When Process Replaces Judgment: Cardinal Zen’s Warning, the Synodal Consistory, and the Crisis Rome Refuses to Confront
Pope Leo XIV has asked the cardinals for frank counsel. Yet the June Consistory repeats a synodal method already condemned from within the College for fragmenting debate, diminishing episcopal judgment and reducing disagreement to managed summaries. As the liturgical crisis and the approaching SSPX consecrations remain outside the formal agenda, the Church appears increasingly able to organise conversation—and increasingly reluctant to reach a conclusion.
The Church does not lack conversations. What she increasingly lacks is the willingness to let a conversation end in judgment.
That is the real story behind the Extraordinary Consistory now taking place in Rome. It is not simply that the liturgy has disappeared from the agenda, though its absence is conspicuous. Nor is it merely that the cardinals have been divided among twenty working groups, assigned tightly controlled speaking times and instructed not to discuss the proceedings with the press. The deeper problem is that an institution created to advise the Pope on matters of major importance is being reshaped according to a method that disperses disagreement, filters speech through collective summaries and treats the management of discussion as though it were itself an act of government.¹
Pope Leo XIV opened the Consistory on Friday with an appeal that deserves to be taken seriously. “I need your freedom, your frankness, and your loyalty,” he told the cardinals. “Sincere counsel is always an act of communion.” He asked for their strong, explicit and public support, and said that he wished to feel sustained by them as brothers.²
That is a welcome understanding of the cardinalate. Honest counsel is not disloyalty. A cardinal who warns, contradicts or corrects may serve the Roman Pontiff more faithfully than one who merely applauds him. The Pope is right to restore regular meetings of a College that was seldom permitted to deliberate together during the previous pontificate. He is right to seek brotherhood rather than court politics and candour rather than ceremonial agreement.
The difficulty lies not in what Leo has asked for, but in the machinery through which the answer is expected to pass.
For most of the Consistory, the College does not deliberate as a college. The cardinals are separated into small groups. Each speaks for a few minutes. A period of silence follows. Another round of still shorter interventions reduces the first discussion to selected points. A secretary prepares a report for the group’s approval. Every report is submitted electronically, but only certain groups and a selection of the others are permitted to present their conclusions to the whole assembly. The unrestricted dialogue with the Pope has been placed at the end of the final session, beside his concluding address and the singing of the Te Deum. Each intervention is limited to three minutes.³
Small-group discussion is not intrinsically objectionable. It may encourage a reticent cardinal to speak more freely. It may allow bishops from different continents to know one another better. It may expose men formed in one ecclesial culture to difficulties they had never encountered.
A method may possess advantages and still be unsuited to the purpose for which it is being used.
The College of Cardinals is not a parish consultation, an academic seminar or a corporate retreat. Canon law describes it as the body whose members assist the Roman Pontiff collegially when they are summoned to deal with questions of major importance. A consistory is therefore not simply an opportunity to share experiences. It is one of the principal means by which the Pope receives the considered counsel of the Church’s senior prelates as a body.
That collegial character is weakened when the College rarely hears itself.
A cardinal may speak plainly at one round table, but the cardinals seated at nineteen other tables will not hear him. A serious objection may be included in a secretary’s summary, softened into cautious language or omitted because the group cannot agree upon it. A warning becomes a “concern.” A contradiction becomes a “tension.” A doctrinal disagreement becomes a request for “further discernment.” What began as argument arrives in the plenary as synthesis.
No conspiracy is required. The method does the work.
The defect is no longer hypothetical. It was identified from within the previous Consistory by the very cardinals whose episcopal office the process was supposed to honour.
Cardinal Joseph Zen used his brief intervention in January to deliver perhaps the most severe criticism of synodality yet heard within the College. He did not complain merely that the timetable was inconvenient or that the proceedings had been badly organised. He called the process an “ironclad manipulation” and “an insult to the dignity of the bishops.” He asked whether bishops had actually been allowed to perform the work proper to their office: “disputation” and “judgment.” He described the continual invocation of the Holy Ghost as “ridiculous and almost blasphemous” when it appeared to sanctify the possibility that the Church might repudiate what the same Holy Ghost had inspired throughout her two-thousand-year Tradition.⁴
Zen’s objection went to the heart of the matter. The language of listening can conceal the displacement of those whom Christ appointed to teach and govern. A carefully selected assembly can be presented as the voice of the People of God. Episcopal judgment can then be reframed as one contribution among many. The resulting document may be called authoritative while remaining sufficiently elastic to allow contradictory doctrines or disciplines in different regions.
Zen asked whether such regional variation would eventually produce a fracture resembling that of the Anglican Communion. His question was not alarmist. Anglicanism has spent decades attempting to preserve institutional unity while provinces teach incompatible doctrines, recognise different ministries and refuse sacramental communion with one another. The language of process survives. Communion does not.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller reached the same conclusion from another direction. The Church, he insisted, is neither a democracy nor a parliament. The legitimate participation of the faithful belongs to her life, but it cannot be confused with the authority conferred through Holy Orders. He criticised the dominance of sociological exercises and small-group discussion over theological debate before the whole assembly. Many cardinals, he said, wanted the classical model restored: serious propositions placed before the College, followed by serious interventions heard by the College.⁵
Cardinal Raymond Burke was more measured, and warmly welcomed Pope Leo’s decision to convene the cardinals. Yet he too said that the January format needed to be reconsidered if it was to respect the true nature of an extraordinary consistory. Traditionally, a qualified speaker presented the matter requiring counsel and the cardinals then debated it together. In January, general discussion was largely replaced by reports from secretaries, while only a small proportion of the more than 160 cardinals present could speak during the limited plenary periods. Written submissions to the Pope, Burke observed, could not substitute for the clarification that occurs when cardinals hear and answer one another.⁶
These were not complaints from outsiders hostile to consultation. They came from within the Consistory, from cardinals who welcomed its restoration and wanted it to fulfil its proper purpose. They were not resisting genuine episcopal collaboration with the Pope. They were warning against the replacement of that collaboration by an engineered methodology in which everyone speaks, few hear, summaries replace arguments and no one is required to reach judgment.
Pope Leo nevertheless praised the January meeting as an experience of synodality—not merely an organisational technique, he said, but a means of growing in listening and relationships.⁷ Six months later, the same machinery has been assembled again.
The same separate tables have returned. The same restricted interventions have returned. The same secretarial reports and selective presentations have returned. The same Synod Secretariat whose growing influence caused concern in January will introduce the final session on the further implementation of synodality.
The method condemned in January is being used in June to discuss the future extension of the method.
That is more than irony. It illustrates how institutional process can become insulated from judgment. The cardinals were permitted to criticise the structure. Their criticisms entered the conversation. The conversation then continued under substantially the same structure. Objections were heard, and because they were heard, the process could present itself as receptive even while remaining unchanged.
This is the peculiar strength of procedural government. Opposition need not be silenced when it can be absorbed.
The June programme makes the problem still clearer. Its four sessions address the international situation, themes drawn from Magnifica Humanitas, the construction of the common good and the implementation of the Synod. Each subject is capable of serious treatment. None is trivial.
Yet the questions requiring an immediate ecclesiastical decision remain outside the hall.
The liturgy is the clearest example. It was one of the four subjects offered to the cardinals in January. Cardinal Arthur Roche prepared a defence of the restrictions introduced by Traditionis Custodes, but the subject received little substantive discussion. It was widely expected to return at the next gathering. Instead, it disappeared from the programme.
The Associated Press has reported that the traditional liturgy had initially been intended for discussion but was removed as the episcopal consecrations announced by the Society of Saint Pius X drew near. The Holy See has not officially confirmed that reason, but the published agenda confirms the omission.⁸
The timing makes the silence impossible to ignore.
On 1 July, the Society intends to consecrate four bishops at Écône without a pontifical mandate. Rome has declared that such an act would be schismatic and incur grave canonical consequences. The Society maintains that it does not intend to reject the papacy, establish territorial jurisdiction or create a parallel Church. It says the consecrations are required to preserve its ability to ordain priests, administer Confirmation and continue its apostolate in what it judges to be a grave state of necessity.
The Society may be wrong in that judgment. Rome may be justified in forbidding the consecrations and imposing penalties upon those involved. Yet the gravity of the dispute makes avoidance less defensible, not more. It makes direct judgment, direct engagement and direct papal conversation more urgent.
The contradiction is painful. The contemporary Vatican speaks constantly of dialogue, encounter, accompaniment, listening and the patient resolution of disagreement. Yet Father Davide Pagliarani, the SSPX Superior General, sought a personal audience with Pope Leo months before the consecrations were announced. According to the Society, repeated requests and letters produced no such meeting. Only after the announcement was Pagliarani invited to meet Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.⁹
The meeting took place on 12 February. The Holy See offered renewed theological discussions, but on condition that the Society suspend the consecrations. The Society refused, arguing that a threat of sanctions coupled with a demand that it first abandon what it considered necessary could not constitute genuinely open dialogue. The parties therefore returned to the familiar impasse: Rome would not permit the foundations of the Council and the liturgical reform to be placed in question, while the Society would not suspend the act it regarded as necessary before those disputes had been resolved.
No one can know whether a personal meeting between the Pope and Pagliarani would have changed the result. It might have achieved nothing. Yet the Pope is not simply another official in a chain of negotiation. The entire controversy concerns the Society’s relation to the Roman Pontiff and the limits of obedience owed to him. A personal appeal would therefore have possessed a paternal and theological significance that no exchange with a dicastery could reproduce.
Instead, the cardinals have assembled within sight of a crisis they will not formally discuss.
Nor does the liturgical question belong exclusively to the Society. Priestly institutes, religious communities, diocesan clergy and lay faithful in full canonical communion with Rome have lived since 2021 under the restrictions imposed by Traditionis Custodes and its subsequent enforcement. Permissions have been withdrawn, celebrations displaced and settled congregations treated as an ecclesial problem to be contained. The Holy See has increasingly centralised decisions that once belonged to diocesan bishops.¹⁰
Those Catholics have not announced unauthorised bishops. They recognise the Pope and submit to their lawful ordinaries. Yet their treatment inevitably affects the credibility of Roman assurances to those outside regular canonical structures. A Church that restricts attachment to her inherited liturgy while urging estranged traditionalists to trust her pastoral generosity creates a contradiction that no managed consultation can conceal.
This was precisely the question the College might usefully have placed before the Pope. Has Traditionis Custodes produced unity, reduced division or drawn traditional Catholics more securely into diocesan life? Has it distinguished carefully enough between rejection of an ecumenical council and attachment to a venerable form of the Roman Rite? Has the restriction of peaceful communities encouraged obedience, or supplied the estranged with further reasons for distrust?
Those are not questions to be feared. They are questions a consistory exists to ask.
The same is true of the approaching consecrations. The cardinals need not approve the Society’s case in order to examine whether Rome has done everything prudently possible to prevent rupture. They might distinguish the canonical offence of consecrating without mandate from the canonical crime of refusing submission to the Pope. They might examine why decades of concessions, negotiations and doctrinal exchanges have failed to produce settlement. They might advise Leo whether a personal meeting is still warranted before 1 July.
Instead, they are asked what languages and practices can foster reconciliation in the world while one of the Church’s gravest unresolved internal conflicts since 1988 is withheld from formal treatment.
The cardinals are asked which voices the Church may not yet be hearing. The reports of most cardinals will not be heard by the whole College.
They are asked to speak freely. Their subjects have been selected in advance, their interventions restricted and their deliberations sealed by a media blackout.
They are asked to practise synodality. The most forceful episcopal criticism of synodality delivered at the previous Consistory has produced no visible alteration to the method.
This is not suppression in the crude sense. No guard stands beside the tables. No cardinal is forbidden to mention the liturgy or the SSPX during the limited open interventions. The process is more subtle. Difficult questions are not prohibited; they are deprived of time, institutional focus and any expectation that the gathering will answer them. They may enter the conversation, but the meeting has not been designed to reach a judgment upon them.
That is how process replaces government.
The danger extends beyond one Consistory, one liturgical dispute and one priestly society. A Church that cannot decide eventually discovers that events decide for her. Doctrinal ambiguity hardens into rival practice. Temporary pastoral experiments become permanent structures. Restrictions imposed as emergency measures become settled policy. Groups denied a serious hearing cease to expect one. Their estrangement is then cited as evidence that dialogue was impossible from the beginning.
Christian communion cannot be produced by averaging opinions or editing disagreements into a report acceptable to everyone at a table. It rests upon a common faith, common sacraments and common government. It requires patience, charity and listening, but it cannot be reduced to them. At some point a proposition must be judged true or false, a policy prudent or harmful, an act lawful or unlawful, a wound healed or permitted to deepen.
The great assemblies of the Church were often turbulent. Bishops disputed. Theologians quarrelled over words. Factions formed. Secular rulers interfered. There is no need to romanticise them. Their greatness lay not in the serenity of their methods but in their determination to reach judgment. They confessed the faith, condemned error, enacted canons, corrected discipline and restored communion wherever it could be restored.
The modern ecclesiastical meeting increasingly appears to fear the very thing those assemblies existed to produce: a conclusion.
Pope Leo is right to invite frankness. He is right to restore regular consistories and to seek the counsel of the whole College. His appeal to the cardinals may yet prove more consequential than the structure imposed upon them. A determined Pope can hear beyond the summaries. A courageous cardinal can make three minutes count.
But consultation must be ordered towards decision. Listening must serve truth. Synodality must not become the mechanism by which authority indefinitely postpones the exercise of authority.
A shepherd listens because he must know the condition of the flock. He does not listen because listening relieves him of the duty to lead it.
The tragedy of this Consistory is not that Rome is speaking too much. It is that the organisation of speech has begun to substitute for the courage to answer. At the moment when the Church most needed an honest theological dispute, a direct paternal encounter and a judgment informed by the whole College, she chose another managed conversation instead.
The round tables will turn. The secretaries will write. Reports will arrive by email. A press conference will explain what the cardinals discerned.
Outside the hall, the questions excluded from judgment will continue towards Écône.
And on 1 July, unless something changes, the crisis the Consistory declined to judge will deliver a judgment of its own.
- Francis, Traditionis Custodes, 16 July 2021; accompanying letter to the bishops; subsequent responses of the Congregation for Divine Worship; Rescriptum ex Audientia, 20 February 2023.
- Code of Canon Law, can. 349: the cardinals assist the Roman Pontiff collegially when summoned “to deal with questions of major importance.”
- Leo XIV, Address at the Opening of the Extraordinary Consistory, 26 June 2026. The Pope asked the cardinals for their “freedom,” “frankness” and “loyalty,” describing sincere counsel as an act of communion.
- Holy See Press Office, programme for the Extraordinary Consistory, 22 June 2026. The programme confirms group work, electronic submission of reports, selective plenary presentations and three-minute interventions during the concluding dialogue.
- Joseph Cardinal Zen, intervention at the Extraordinary Consistory, January 2026. Zen described the synodal process as an “ironclad manipulation” and “an insult to the dignity of the bishops,” and asked whether bishops had been permitted to undertake “disputation” and “judgment.”
- Gerhard Cardinal Müller, comments following the January 2026 Consistory and subsequent remarks before the June gathering. Müller distinguished episcopal government from parliamentary or democratic models and reported support among cardinals for fuller plenary debate.
- Raymond Cardinal Burke, reflections on the January 2026 Extraordinary Consistory. Burke welcomed the restoration of consistories while arguing that written submissions and small-group reports could not replace substantive debate before the whole College.
- Leo XIV, concluding address to the Extraordinary Consistory, 8 January 2026. The Pope described the small-group method as an experience of synodality that should be continued and deepened.
- Holy See Press Office, programme for the June Extraordinary Consistory; Associated Press reporting, 26 June 2026. The official programme omits the liturgy, while subsequent reporting stated that the subject had initially been expected but was removed as the SSPX consecrations approached. The Holy See has not publicly confirmed the reason.
- Society of Saint Pius X statements concerning Father Davide Pagliarani’s requests for an audience with Pope Leo XIV and the subsequent meeting with Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández on 12 February 2026.
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