Archbishop Randazzo on Synodality: A Call to Genuine Renewal

Archbishop Anthony Randazzo’s warning against cutting away the Church’s supposed “dead wood” reaches far beyond one argument about synodality. It raises the question Rome increasingly needs to answer: is the present process faithfully receiving Vatican II, or using an ever-expanding interpretation of the Council to accomplish changes which the Council itself never enacted?

Archbishop Anthony Randazzo has supplied an image Rome would do well to ponder. The Church, he says, is like an ancient tree capable of putting forth fresh shoots. Authentic renewal allows the old wood to live and bear fruit again. Yet he warns that some “over-enthusiastic interpretations of synodality” may instead see an opportunity to “cut away what is perceived to be dead wood”. Without careful discernment, what begins as renewal can become damage to the tree itself.¹

The identity of the speaker gives the warning particular weight. Pope Leo XIV appointed Randazzo Prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts on 25 March 2026, entrusting him with the Roman office concerned with the proper understanding and application of the Church’s law.² This is not therefore the complaint of an outsider looking suspiciously upon Rome. It is a warning from the man Pope Leo has chosen to oversee one of the principal instruments by which the Church gives juridical expression to her constitution and discipline.

Randazzo goes further. Canon law, he says, rests upon foundations arising from Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition and exists to safeguard the “communion of faith received from the Apostles”. He insists that Vatican II must be read in its entirety rather than selectively pressed into the service of one preferred interpretation. The Church “does not renew herself by abandoning her roots”, he says, but by allowing those roots to nourish new growth.¹

That warning becomes more significant when placed beside the Synod Secretariat’s own description of the present moment. In June it called the implementation phase of synodality “a new stage in the reception of the Second Vatican Council”.³ The process is no longer confined to the assemblies held under Pope Francis. Diocesan and eparchial assemblies are planned for 2027, followed by assemblies of episcopal conferences, continental assemblies in early 2028 and an Ecclesial Assembly in Rome in October 2028. The official guidance goes further still: participants are to help sustain the process beyond 2028 so that synodality may increasingly become an ordinary style of ecclesial life.⁴

That language forces the real question into the open. What precisely is meant by the continuing “reception” of Vatican II?

There is an orthodox and necessary answer. Councils do not cease to require reception when the bishops go home. Their teaching must be understood, absorbed, applied and lived. Vatican II therefore required reception just as earlier councils did. But “reception” can also acquire a different meaning. It can become a method by which later interpreters claim authority not merely to apply what a council taught, but to develop what they believe the council was trying to say beyond what it actually said.

At that point reception begins to shade into revision.

This is where the expression “Vatican III by stealth” becomes more than a provocative slogan. The Synod on Synodality is obviously not an ecumenical council. There has been no canonical convocation of Vatican III, no body of Council Fathers exercising the authority proper to an ecumenical council, and no claim that synodal reports possess conciliar authority. To pretend otherwise would make the criticism easy to dismiss.

The more serious argument concerns function rather than canonical form. Synodality can become a mechanism through which one particular interpretation of Vatican II acquires practical and institutional force without its advocates having to demonstrate that the changes they seek were actually enacted by Vatican II. What another generation might have attempted through a new council can instead be described as the unfinished “reception” of the last one.

That possibility is not invented by critics of synodality. The International Theological Commission acknowledged in 2018 that “synodality” is a neologism and that neither the term nor the concept is explicitly found in the teaching of Vatican II. Nevertheless, it argued that synodality lies at the heart of the renewal encouraged by the Council and represents something that has matured in ecclesial consciousness since Vatican II.⁵

There is the interpretative move upon which much depends. The argument is no longer simply that Vatican II expressly established a particular synodal structure which remains to be implemented. It becomes instead that Vatican II generated an ecclesiological dynamic whose fuller implications were not themselves stated by the Council, and that subsequent development may therefore legitimately carry the Church into structures and understandings which the Council Fathers did not enact.

Some prominent supporters of the project have been remarkably candid about that genealogy. America described the Synod in 2023 under the headline, “The synod is not Vatican III. It’s Pope Francis’ implementation of Vatican II.” Massimo Faggioli, writing sympathetically about the project, described Francis as opening the way to a synodal Church which was “not quite born at Vatican II, but was theologically conceived there”.⁶ ⁷

Those claims deserve to be taken seriously rather than caricatured. They reveal that the real dispute is not between Catholics who accept Vatican II and Catholics who do not. The dispute concerns the hermeneutic by which Vatican II is received.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI did not regard the Council as unfinished business which they were attempting to suppress. Both regarded their pontificates as implementing Vatican II. What they resisted was the claim that the Council had inaugurated an open-ended ecclesiastical trajectory whose supposed “spirit” could outrun its texts and the previous Magisterium.

Benedict XVI identified the problem with exceptional clarity in his address to the Roman Curia on 22 December 2005. He contrasted the “hermeneutic of reform” within the continuity of the Church with what he called the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”. According to the latter, the actual texts of Vatican II were compromises containing remnants of an older ecclesiology. Their deepest meaning was therefore supposedly to be found not in what the Council finally taught, but in its impulses towards novelty. Once that premise is accepted, Benedict observed, it becomes possible to claim that fidelity to the Council requires going beyond its texts in order to realise its allegedly deeper intention.⁸

That analysis goes directly to the present difficulty. If the decisive question is no longer “What did Vatican II teach?” but “Where was Vatican II leading us?”, authority quietly migrates from the Council to those claiming to interpret its trajectory. The text no longer governs the interpretation. The interpreter increasingly governs the text.

This is precisely why synodality can serve as such an effective vehicle for progressive reinterpretation. It need not begin by declaring doctrines false. It operates primarily through process, vocabulary, structures and expectations. “Listening”, “discernment”, “co-responsibility”, “participation”, “lived experience” and “conversation in the Spirit” become the ordinary language through which ecclesial questions are framed. None of those expressions is objectionable in itself. The difficulty arises when the method acquires an authority of its own and the continuation of discussion gradually changes the perceived status of what is being discussed.

A proposition need not be formally denied if it can be made to appear permanently provisional.

Questions touching authority, ministry, sexual morality, the role of women and the constitution of the Church can return repeatedly to synodal discussion. Some genuinely admit pastoral development. Others are governed by doctrines or structures which the Church has received rather than devised. Yet repeated inclusion in a continuing process can itself create the impression that every question remains open. Catholics understandably begin to assume that if Rome is still “discerning” something after years of discussion, the previous answer must somehow be incomplete.

This is not how the development of doctrine works. Development deepens the Church’s understanding of what she has received. It does not turn the deposit of faith into raw material for successive generations to reconstruct.

The same clarity is necessary when the sensus fidelium is invoked. Catholic teaching does not identify the sensus fidei with opinion polling, consultation exercises or the views of those most inclined to attend ecclesiastical meetings. The International Theological Commission’s substantial 2014 study explicitly warned against confusing public opinion within the Church with the supernatural sense of faith. Authentic participation in the sensus fidei presupposes the theological virtue of faith, life within the communion of the Church, attentiveness to the Magisterium, holiness and adherence to the Apostolic Faith. It also states that the Magisterium must judge whether opinions presented as the sensus fidelium actually correspond to the Tradition received from the Apostles.⁹

That is crucial. Listening to the faithful is necessary. Pretending that every opinion expressed by Catholics constitutes the voice of the Holy Ghost is not.

The problem becomes still sharper once those opinions pass through the machinery of synodality. The ordinary Catholic does not speak directly into a Roman final document. Contributions pass through questionnaires, meetings, facilitators, diocesan syntheses, national syntheses, continental discussions, secretariats, drafting committees, theologians and further stages of interpretation. Each stage requires judgement about what to include, what to omit, what to emphasise and how to describe it.

The result may be useful, but it is mediated. It cannot simply be presented as though “the People of God” had spoken with a single voice.

This is the paradox we have repeatedly identified in modern synodality. A process advertised as an antidote to clericalism risks producing a new clericalism of the ecclesiastical professional. Actual influence can migrate away from easily identifiable pastors towards those who frame the questions, manage the process, control the vocabulary and write the syntheses. The authority has not disappeared; it has merely become harder to see.

John Paul II had already identified the danger of intermediary structures obscuring episcopal responsibility. In Apostolos Suos he strongly defended legitimate episcopal collaboration while insisting that bishops’ conferences and their offices exist to assist bishops, not substitute for them. He explicitly warned against excessive bureaucratic development and reaffirmed that the diocesan bishop possesses a proper, ordinary and immediate authority which collective structures cannot simply absorb.¹⁰

That principle matters because Catholic government is not generated by committee. Bishops receive an office in the Church which secretariats, commissions and consultation teams do not possess. Their advisers may be knowledgeable and indispensable, but advice does not become ecclesiastical authority simply because enough layers of process surround it.

There is therefore a deeper difference between Vatican II and the present synodal model than is usually acknowledged. Vatican II began on 11 October 1962 and ended on 8 December 1965. Paul VI formally declared the Council terminated and its assembly disbanded.¹¹ It left behind identifiable texts whose authority, meaning and relationship to prior teaching could subsequently be examined.

Permanent synodality is different by design. The Ecclesial Assembly of October 2028 is explicitly described not as the final moment of the process but as another moment of assessment, synthesis and renewed impetus. Official guidance speaks of sustaining the process beyond 2028 and of synodality increasingly becoming the ordinary style of ecclesial life.⁴

That difference should not be underestimated. A council ends. Its acts can then be received. A permanent process continually produces new stages of its own reception.

The danger is circularity. Synodality generates documents which call for more synodality; subsequent assemblies evaluate the implementation of earlier synodal documents; those evaluations produce new orientations which require further implementation. A method intended to serve the Church can gradually acquire the character of an ecclesial end in itself.

That makes the question of proportionality unavoidable. Years of assemblies, reports, meetings, formation programmes, travel, personnel and administrative work consume money and, more importantly, human attention. A Church facing collapsing sacramental practice in much of the West, declining vocations, widespread catechetical ignorance and societies increasingly estranged from Christianity is entitled to ask what fruits this enormous investment is producing.

The answer cannot merely be that Catholics are becoming more synodal. A missionary process must ultimately be judged by missionary fruits: people brought to Christ, souls returned to the sacraments, Catholics better instructed in the Faith, stronger families, more vocations, holier clergy and parishes capable of transmitting Christianity to another generation.

Randazzo’s intervention therefore comes at exactly the right moment. His image of the ancient tree exposes the question hidden beneath much of the present discussion. Before one removes the “dead wood”, one must first possess a reliable criterion for determining what is dead.

Age cannot be that criterion, because Christianity itself is ancient. Contemporary incomprehension cannot be the criterion, because the Gospel has contradicted every age into which it has been preached. Consultation cannot supply the criterion, because Revelation is not established by majority opinion. Nor can an alleged trajectory of Vatican II supply it if that trajectory requires abandoning what Vatican II itself affirmed or what the Church had already definitively received.

Pope Leo XIV therefore faces a task which is both simpler and more consequential than deciding whether to continue using the language of synodality. He inherited the process and has chosen to continue its implementation. He can now give it boundaries.

Those boundaries should not be difficult to state. Vatican II must be received according to what it actually taught and within the continuity of the one Church before and after the Council. Synodal bodies can advise, consult and assist; they cannot become parallel sources of ecclesiastical authority. The sensus fidelium must be recognised according to its Catholic meaning rather than confused with organised opinion. Questions genuinely open to prudential development must be distinguished from doctrines and structures the Church has no authority to reinvent.

Above all, Rome must recover the elementary order expressed in the principle Accipere, non fingere: receive, do not invent. The Church listens because she has first listened to Christ. She discerns because she has first received a Faith by which discernment is possible. The Holy Ghost guiding the Church today is the same Holy Ghost who inspired Scripture, sustained the Apostolic Tradition, guarded the Church through her councils and sanctified generations of faithful before anyone spoke of a “synodal process”.

That is why the argument about “Vatican III by stealth” cannot simply be waved away by observing that no Vatican III has been canonically convoked. The serious question is whether an indefinite process is being permitted to produce the ecclesiological consequences of another council while describing those consequences as merely the continuing reception of Vatican II.

If synodality means receiving the Council, then it must receive the Council that actually happened. It cannot invoke an imagined Vatican II whose authentic meaning lies perpetually beyond its own documents. Benedict XVI saw where that logic leads: the written Council becomes subordinate to a supposed spirit of the Council, and the supposed spirit becomes whatever later interpreters decide the unfinished revolution requires.

Vatican II ended on 8 December 1965. Its reception continues because the life of the Church continues. But reception cannot mean that every generation receives permission to rewrite what the previous generation received.

Otherwise “reception” becomes a euphemism for revision, and an ecclesial process without conciliar authority begins accomplishing what would once have required another council.

That is why Archbishop Randazzo’s warning matters. Before anyone in Rome cuts away the alleged dead wood, the Church must first be certain that she is pruning the tree — and not severing the living branches through which the Apostolic inheritance still runs.