By Their Fruits: ✠Mutsaerts Puts Synodality to the Test
For months Nuntiatoria has argued that consultation cannot manufacture a sensus fidelium, that process cannot become ecclesiology, and that the Church must receive rather than reinvent what she has been given. Now a Dutch bishop has put essentially the same questions directly to Pope Leo XIV: where are the conversions, the vocations, the Eucharistic faith and the missionary courage?
There is a certain satisfaction, though little cause for celebration, in discovering that a serving bishop has now put directly to Pope Leo XIV questions which Nuntiatoria has been asking for months. In an open letter to the Holy Father, ✠Rob Mutsaerts, Auxiliary Bishop of ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, asks what the Synod on Synodality has actually produced. Not how many people were consulted, meetings convened, reports written or assemblies held, but something altogether more elementary: has faith become stronger? Has Christ been proclaimed more clearly? Has Catholic identity deepened? Have more people been converted? Has Sunday Mass attendance increased? Are there more priestly vocations? Is catechesis more effective? Is there greater reverence for the Eucharist? Is the Church’s moral teaching clearer? Has missionary courage increased?¹
They are devastating questions because they restore the proper scale of things. They take the discussion out of the committee room and place it before the altar, the confessional, the baptismal font, the seminary and the mission field. ✠Mutsaerts begins from salus animarum suprema lex — the salvation of souls is the supreme law — and asks whether the synodal process has actually brought souls closer to Christ and eternal salvation. He does not deny that people have listened, spoken, participated or worked with good intentions. He asks whether those activities have borne recognisably Catholic fruit.¹
That distinction matters. Any institution can pronounce a process successful if success is measured by the completion of the process itself. A consultation can report that thousands were consulted; an assembly can congratulate itself for having assembled; an initiative in participation can cite the quantity of participation it generated. Yet none of these things tells us whether the supernatural mission entrusted by Christ to His Church has been advanced. Our Lord supplied another criterion altogether: “By their fruits you shall know them.”
Readers of Nuntiatoria will recognise the argument, because this publication has already approached the problem from several directions. In May, “Synodality or Stage Management?” examined the danger of curated consultation being represented as an authentic ecclesial consensus, particularly when those participating cannot simply be assumed to constitute a representative cross-section of believing Catholics.² Later that month, “Cardinal Zen, Synodality, and the Constitutional Crisis of the Church” asked the deeper question: whether a method of consultation was becoming an ecclesiology, altering not merely how the Church discusses questions but how she understands herself.³ In June, “When Process Replaces Judgment” addressed the related tendency for managed deliberation to displace the episcopal task of reaching doctrinal and prudential judgement.⁴ And only days before ✠Mutsaerts’ intervention, “Experts in Synodality: Leo XIV and the Rise of the Church of Process” returned to the possibility that synodality was ceasing to be one instrument among others and becoming a permanent paradigm through which ecclesial life itself was increasingly understood.⁵
Then came the governing principle of the present edition: Accipere, non fingere — to receive, not to fabricate. Nuntiatoria argued that the Catholic instinct begins with reception. Revelation is received. Grace is received. The Sacraments are received. The Church herself is received as something established by Christ before she becomes something administered by us. Ecclesiastical authority is therefore stewardship before it is creativity: bishops inherit a deposit which they are charged to guard, explain and transmit, not raw material from which Christianity is to be reconstructed according to each generation’s expectations.⁶
And now ✠Mutsaerts writes to Peter: “The Church is not a conversation but a received reality.”¹
There is no reason to suppose that ✠Mutsaerts has been reading Nuntiatoria, and none is required. The significance lies precisely in the independent convergence. Catholics beginning from the received character of Revelation and then examining the claims made for contemporary synodality repeatedly encounter the same fault-line. Synods are Catholic. Consultation is Catholic. Bishops deliberating together is Catholic. Pastors listening attentively to their people is Catholic. None of that is in dispute. The difficulty begins when consultation ceases to be an instrument ordered towards the Church’s received mission and becomes capable of generating expectations about what the Church herself might now become.
✠Mutsaerts goes directly to that point. Faith is received, he argues. The Church possesses Revelation because she received it, not because she distilled it from the aggregated religious experiences of her members. Consequently, truth does not arise by majority vote. If ninety per cent of Catholics ceased believing in the Real Presence, Christ would not thereby become less present in the Blessed Sacrament. If eighty per cent rejected a proposition of Catholic moral teaching, that proposition would not consequently become false. His conclusion could hardly be clearer: “Truth is not produced by consensus.”¹
This bears directly upon the repeated misuse of sensus fidelium. There is a world of difference between discovering what Catholics presently think and discerning the supernatural instinct of faith among the faithful. The former may be investigated sociologically. The latter cannot be manufactured by questionnaires.
Nor is that merely a traditionalist objection to synodality. The International Theological Commission’s 2014 study Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church explicitly distinguishes the sensus fidei from public opinion and identifies conditions for authentic participation in it: participation in the life of the Church, listening to the Word of God, openness to reason, adherence to the Magisterium, holiness, humility and concern for the edification of the Church. It describes the sensus fidei as an instinct for the truth of the Gospel arising from faith lived within the communion of the Church.⁷
That is why our earlier description of a “manufactured consensus crisis” was not rhetorical exaggeration. A thousand people may tell the Church what they desire; their experience may deserve patient pastoral attention. But multiplying testimonies cannot transform desire into Revelation. A consultation can reveal widespread dissent from Catholic teaching. It cannot, merely by revealing that dissent, convert it into the supernatural sensus fidelium.²
✠Mutsaerts therefore asks the essential supplementary question about the much-invoked duty of listening: listening to whom? A bishop must listen to his flock, but the Church listens first to Christ, Scripture, Apostolic Tradition, the saints and the Magisterium. Only within that prior act of reception can contemporary experience find its proper place. Reverse the order and the direction of pastoral activity changes. Instead of asking how modern man may be converted by the Gospel, we begin asking how the Gospel might be rendered acceptable to modern man.¹
The distinction turns upon a word strangely absent from much contemporary ecclesiastical language: conversion.
The Church exists to make saints. Her pastoral ministry is ordered towards bringing sinners to repentance, unbelievers to faith, the baptised to holiness and souls finally to Heaven. Welcome, accompaniment, participation, listening and dialogue can all serve that purpose. But none can replace it. A shepherd listens to the sheep because he intends to lead them somewhere.
This is why ✠Mutsaerts’ test of fruits is so difficult to evade. The crisis confronting Western Catholicism is not difficult to identify. He points particularly to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Western Europe: emptying churches, merged parishes, disappearing monasteries, ageing religious communities, weak catechetical knowledge, diminished sacramental practice, scarce priestly vocations and the virtual disappearance of Confession from the lives of many Catholics. Against that background, he asks why such immense ecclesiastical energy continues to concentrate upon structures, participation, decision-making, inclusivity, power and institutional organisation. Those questions may have their legitimate place, he concedes; but a burning house has other priorities.¹
This is not a demand that the Church cease discussing governance. It is a demand for proportion. If Catholic life is visibly weakening, the first question should surely be how Catholics can again be brought to belief, worship, repentance and holiness. If seminaries are empty, the problem is not solved by producing more sophisticated documents about vocation. If churches are empty, another consultation about participation is unlikely by itself to fill them. If Catholics no longer understand the Mass as the Sacrifice of Calvary sacramentally made present, the fundamental problem is not one of governance but faith.
Here ✠Mutsaerts adds an observation of particular importance: those most active in ecclesiastical consultation are not necessarily representative of the Church. The Catholic who attends Mass faithfully, prays the Rosary, teaches the Catechism to grandchildren or travels considerable distances for the traditional liturgy may never attend a listening session. The mother occupied with raising a large Catholic family may have little time for diocesan consultations; the contemplative religious does not necessarily complete online surveys. Yet their adherence to Catholic life may be considerably deeper than that of professional ecclesiastical participants.¹
That observation almost exactly meets the question raised by Nuntiatoria in “Synodality or Stage Management?” Representativeness has to be demonstrated; it cannot simply be assumed because a consultation occurred.² The “People of God” cannot be reduced to those who attend the meeting, volunteer for the committee, answer the questionnaire or acquire access to the microphone.
The problem becomes still more acute when consultation raises expectations about matters on which the Church cannot simply reinvent her teaching. ✠Mutsaerts points to the female diaconate, priesthood, sexual morality, homosexual relationships, ecclesiastical authority, decentralisation and the position of women. When such matters are left apparently open to discussion year after year, participants naturally infer that substantive alteration remains possible. If doctrine subsequently prevents the desired change, frustration follows: people were encouraged to articulate expectations which the Church was never free to fulfil.¹
This is pastoral inversion. Charity does not consist in creating expectations which fidelity to Revelation must later disappoint. Authentic pastoral practice begins by speaking truthfully about what has been received and then accompanying people within that truth.
The continuing structure of the synodal process makes these questions more urgent, not less. The Synod itself ended its principal assembly phase in 2024, but its implementation now proceeds through diocesan and eparchial evaluation assemblies in the first half of 2027, assemblies of episcopal conferences later that year, continental assemblies in early 2028 and an Ecclesial Assembly at the Vatican in October 2028. Significantly, the General Secretariat states that this implementation phase, begun under Francis, has been “confirmed and promoted by Pope Leo XIV.” The May 2026 guidelines describe synodality becoming increasingly the “ordinary style of ecclesial life.”⁸
Leo XIV therefore cannot regard the question as merely an inheritance from the previous pontificate. The continuing process is now proceeding with his approval. That gives ✠Mutsaerts’ letter particular importance: this is not a post-mortem upon something already concluded, but an appeal concerning a trajectory which can still be judged and, if necessary, corrected.
Nor does ✠Mutsaerts demand the abolition of consultation. His appeal to the Holy Father is considerably more fundamental: clarity. He asks Peter to strengthen his brethren; to point the Church back to Christ when she becomes absorbed in internal discussion; to remind her of her mission when she loses herself in processes and structures; and to give courage when Catholics become hesitant to proclaim truths which offend the assumptions of modernity. He closes by identifying the heart of authentic reform: Christ, conversion, holiness, the Eucharist, evangelisation and the salvation of souls.¹
That is where his intervention most clearly meets Accipere, non fingere.
The Church may deliberate about how best to transmit what she has received. She cannot deliberate about whether the received deposit remains true. She may reform institutions of ecclesiastical creation; she cannot recreate her divine constitution. She may improve methods of evangelisation; she cannot redefine evangelisation so that conversion becomes optional. She may listen compassionately to those who reject her moral doctrine; she cannot infer from rejection that the doctrine itself has become negotiable.
St Paul supplied the principle long ago: Tradidi enim vobis in primis quod et accepi — “For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received.” The Church hands on because first she receives. That Pauline instinct is not merely the masthead of this publication — Tradidi quod et accepi — but the pattern of Catholic Tradition itself.
And this is why ✠Mutsaerts’ questions deserve answers rather than irritation. Those convinced that synodality represents genuine ecclesial renewal should welcome precisely these criteria. Has faith strengthened? Has Christ been preached more clearly? Have conversions increased? Are there more vocations? Is Catholic doctrine better known? Has Eucharistic reverence deepened? Has moral teaching become clearer? Is missionary courage greater?
If the answer is yes, let the fruits be shown.
If the answer is not yet, then after five years of synodal activity and with another two years of implementation ahead, Catholics are entitled to ask when those fruits may reasonably be expected.
And if the answer is no, then fidelity demands something more searching than another report explaining the success of the process according to the criteria established by the process itself.
There is no hostility to synods in saying so. There is no contempt for consultation. There is simply the refusal to allow means to become ends, participation to become Revelation, or process to become ecclesiology.
For once every assembly has finished, every synthesis has been drafted and every implementation stage completed, the Church will still confront the question with which ✠Mutsaerts begins and ends: have the people entrusted to our care been brought closer to Jesus Christ?¹
That question has an authority no secretariat conferred upon it.
“By their fruits you shall know them.”
Perhaps the great need of this hour is therefore not another refinement of synodal method, but the ancient programme by which the Church has always renewed herself: bishops who teach, priests who believe and pray, religious consumed with the pursuit of perfection, parents who hand on the Faith, catechesis that teaches what Catholics are actually required to believe, seminaries forming men willing to sacrifice themselves for Christ, confessionals in which sinners are reconciled, altars upon which God rather than man is unmistakably the centre, and missionaries sufficiently convinced of the Gospel to ask the world to change rather than continually asking how the Church might change to accommodate the world.
Accipere, non fingere.
Receive what Christ has given. Hand it on intact. Call souls to conversion. Make saints.
There are the fruits.
¹ ✠Rob Mutsaerts, Auxiliary Bishop of ’s-Hertogenbosch, “Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Leo XIV,” Paarse Pepers, Dutch original, 13 August 2026; English version published 15 August 2026.
² Nuntiatoria, “Synodality or Stage Management? Fr. James Martin, Study Group 9, and the Manufactured Consensus Crisis,” 15 May 2026.
³ Nuntiatoria, “Cardinal Zen, Synodality, and the Constitutional Crisis of the Church,” 22 May 2026.
⁴ Nuntiatoria, “When Process Replaces Judgment: Cardinal Zen’s Warning, the Synodal Consistory, and the Crisis Rome Refuses to Confront,” 26 June 2026.
⁵ Nuntiatoria, “Experts in Synodality: Leo XIV and the Rise of the Church of Process,” 14 August 2026.
⁶ Nuntiatoria, “16.08.26 Nuntiatoria CXIX: Accipere non Fingere,” 14 August 2026.
⁷ International Theological Commission, Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church (2014), especially nos. 2–3 and 89–105 on the character of the sensus fidei, the dispositions required for authentic participation, and its distinction from public opinion.
⁸ General Secretariat of the Synod, “Towards the Ecclesial Assembly of October 2028,” 20 May 2026.
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Today’s Mass Propers
- Today’s Mass: August 19 S. John Eudes
Saint John Eudes (1601-1680) was a pivotal figure in promoting devotion to the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Educated by Jesuits, he founded the Eudists and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, establishing numerous seminaries and emphasising missionary work. He was canonised in 1925, leaving a lasting legacy.
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