The Church That Listens but No Longer Speaks
Old Roman Apostolate Commentary on the Italian Synodal Path
The Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) has issued its latest summary document of the Cammino sinodale, the national Synodal Path, under the title Lievito di pace e di speranza — Yeast of Peace and Hope (25 October 2025).⁽¹⁾ The text, drawn from four years of consultation, claims to reflect “the fruits of listening and discernment” within the dioceses of Italy. Yet the result, as Archbishop Erio Castellucci’s presentation makes clear, is a portrait of a Church that defines herself not by what she teaches, but by how she listens. “A Church on the move,” he writes, “in listening, without pretensions of superiority, with the sole concern of welcoming the Gospel and announcing it to the world.”⁽²⁾
Such language at first appears humble and pastoral. Yet on closer reading it marks a decisive transformation in ecclesial identity. No longer the Church that proclaims the truth revealed by God and transmitted through the ages, she is now a community of conversation — a Church that “walks together,” that “discerns,” that “listens.” The shift is not merely verbal. It is theological, even ontological. For to reduce the Church to dialogue is to obscure her divine origin and mission.
A quantitative analysis of the text reveals how far this transformation has gone. The words peccato (sin), grazia (grace), and salvezza (salvation) appear only four times in the seventy pages of the official CEI document. Two refer to “structures of sin” in a social sense, one to “the grace of Christ,” and one to the Church as a “germ of unity, hope, and salvation.”⁽³⁾ In other words, sin, grace, and salvation — the very vocabulary of the Gospel — have been all but erased. The theological centre has shifted from the supernatural to the sociological, from conversion to inclusion, from revelation to process.
From the Old Roman Apostolate’s perspective, this marks not development but decline. The Catholic Church has always understood herself, as Pope Leo XIII wrote in Immortale Dei, to be a societas perfecta — “a society perfect in her kind, possessing within herself all the resources requisite to her existence and action.”⁽⁵⁾ Her authority flows from the divine commission of Christ, not from the consensus of committees. Yet the Synodal Path substitutes hierarchy with bureaucracy. Under the banner of “differentiated co-responsibility,”⁽⁴⁾ the Church is recast as a democratic organism in which “everyone decides on everything, but no one is accountable for anything.”
This bureaucratic model mirrors the very structures of modern governance that the Church once evangelised. It is, as St Pius X foresaw in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, the modernist dream of transforming the Church into a “moral and democratic society,” where revelation is reduced to experience and doctrine evolves with public sentiment.⁽⁶⁾ What was once the pillar and ground of the truth⁽⁷⁾ becomes a forum for dialogue with error.
The fruits of such a vision are seen most clearly in paragraphs 30 and 31 of Lievito di pace e di speranza, gathered under the slogan Tutti, tutti, tutti — “All, all, all.” Here the Synodal Assembly proposes that the Church in Italy should “promote the recognition and accompaniment of homosexual and transgender persons, as well as their parents,” and that it should “support the civil days promoted against homophobia and transphobia.” It further calls for “teams to coordinate new programs of formation in relationships and corporeality-affectivity-sexuality, also taking into account sexual orientation and gender identity.”⁽⁸⁾
These are not misinterpretations or external commentaries. They are direct citations from the official CEI document. Nowhere, however, does the text remind the faithful of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches — that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” that chastity is a universal call, and that all are invited to conversion through grace.⁽⁹⁾ Instead of reaffirming the moral law, the Synodal Path baptises the language of secular activism. To “accompany” is no longer to lead souls toward repentance, but to affirm them in their present state. As a physician who refuses to heal betrays his vocation, so too does a Church that refuses to correct betray her mission.
Elsewhere the document substitutes evangelical concepts with worldly ones. It calls for “renewable and solidarity energy communities,” “integral human development,” “paths of peace and nonviolence,” and “formation to relationality.”⁽¹⁰⁾ These may be worthy civic concerns, but they are not the Gospel. The Synodal Path scarcely mentions the Cross, speaks rarely of repentance, and seems to know nothing of sanctifying grace. The “conversion” it demands is “pastoral,” “missionary,” or “relational” — never moral or spiritual.⁽¹¹⁾
This evacuation of transcendence recalls the warning of Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi: “If we would define and describe this true Church of Jesus Christ… we shall find nothing more noble, more sublime, or more divine than the expression ‘the Mystical Body of Christ’.”⁽¹²⁾ The Church is not an NGO for social betterment but the supernatural Body through which divine life flows into the world. When she forgets this, she becomes merely a human institution — capable of compassion, but not of salvation.
Most revealing of all is the document’s explicit contrast between those who “dream of a pure and simple revival of Christianity” and those who seek “an ecclesial posture adapted to today’s society.”⁽¹³⁾ The implication is unmistakable: fidelity to the perennial faith is dismissed as nostalgia, while accommodation to modernity is hailed as courage. Yet it was precisely such accommodation that Our Lord warned against when He said, “If the world hate you, know that it hath hated Me before you” (John 15:18). The Church was never called to be fashionable. She was called to be faithful.
From an Old Roman viewpoint, Lievito di pace e di speranza epitomises the culmination of postconciliar modernism. It replaces faith with feeling, certainty with sentiment, truth with tolerance. It is not an organic continuation of the Catholic tradition but a rupture disguised as reform. The synodal process, for all its rhetoric of inclusivity, excludes precisely those who insist on orthodoxy. It exalts diversity while marginalising doctrine.
The result is a Church that listens but does not teach, that accompanies but does not convert, that speaks of peace but not of penance. Such a Church may earn the world’s applause, but she will lose her soul. The world does not need a “different Church,” as the CEI suggests in its conclusion. It needs the Catholic Church — the Church of the apostles, the martyrs, the saints — to be herself again: Mater et Magistra, Mother and Teacher.
If the Church in Italy and beyond truly wishes to be “the yeast of peace and hope,” she must first recover the supernatural dimension of her mission. Peace without conversion is merely compromise. Hope without truth is illusion. A Church that speaks with the world’s voice can no longer speak for Christ. Only by returning to the Cross — the axis of all history, the altar of all reconciliation — can she once again become what she was founded to be: the living sign of salvation for the world.
The Old Roman Apostolate therefore urges all clergy and faithful to hold fast to the faith once delivered to the saints. It is time not for more listening sessions, but for renewed preaching; not for more dialogue, but for repentance; not for more committees, but for conversion. Let the Church again proclaim with conviction: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Then — and only then — will she truly be the leaven that transforms the world, not by adapting to its taste, but by raising it to the glory of God.
¹ Conferenza Episcopale Italiana, Lievito di pace e di speranza: Documento di sintesi del Cammino sinodale delle Chiese che sono in Italia (Rome: CEI, 25 October 2025).
² Ibid., p. 5 (“Una Chiesa in cammino, in ascolto, senza pretese di superiorità…”).
³ Verified occurrence count: peccato (sin) 2 ×, grazia (grace) 1 ×, salvezza (salvation) 1 × in entire text; cf. pp. 12–15.
⁴ Lievito di pace e di speranza, §§ 11–14.
⁵ Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1885), §10.
⁶ Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), §42.
⁷ 1 Timothy 3:15.
⁸ Lievito di pace e di speranza, §§ 30–31.
⁹ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 2357–2359.
¹⁰ Lievito di pace e di speranza, §§ 24–25.
¹¹ Ibid., §§ 13–15.
¹² Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi (1943), §13.
¹³ Lievito di pace e di speranza, p. 7.
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