Tradition and Synodality: One Reality, Two Names

 

A word on timing. This essay was written more than a month ago and then set aside, awaiting the right occasion to appear — which has now presented itself, and fortuitously so. In the very days these pages were being prepared for posting, a cardinal of the Roman Church declared that synodality “has to stop.” What follows was composed well before that interview and in complete independence of it; yet I can imagine no more fitting reply. The claim it answers — that tradition and synodality are rivals, that one must be chosen against the other — is precisely the confusion these pages were written to dispel. I offer them now not as rebuttal but as clarification long in the making.

In the polarized atmosphere of contemporary Catholic discourse, two words have become tribal banners. Pronounce tradition in one room and you are heard as a partisan of restoration, a sympathizer with the Society of St. Pius X, a critic of Vatican II. Pronounce synodality in another room and you are heard as a partisan of the late pontificate, a progressive, a liturgical relativist. Both readings are not only impoverished; they are theologically incoherent.

For the great irony — and the consolation — is this: authentic tradition is synodal, and authentic synodality is traditional. The two words name the same reality from different angles. To set them against one another is to misunderstand both.

Synodality as the Patristic Norm

The Greek σύνοδος (synodos) means simply “common path” or “walking together” — syn, with; hodos, way. From the earliest centuries, this walking-together has been the constitutive mode of the Church’s life.

The first ecclesial council convenes in Acts 15. The question of Gentile observance of the Mosaic Law could have been decided by Peter alone — and indeed Peter speaks decisively. But the apostles and presbyters gather, debate, listen, and issue their judgment in language that no theologian can read without trembling: Visum est Spiritui Sancto et nobis — “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). The Holy Spirit and the assembled Church speak together. This is synodality at its origin, and it bears the imprimatur of the apostolic generation itself.

The patristic era institutionalized this practice. St. Cyprian of Carthage, in the third century, articulated the principle with characteristic clarity in his letters to the presbyters of his see: from the beginning of his episcopate he had determined to do nothing without the counsel of his presbyters and the consent of the people. The episcopal, presbyteral, and lay dimensions were not in competition but in communion. Nihil sine episcopo, nihil sine consilio presbyterorum, nihil sine consensu plebis — this Cyprianic principle, distilled by Congar and others into its classical form, governed the ancient North African Church.

The great ecumenical councils — Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451) — were synodal events writ large. The fides Nicaena was not promulgated ex nihilo by an imperial decree; it was discerned, debated, and confessed by bishops walking together under the Spirit’s guidance. The Creed we profess at every Sunday Eucharist is itself a synodal document — the lex credendi of the Church forged in the synodos of her bishops.

In the Christian East, this synodal character has never been forgotten; it remains constitutive of ecclesial governance. In the Latin West, the rise of papal centralization — necessary and providential in its own way — sometimes obscured but never abolished the synodal nature of the Church. Even the medieval papacy convened councils. Even Trent was a synod. Even Vatican I, despite its truncated work, was a synod.

Tradition as Living Transmission

Here is where the contemporary self-styled “traditionalist” frequently errs. He treats Tradition as a static deposit — a museum piece to be preserved against contamination. But this is not the patristic understanding, nor is it the understanding of Vatican II.

Dei Verbum 8 is the controlling text: “The Tradition that comes from the apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words that have been handed down.” Tradition is not a stone; it is a stream. It is traditio — a handing-on — and a handing-on requires both giver and receiver, both transmitter and recipient. It requires, in short, the whole Body of Christ walking together.

John Henry Newman saw this with characteristic prescience. In On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859), he documented how during the Arian crisis the Nicene faith was preserved not primarily by the episcopate — which had largely capitulated — but by the sensus fidelium, the supernatural instinct of the baptized. This was not a democratization of doctrine; it was a recognition that the Holy Spirit speaks through the whole Body. Tradition lives because the Church lives, and the Church lives because she walks together.

Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) provides the deeper grammar. Doctrine develops as a living idea develops in a living community. It does not develop by individual genius or by curial fiat; it develops in the synodal exchange of teaching and reception, of proposal and assimilation, of question and discernment. Without synodality, there is no development. Without development, there is no Tradition — only fossil.

Vatican II: A Synodal Recovery

The Second Vatican Council was itself the greatest synodal event of the modern era. More than 2,500 bishops from every continent, hundreds of periti, observers from the separated Churches, walking together for four years under the Spirit’s guidance. The Council did not abolish Tradition; it recovered Tradition more deeply than many of its critics have ever understood.

Lumen Gentium 22 restored the doctrine of episcopal collegiality, completing the truncated ecclesiology bequeathed by the interrupted work of Vatican I. Lumen Gentium 12 articulated the sensus fidei of the whole People of God. Sacrosanctum Concilium 14 called for the participatio actuosa of the faithful in the liturgy — not as a sociological innovation but as a recovery of patristic understanding, the liturgy as the opus Dei of the whole assembly. Each of these moves is at once traditional and synodal. There is no opposition.

To accept Vatican II is to accept that Tradition is synodal. To reject synodality is, whether one realizes it or not, to reject the Tradition that Vatican II authentically transmitted.

The Present Hour

Pope Francis named synodality “the path God expects of the Church in the third millennium.” Pope Leo XIV has carried this forward with quiet fidelity, his first-year encyclical Magnifica Humanitas extending rather than reversing the synodal trajectory. His pontificate has shown that synodality and the patrimony of the Latin Church are not in tension but in communion.

Meanwhile, the Society of St. Pius X, in its Declaration of Catholic Faith of May 14, has chosen the opposite path — rejecting Nostra Aetate, Dignitatis Humanae, and Sacrosanctum Concilium in the name of a “Tradition” that has, in fact, never existed. For the Tradition the SSPX claims to defend was itself the fruit of synodal discernment. Trent was a synod. The Counter-Reformation Missal they so jealously guard was the work of a council. To absolutize one synodal moment against all others — and against the Council that constitutionally completes them — is not to defend Tradition but to falsify it.

On the opposite flank, some speak of synodality as if it began in 2013 — as if the Spirit had been silent for two millennia until the first General Assembly was convened. This too is a misreading, and not a small one. Synodality is not novelty. It is the most ancient ecclesial grammar.

Conclusion: The Path and the Walking

The Church is una, sancta, catholica, et apostolica. She is one because the Spirit makes her one; she is apostolic because she walks the path the apostles walked; and the apostles walked together. Tradition is the path. Synodality is the walking. They are not two things but one: a Pilgrim People bearing the apostolic deposit through history under the Spirit’s guidance, handing it on faithfully precisely by receiving it together.

To pit tradition against synodality is to pit the path against the walking — an absurdity that collapses on the slightest examination. The faithful Catholic does not have to choose. One has only to walk.