Reading Francis

Fruit is either ripening, or it is rotting.

I test high on liking to take personality tests, I like to joke. Of the many personality assessments I’ve taken over the years, one has been particularly clarifying for me as a leader. While I don’t remember the name of the instrument, my whole work team took it, and we were able to see how we compared to each other as well as to general norms on a variety of measures.

On two measures, I was an extreme outlier. One was on a scale of “Hierarchical vs. Collaborative”, and another was “Need for Certainty vs. Tolerance of Ambiguity”. In both cases, I was far outside the norm and FAR from the rest of my team: I am extremely non-hierarchical, and I have an extreme tolerance of ambiguity. That I am at the top of the (little) hierarchy and therefore the decision-maker of the group who took the test together made these results highly amusing to me (and horrifying to several of them). But they explain a lot.

As the team members have changed over the years, I’ve seen the same scenario play out. Someone on my team comes to me to ask me to make a decision (in their favor) and communicate it out to the team (so their colleagues will fall in line and do what the requestor wants), and they walk away confused, because, instead of providing a deus ex machina solution to their compliance problem, I challenge them to find ways to build buy-in from their colleagues, perhaps adjusting their preferred solution to include their concerns and suggestions, and have patience with the time it takes to build support. In time, I circle back to consider the options and “land the plane” on the decision, but, in most cases, this takes some patience and some work by all involved. I do this because I have learned that we’re all better off when people follow decisions they fully understand and believe in, rather than simply following orders that come down from on high.

It’s with this bias that I embrace the Catholic Church’s recent embrace of synodality by Pope Francis and, now, Pope Leo. What I have heard and seen has been a movement by an extremely hierarchical institution (with a hyperfocus on the need for certainty) to embrace a more collaborative approach to discerning what the Holy Spirit is calling us all to, which requires some patient tolerance of ambiguity.

As with my team members, this approach has driven some more hierarchical and certainty-craving Catholics to distraction. For at least the last millennium (if not two millennia), the “brand” of the Roman Catholic Church has been hierarchical certainty, so it’s understandable that this shift (which actually began with the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s) feels disorienting. We’re in the midst of this sea-change, and it’s probably going to be messy and tense for a while longer.

The thing is, even a collaborative leader still has to make the decisions in the end, and while sometimes a collaborative process yields consensus, more often, the process is less about winning converts from one side to the other than it is about building a more complete and mutual understanding of the different points of view, which makes the collaborative leader’s decision easier to swallow and follow.

In recent years, Vatican leaders have said of hot-button issues like the ordination of women deacons or the ordination of “mature married men” as priests that the issue is not yet “mature”, that it’s not yet ripe. Through my personal lens, I completely understand this. I say essentially the same thing to the people who knock on my door asking for a quick decision on an issue that hasn’t been fully socialized.

At the same time, it’s incumbent upon the Vatican to lay out the path forward for “ripening” those issues. Without a path forward for deeper consideration, conflicts don’t naturally resolve; they fester.

With that in mind, here’s a modest proposal.

Suppose that Pope Leo begins 2026 with a change of plans. Currently the next phase of synodality is an implementation phase of the last synod on synodality that is set to yield assemblies around the globe to evaluate progress in 2027, culminating in another Vatican meeting in 2028. (This plan was signed off by Pope Francis while he was hospitalized.) 

Leo could ask the Church to keep that timeline, but rather than making the conversation another process-driven check-in on how synodality is proceeding, he could help the Church move from concept to application by giving them a specific issue to discuss and a framework for doing so. It could look like this:

“Since the issues of women deacons, the role of the permanent diaconate more broadly, and the roles of women in ministry more broadly have continued to emerge in virtually every recent synod, the global Church will undertake a synodal process specifically around these issues. 

• Each diocese (and, to the extent practical, each parish) will conduct synodal conversations, using approaches such as “conversations in the spirit” to determine the ways that the Holy Spirit may be calling the Church to define, refine, revise and embrace ways to engage people in ministry to the Church beyond the priesthood and episcopacy. 
• Local churches are encouraged to intentionally invite participants who have experienced a calling to ministry that has not been traditionally supported by the Church, as well as to those whose spirituality rests heavily on the reliance on clerical leadership. The intent of this process will be to engage all Catholics, but especially those whose lived experiences are deeply rooted in issues of formal ministry. The goal of this shared exposure to differing perspectives is to increase mutual understanding and compassion.
• In addition, recognizing that not every diocese or every local church has an abundance of experience with the permanent diaconate, or of the full range of ways that lay women and men pursue leadership roles of ministry around the world, the Dicastery of Communication will work with representatives of local churches to create compelling videos and virtual interviews with people who inhabit those roles and communities that support them, sharing those glimpses of ministry around the world with local churches to inform their synodal sessions. Where practical, these glimpses will not only include recorded interviews, but also opportunities for live discussions with people living different forms of ministry. For example, a local church that does not currently have permanent deacons might have a virtual conversation with one that has deep experience with permanent deacons.
• Moreover, in the interest of learning from the experience of non-Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ, local churches are encouraged to engage ecumenical dialogues with congregations, both those that entrust ordination to women and those that explicitly restrict the roles of women in leadership. These discussions should include clear explanations of the doctrinal differences between denominations as regards to ministerial roles, so that Catholic faithful are best prepared to contextualize the experiences of other Churches within established Catholic doctrine. The goal of this ecumenical dialogue is to expose local churches to a fuller range of experiences of ministry, so as best to attune participants to how the Holy Spirit may be moving in the Church through this issue.

These opportunities to “widen the lens” on approaches to formal ministry should yield a greater sense of mutual understanding and compassion between believers on these topics. Adding them the synodal listening processes will, we hope, give Catholic faithful the opportunity to discern across a broad range of Christian and Catholic experience where the Holy Spirit is moving in their local church. The continental and global phases of this process will enable Church representatives to discern together what opportunities the Spirit is opening for new growth, as well as whether that new growth has connections beyond the particular region in which it emerges.”

Pope Leo could roll out something like this with or without explicit guardrails. He might say, for instance, that settled doctrine does not allow for reconsideration of changes to the current limits on the priesthood. Or he could say, “We stand open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The history of the Church from its very beginning is that our God is a God of surprises. As the early Church learned from the Spirit’s inclusion of the Gentiles, those who presume to foreclose what is possible for God often find themselves proven wrong by his overabundant creativity in the service of divine mercy.” (I wouldn’t bet on him taking that tack, mind you.) By communicating the scope of possibilities at the outset, though, he would give those who need clarity on all sides of the issue a sense of what’s possible and what’s not in this process.

At the end of all this, almost for sure, the global Roman Catholic Church will not have consensus, and Pope Leo will have to make some decisions. However, through the process, he will have shown a path forward on the thorny issues that divide Catholics now, a way toward ripening rather than rotting.