwhile, we fail to keep in mind the sacred history that God Himself made clear by His appearance on earth "in the fullness of time." (Galatians 4:4) Christianity came into the world at a particular time. It needed, and absorbed, the high rationality of Athens so that the human mind, as well as the human heart, could enter profoundly into relation with Revelation. Much of what we understand about the Incarnation, for example, was worked out using ancient Greek terms. In recent years, even at the highest levels of the Church, we've often enough heard philosophy and theology denigrated, almost as if having clear ideas about Faith and morals are an affront to God, who seems instead to be pure, undefined "mercy." And the Church needed Rome as well, because to go out and preach the Gospel to all nations effectively, which meant keeping an essential unity among global diversity and opposing forces over wide stretches of the earth, something like the Roman disciplines of law, order, and - yes - even military power - were, and are necessary. Christianity did not spread by the sword, as did Islam, but the sword was often called on to defend the Faith. We just celebrated the anniversary of the Christian naval victory at Lepanto over the Ottomans on October 7; October 10th is the day that the Franks turned back the invading Muslims at Tours in France; and the 14th marks the defeat of the Turks at the Siege of Vienna. Without such resistance to armed attacks, Christian Europe would not now exist or have transmitted its faith and culture to the Americas and much of the rest of the world. But it's not only in protecting Christian lands from outside assault that a certain martial virtue is essential. The Church itself needs a manly spirit - in our time perhaps more than ever - when forces even within the Church try to make it appear that true Christianity's soul is merely openness - especially to its critics. The modern American poet Ezra Pound wrote a bit of a corrective of our modernist image of Jesus and something more in its humorous way ("Ballad of the Goodly Fere"): Ha' we lost the goodliest fere o' all For the priests and the gallows tree? Aye lover he was of brawny men, O' ships and the open sea. . . . I ha' seen him drive a hundred men Wi' a bundle o' cords swung free, That they took the high and holy house For their pawn and treasury. They'll no' get him a' in a book I think Though they write it cunningly; No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere But aye loved the open sea. . . . A master of men was the Goodly Fere, A mate of the wind and sea, If they think they ha' slain our Goodly Fere They are fools eternally. I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb Sin' they nailed him to the tree. That's the voice of a working man, a carpenter, a fisherman. Someone who also livs foursquare on the earth as well as in worlds of spirit and ideas. A Benedictine bishop said in recent days that "The Synod will not bring any concrete answers, ...