Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a novel where the difference between physical power and moral power is apparent: ‘He was often tempted, while they were passing backwards and forwards on his body, to seize forty or fifty of the first that came in his reach, and dash them against the ground.’ But he displays his moral power when he convinces the ministry not to destroy and enslave Blefuscu, the enemies of the Lilliputians. He stated, ‘that he would never be an instrument of bringing a free and brave people into slavery.’ Even though he knew he was going against the emperor and his wishes, that didn’t matter to him, he stayed true to what he believed and even convinced the rest of the ministry not to destroy the people of Blefuscu. The power that the world exhibits is elemental brute power, but human power is not brute power; it has a moral dimension. The great Greek tragedies and epics speak of the moral power of man confronting the brute power and the tragedy that occurs as a consequence. Culture speaks of the power of the moral and the spiritual. Moral and spiritual authority is always in danger of prostrating before the tempter: “All these will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” Not falling into that temptation calls for eternal vigilance.
The authority of the papacy was weakened by the lords who dominated churches and monasteries, who appointed bishops and abbots and collected church taxes. These bishops and abbots, appointed for political reasons, lacked the spiritual devotion to maintain high standards of discipline among priests and monks. Church reformers were determined to end this subordination of the Church to lay authority. The practice of lay investiture led to a conflict between the papacy and the German monarchy. The Holy Spirit always worked and created spiritual leaders who made their moral and spiritual voice heard. But there were leaders who assumed the spiritual mantle and displayed brute power in collusion with the worldly powers. Spiritual and moral power should be exercised not in the monarchical style but in the collegial style, wielding spiritual and moral power over the people: “For where two or three gather together in My name, there am I with them”( Mt 18:20).
Leo the Great was pope from 440 until 461. His pontificate has traditionally been accepted as a milestone in the history of the papacy, especially for how the bishops of Rome viewed their responsibility beyond their own city. Leo’s involvement with synods and councils was massive, likely going back to before his election as bishop of Rome. His experience was rooted in the fact that “synods [were] held in Rome twice a year.” Roman synods were not just liturgical events, nor were they designed to solemnly approve what the bishop had already decided unilaterally. How Leo acted at those synods, however, reveals the specifically Petrine view of his office. He spoke in the midst of his brother bishops and fellow Roman Catholics, but most of all he and they were assembled “before Peter” (coram Petro). Leo’s petrocentrism remained the expression of a yet more fundamental christocentrism of his doctrine and piety. Leo’s “sense of Christian unity… defined his ideology of Christian romanitas,” but he had no time for compromises on matters of faith. Such politically motivated compromises today may seem “reasonable” and “consensus-building,” but for Leo taking off the doctrinal edges for the sake of political gain remained an illegitimate strategy. The Synodal Way, a quasi-synod of all the dioceses of Germany, catapults us into a world far removed from Leo’s time. More fundamentally, for the Synodal Way, the sources of knowledge about God are “an up-to-date interpretation of Holy Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium”; “our deliberations are nourished… by current knowledge in theology and the human sciences, as well as the sensus fidelium, the sense of the faithful for the faith.” Such statements are both traditional and non-traditional; they illustrate what the quasi-synod actually means by defining itself as a “way of repentance and renewal.” The Synodal Way also claims a new kind of authority. It wants to make “binding decisions”, but is not able to provide the canonical authority for them, precisely because it constitutes a new kind of Church leadership which was papal. This involves both risk and opportunity. Today the Synodal Way, a path followed by the Oriental Catholic churches, is different from the Petrine primacy of the Latin Western church. How the Primacy will adapt to Synodality is indeed an issue that has theological undercurrents. The process of followed for the Synodal decisions is not the Petrine way. How to work together is an issue that Pope Francis has to worry about.