The Synod planned for October in Vatican is being labelled as the Pope’s magnum opus. He wants the process to be an “ecclesial” event: a common discernment of the role of prayer in the life of the Church. This Synod is not expected to make laws or decide on matters on policy or doctrine. All of the consultation leading to i is aimed at giving the Pope advice on the consultation itself. The Synod has no topic other than Synodality itself. Thankfully, no feared doctrinal changes are envisioned, but I fervently hope that the Synod finds a way to make such changes where and when necessary. As a senior priest and life-long journalist there is one change I fervently hope for: A Catholic method of handling issues that crop up in the Church. I believe the Pope is aiming at such a method through Synodality. A method of Truth where the Truth is Christ.

It is not a scientific method at all. Science deals with objective knowledge. The world is about the fatality of facts of the elemental Eros of domination. Truth is something in the subject – “I am the truth”. The Gospel contains no objective truth, the Gospel is about life. The dominance of objective thinking, played out as science and technology, alienates and suffocates the life of the spirit and of the individual. We solved every issue within our Church with objective laws and principles based on facts and reports. We have learned to make our issues of faith and ethics, which are very personal and subjective, into objective facts and reports. This is alienation and distortion and hence not truthful at all. The self-revelation of God is the illumination in the consciousness of individuals. Revelation or the illumination is transforming consciousness. The objectification of the consciousness has caused a catastrophe, it has killed the Spirit and remained true to the dead letter, we were speaking of the letter and not of human beings and their life, and we have lost the Divine. We are in the world of facts and their fatality, all our solutions and Gnostic and Manichean. Christian ethics and spirituality signify a peculiar way of being in the world as humans. The pouring forth of the divine illumination corresponds to the changes to which consciousness is subject and to the various tendencies and manifestations of the spirit. We have to look for the human in the privileged spheres of ethics and spirituality. Ethics will not travel along the way of the fatality of ontology. The emergence of ethics and spirituality is to be discovered, through the structure of language, in the peculiar way of human being in the world that is separation from the fatality of facts. Ethics is precisely the orientation toward the other which is discovered in the structure of talking to each other.

It is the talking and sharing of our spirit in a language of illumination, which is the inner light of the consciousness of which St Basil spoke of – the interior light which God created before Sun and Moon. God comes to history through the incarnation of the Divine Logos in us. He has no tongue except that of ours and not language but that of ours. It will be not a voice from on high; it will be accomplished in man and in humanity—it is an anthropological revelation, an unveiling of the Christology of man. Every man knows from his own inward experience that he is a participant in several of his own moments of eternity. We have to affirm the absolute importance of selfhood and the wrestling with the saving of this selfhood from all the powers of alienation that impinge on man.

There is eternal truth in this revolt and the truth is this, that the particular single personality and its destiny are a higher value that the world order and the harmony of the whole, than abstract being. And this is a Christian truth. We hold Christianity itself to be a rebellion against the world and its laws. Being a Christian does not mean being an obedient slave.  Being’s loss of meaning is to the advantage of man in corresponding proportion. The whole meaninglessness of the world is turned to the advantage of man – he remains the sole potential carrier of meaning in the Universe. This is reinvention of man in the church, the sensusfidei. This alone the revolution needed.