The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church doesn’t invent, revise, or vote on its Magisterium, its authoritative application of that depositum fidei. It receives, guards, and transmits that ancient faith. Doctrine can develop in the sense that St. John Henry Newman described it, growing in clarity and application, as an acorn becomes an oak tree. But it cannot be renegotiated – or reversed! – by majority sentiment or contemporary enthusiasm.
The claim of having received the Truth and of guarding it is the Church’s entire reason for existing and makes it something other than a voluntary religious association. But synodality, no matter what its defenders suggest, introduces a mechanism capable of dissolving that claim: a standing, undefined, participatory process for generating endless, contemporary ecclesial consensuses that increasingly function as rival sources of authority alongside, and – from the standpoint of the innovators – ahead of the settled deposit of faith and, therefore, the Magisterium meant to guard it.
The vagueness we’ve seen so far in the synodal process has not been incidental. It’s a feature, not a
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