Synodality and the Scope of Infallibility: What Actually Can and Can't Change
The multi-year synodal process convened under Pope Francis, gathering bishops, clergy, religious, and laity in a broadly consultative structure to discuss the Church’s life and mission, has been read in starkly different ways by different observers — as a long-overdue recovery of the whole Church’s voice in her own governance, or as a structure whose ambiguity risks blurring the difference between genuine doctrinal development and a slow erosion of settled teaching under the guise of process. Untangling the disagreement requires being clear about a distinction ecclesiology has always drawn but which synodality has thrown back into public view: the difference between how the Church discerns and communicates her teaching, and what that teaching’s actual content and limits are.
On the first question — how the Church discerns and communicates — there is real room for development, and nothing in Catholic ecclesiology requires that room to stay closed. The Church’s structures of consultation, collegiality among bishops, and the involvement of the laity in her mission have taken different institutional forms across history, from the early ecumenical councils through medieval synods to Vatican II’s own renewed emphasis on collegiality, and a synodal process that widens genuine consultation before major decisions is not, in itself, a departure from anything the Church has always held about how authority is properly exercised — Vatican II’s own documents explicitly encourage exactly this kind of broadened consultation.
On the second question — what the Church’s teaching can actually change — the ecclesiology is considerably less flexible than synodal enthusiasm sometimes implies, and this is where the sharper disagreements live. The Church distinguishes carefully between different levels of teaching authority: dogmas solemnly defined as revealed by God (irreformable, by the Church’s own account of what she is capable of, since she claims not to invent revelation but to guard and transmit it); doctrines taught infallibly though not solemnly defined; and prudential or disciplinary teachings that can genuinely change because they were never claimed to be unchangeable in the first place. Papal infallibility itself, defined at Vatican I, is considerably narrower in scope than either its critics or some of its enthusiasts assume — it applies only when the pope, acting explicitly as supreme pastor and teacher of all Christians, formally defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church; it says nothing about the pope’s private opinions, his ordinary governance decisions, or even most of what popes say in encyclicals, which typically don’t invoke this extraordinary charism at all.
This is precisely the ecclesiological terrain the synodal process has to navigate, and where the sharpest disagreement over it actually lies: not whether wider consultation is legitimate (it clearly can be), but whether specific proposals emerging from that consultation — on questions of pastoral practice toward divorced-and-remarried Catholics, or the blessing of same-sex unions, to take two live examples — are being proposed as within the Church’s genuine authority to adjust as a matter of pastoral discipline, or whether they would, if adopted, cross into territory the Church has always held she has no authority to change at all, however she is structured to discuss it. Defenders of an expansive reading of synodal authority argue the process is exploring genuinely open pastoral and disciplinary questions the Church has always had authority over. Critics argue that some of what is being discussed touches doctrine the Church herself has always taught she cannot alter regardless of how broad or sincere the consultation behind a proposed change might be — that no amount of synodal process can make the Church’s own stated limits on her authority disappear.
What both careful defenders and careful critics of the synodal process agree on, when the argument is conducted at its best, is that the question is not “more consultation versus less” but “which category does a given proposal actually fall into” — a question ecclesiology has always had to answer, synod or no synod, and one the current process has made unavoidably public rather than newly created.