The working document, or instrumentum laboris, for next October’s meeting of the Synod of Bishops is “taking up again” the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on the church by focusing on the missionary responsibility of all the baptized in the synodal church. That is what Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the relator general for next October’s synod, said in this exclusive interview with America’s Vatican correspondent.
He emphasized the importance of the working document’s attention to affirming and promoting the role of women in the church in the 21st century and said, “If women do not feel comfortable in the church, we have failed our living as Christians.” He explained that “synodality is the path the church has to follow in order to fight the polarization” that exists in the church and world today by seeking to harmonize differences.
Cardinal Hollerich presented the instrumentum laboris together with Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the synod, at a press conference in the Vatican on July 9. I sat down with him afterward at the office of the synod’s secretariat on Via della Conciliazione.
The Luxembourg-born cardinal, who will turn 66 in August, is a member of the Japanese province of the Jesuits. He lived in Japan from 1985-89 and again from 1994 to 2011, when Benedict XVI appointed him to be archbishop of Luxembourg. Pope Francis made him a cardinal in 2019, named him relator general for the synod in 2021 and appointed him to his council of nine cardinal advisors in 2023.
He is one of the most influential figures at the October synod, together with Cardinal Grech. As relator general, he will deliver the keynote address to the synod’s opening plenary assembly in October and will preside over the drafting of its final text.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Gerard O’Connell: The instrumentum laboris for the October 2024 synod is an important document that focuses on one question—how to be a missionary, synodal church—to be discussed by the 400 participants. How would you summarize this document?
Cardinal Hollerich: I would say it is taking up Vatican II again, taking up “Lumen Gentium” [the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church] and looking at possible consequences of “Lumen Gentium” for the life and the function of the church today. We had this document of Vatican II, but we continued as if nothing had happened. Now is the time to reflect [on the fact that] if the people of God is made up of all baptized persons, what does this imply? How should we be church together?
I find here [in “Lumen Gentium”] a wonderful possibility for conversion; of conversion to be members of the church, not just to be an individual Christian looking only for his or her own redemption but instead walking together through history with so many women, with so many men, being in solidarity with them, and with them looking to see where the Holy Spirit will guide us as a church.
Pope Francis in “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), the programmatic document for his pontificate, spoke a lot about conversion. Could you express what conversion means in this context?
Changing your way [of being]. I have experienced conversion because as a bishop in my own diocese, I now react differently from how I reacted before the synod. I am listening much more to the different councils I have [in the archdiocese]. I do not immediately oppose it if there is some accentuation that is different from the one I would have had, but I let them go and, in letting them go I discovered that this brings a renewal to the church.
So it means a change of mentality?
Yes. The change of mentality is necessary. We are in the West, and we speak of the Global West of which we are all part, which includes the United States, Canada and Europe. I do not speak about the Global West as a political organization but as a culture where the concept of the person and personal freedoms has developed, but which is now falling into individualism, without any links to each other, and polarization. We see it in politics, but also in the churches, and that [individualism] is destroying Christianity because you can never be Christian alone. You are always Christian with other people, and you are not just baptized to be saved; you are baptized also to become part of a people.
The document says that “in the synodal church, the responsibility of the bishop, the college of bishops and the Roman Pontiff, to make decisions is inalienable, since it is rooted in the hierarchical structure of the church, however it is not unconditional. An orientation that emerges in the consultative process as the outcome of proper discernment, especially if carried out by particular bodies of the local church, cannot be ignored.” In other words, as a bishop, you have to take into account what people are saying.
A bishop is the bishop of his church, and as a bishop, I cannot completely ignore that church. I’m not an absolute ruler. Being a bishop and being a priest is not, let’s say, the expression of an absolute rule from God. It’s not a theocracy in that sense. We have seen theocracies in that sense in other countries, in other religions, in other cultures, but they fail because they disregard the person.
The responsibility that one has received with ordination implies listening to your church. You can as a bishop not agree [with what others are saying], and you can also voice it, but then it’s part of a dialog with your church.
When we say now that the church is not a democracy, I completely agree, but the church is not an absolute monarchy either. Sometimes we have taken in forms of government from the political world, from the organization of our states, without reflecting, and then this slightly changes the sacramental meaning of being a bishop, being a priest. So I think it’s always necessary to adjust, to come back to its original meaning. And there we have to go back to Scripture.
I think that now we are going back to the original church, the primitive church, because in between we had Christendom. Even if I do not believe that it was at any time a complete Christian world, the culture was mainly formed by the Catholic Church in Europe. But that time is over, and now we come back to a church of the first centuries where the church has to confront other mentalities, other ways of thinking. Sometimes it is apologetic, but it always has to enter into dialog with this world because God is present in this world. My task as a bishop is to help my people understand where God is present in our world.
If I look to my own diocese, Luxembourg, one-third of the population was born in Luxembourg, so that means a huge diversity. In the past, we just had Catholic people, and a[small] Protestant minority and a [small] Jewish minority. Now we have all the religions and you cannot come with the pretension that the Catholic Church alone has the answer to all the possible problems. We must become humble, learn from the others, dialog with the others, and always look for the presence of God in our world. Sometimes we tend to become atheists in the Catholic Church: We see God at the origin of our religion, but we do not want to let him act in history anymore.
The working document says one of the first fruits of the synodal process is listening.
I agree. Normally, you would come out of the seminary and say, “Now I know the truth, and I proclaim it to the other people.” Then I can put people into different categories: those who completely accept it and those who partly are critical. Then I say these critical Christians are horrible; they question my authority. But that [way of thinking] is now over.
God is present in this world. God is acting in this world. And I can discover God when I listen. Now, listening is not just an exercise of reason; listening is an exercise of the heart. Listening means you first have to accept the other person as your equal; otherwise, you cannot listen to him, to her. Listening means you must feel empathy for the other person so that you understand not only his or her different position but what led him or her to have a different position. Listening means to get the feeling of the suffering of that person, of the hopes of that person.
God listens to people, and this means God loves people. Listening means entering a little bit into the love of God for people, and therefore it always needs a conversion from those deep attitudes in our human heart that are sinful, attitudes that make us not want to listen, that make us feel superior so that we think we know everything. All that is very sinful, and so even though sin perhaps does not get mentioned in the document, there is the word conversion, and where there is that word, it means there is sin.
The document says those who participated in the October 2023 synod had a real experience of the unity and plurality of the church at a time when the world is marked by growing inequalities, bitter polarization and a continuous explosion of conflicts. There was a clear attempt at the synod’s first session to harmonize differences, or at least to recognize them, and learn to live with them.
There are legitimate differences, but we always saw differences as a kind of threat to the unity of the church. So one person in Africa might have a completely different feeling about something than one person in Europe, but that does not mean that he or she is my enemy, or that I have to fight him or her in order to impose my view. Listening to each other means we get closer to each other, and at the same time it means that our differences are not absolute, that there is something bigger that unites us and that God is always greater than our human heart and our human understanding.
We see differences in the church today, and we see it’s difficult to reach that harmonizing of differences because polarization is so visible in both society and the church.
I think synodality is the path the church has to follow in order to fight this polarization. If we can see the difference not as a polarization, but as something that brings us to a better understanding of who God is and how God acts in the world, I think it’s a big gain.
Last week Girl Guides [a worldwide movement known in the United States as Girl Scouts] visited me. I celebrated Mass for them, and then we had dinner together. At the moment of Communion, some fell on their knees and received Communion in the mouth. Others were standing and received Communion in the hand. I can live with both, and I accept both. As a bishop, what I want is for each person to have respect for Communion and respect for each other in the different ways of taking Communion, [acknowledging] that no way is better than the other one but that there are personal pieties. If they help people, they should keep them.
What comes through most strongly in the working document is both the request and the need to affirm women, to promote women, to bring them into decision-making, to recognize that they are fully part of the church.
That is the most important point for the church today. If women do not feel comfortable in the church, we have failed our living as Christians. Genesis tells us that God created man in his own image and likeness, woman and man he created them. Which means that if I do not respect women, if I think that they, for whatever reason, are less competent because they are women, it is a scandal today, and it cannot be accepted.
Now the question is, if this full equality of women and men means that they must also be ordained ministers, I do not know. But what is important for me is that ordained ministry should not be lived as the point where power is. In general, you should not speak about power in the church but about service. So if women feel that their voice is listened to as much as the voice of men, but they still feel, let’s say, discriminated [against] by not being admitted to the ordained ministry, we have to think about it.
You have the privilege of being a member of the council of nine cardinal advisors (the C9) that assists Pope Francis in the governance of the universal church in a way that others do not have. What do you see in the C9 that is not yet expressed in this document?
I cannot speak about the content, but you know that a Salesian theologian, Sister Linda Pocher, has [over four sessions] always brought one man and many women to the C9, and we listen to them. I am always struck by how seriously the pope is listening. He’s never impatient. He has never made an angry gesture or said “that’s not correct” when some of the women said things about gender theory, for instance, that surely is not the official teaching of the church. Pope Francis listened carefully, and that is a lesson for me. I learn from him, seeing him like that, how open he is, and what the listening church means. I think the pope is fully capable of changing his opinion. And that makes him a great man.
Pope Francis said in “Evangelii Gaudium” that he’s starting processes, and presents this synodal event as a major process that connects with Vatican II. But I notice many people worry and ask if this synodal process will continue in another pontificate.
I think so. But I do not think much about another pontificate because we have a pope, and he’s doing well, and he’s inspiring the whole church. Indeed, I think that it would be very difficult to stop this process now. It is a process from the Holy Spirit, and people have learned that they are free, that they can speak up. I could not imagine the church going back to the past, even if many people wish that. People would speak up.
Next October’s synod assembly will focus on one topic: How do we be a synodal missionary church? But then there are 10 study groups set up by the pope and linked to the synod. How does all this come together?
First of all, the 10 study groups will report to the synod and inform the synod about the current stage of their reflection. The pope said when he instituted the study groups that they have to function in a synodal way. So it’s not something against the synod, where the church [of Rome] wants to have control, but it is a way of putting a synodal way of thinking, feeling and doing inside the theological reflection. We need more theological reflection because some of the questions are not ripe to be decided, so there is a need for further reflection, and we should do it, but always with an open mindset.
But by mid-June 2025, or perhaps even later, these study groups will present their results to the pope. At that point, will he make a decision?
We shall see. Remember there’s also coordination by the Secretariat of the Synod in this process, and that’s a very important element. I am a member of two groups, and I am amazed at what’s happening. One group is about the revision of the 1985 “Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis,” the guidelines on the formation of seminarians according to Vatican II, and the other one is about aspects of the ministry of bishops and the selection of candidates to be bishops.
The working document emphasizes the fundamental importance of formation, especially in the seminaries, but also in the whole church. Pope Francis spoke about it during the first session.
Yes. A woman theologian once said, if you have a Tridentarian seminary, you should not be surprised if you get Tridentarian priests out of it. So we have to look carefully and see how we can give a synodal formation to young people in seminaries and to people throughout the church.
What do you hope for at the end of the synod?
I hope we can decide how to continue to be a synodal missionary church. There are different possibilities. The instrumentum laboris is not a pre-decision; rather it is opening up the discussion in such a way that the church can go forward, walk together in the future.
