At any gathering of sociologists, there’s bound to be data. The annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in August was no different. During a two-day track on “The Future of the Catholic Church,” presenters shared stats on the attitudes of priests, challenges at parishes and, of course, disaffiliation from the institution. But one data point stood out to me more than any other: 60 percent of weekly Mass-going U.S. Catholics had never heard of synodality.
That’s not surprising. Many have long seen synodality as a bit of a marketing challenge, to say the least. Also unsurprising is that obliviousness is even higher among less-frequent Mass attendees, with 77 percent of Catholics overall having heard “nothing at all” about the synod. This lack of even basic familiarity with the process that Church leaders—including, apparently, Pope Leo XIV—are embracing as the way forward does not bode well for the future of the Church. But those gathered at the sociology of religion meeting in Chicago still saw synodality as the most encouraging cause for hope.
“One of the reasons I love synodality is because its structures bring people together,” said Michele Dillon, a sociologist and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. “It really forces a dialogue with difference, and keeps with the Church’s tradition of faith and reason.”
Dillon is one of five authors of a new book, Catholicism at a Crossroads: The Present and Future of America’s Largest Church, which is dense with data about U.S. Catholics, much of it summarizing the challenges facing the institutional Church, its parishes, and its people. The book documents the increasing gap between Church teaching and what lay Catholics believe and notes the loss of women’s loyalty to the Church since 2013.
Synodality, with its emphasis on encounter, engagement, and listening, could address those challenges, speakers at the meeting said.
In a session on “Participative Ecclesiologies,” Anthony Pogorelc, a Sulpician priest and sociology scholar in residence at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, noted that the Synod on Synodality’s attempts to encourage an ongoing reception of the Second Vatican Council are not new, even in recent Catholic history. He cited several events, including the 1976 Call to Action meeting in Detroit, organized by the U.S. bishops, as attempts to listen to different perspectives and take them seriously.
Michel Mraczek, who serves on the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Wroclaw, Poland, brought an international perspective, noting that in his country, where Catholicism is more traditional and more clerical, the Synod on Synodality was all the more novel for the faithful. “In many parishes, the synod was the first opportunity for laypeople to express authentic opinions, and, at the same time, the first opportunity to be heard,” he said.
In the United States, priests have divided opinions on the synod, according to a report from Brandon Vaidyanathan, professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America. Only 42 percent said the synod was helpful for their ministry, while 39 percent said it was a waste of time. A majority of priests see themselves as already exercising synodality in their own parishes through their practice of consultation and listening.
In parts of the world where priests visit local parishes only occasionally, synodality and lay empowerment are just “how things get done,” Tia Noelle Pratt of Villanova University said, adding that Pope Leo XIV experienced this in Peru. But the United States has been slow to adopt synodality and lay empowerment. “We’re getting there, but we’d almost rather see [the Church] burned down than see it change.”
The Church has certainly been damaged in recent decades, and sociologists have been among those who have documented its loss of credibility and members. The sessions on “The Future of the Catholic Church” were in part a reaction to the sex-abuse crisis, increasing disaffiliation, and other challenges, said Richard Wood, president of the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, which sponsored the track.
“As an act of faith as Catholics, we’re assured of the future of the Church,” Wood told me in an interview. “But the power of the Spirit in history is going to be through human decisions. I think good scholarly thinking can better inform decisions in the Catholic tradition.”
Although the discipline has often predicted the decline of religion, some sociologists have tried to assist the Church, including those who formed the American Catholic Sociological Society in 1938 in Chicago, a precursor to the current organization. Tricia Bruce’s presidential address at this year’s meeting found—in Chicago’s history and today—a story of resilience. “Even as churches burned down, they kept rising again,” she said, referencing the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 but also hinting at the hopeful movement she sees in the Synod on Synodality.
A consultor to the synod meetings in Rome, Bruce is less concerned about everyday Catholics’ lack of awareness and more excited about how it represents Pope Francis’s attempt “to listen to reality, not just ideas,” in “all the messiness, all the contextual differences, all the disagreements, all the people everywhere.”
“Early in his papacy, Pope Francis identified among his foundational tenets that reality is greater than ideas,” Bruce said.
Those five words flip the ‘definition of the situation’ into a requirement to first ask, and listen, and hear, and learn what is. It’s a philosophy that draws so many to Pope Francis, Catholic or not—his simple recognition of value in what and whom is in front of him.
Bruce’s address wove in stories about her aunt who had moved to Chicago around the turn of the twentieth century and was a devout Catholic. Storytelling was touted throughout the Catholic sessions as essential to the future of the Church. In her presentation on “spiritual exemplars,” Megan Sweas, a journalist at the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, suggested that media could provide an opportunity for storytelling and dialogue. Theologian and ethnographer Susan Bigelow Reynolds of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta told stories of traditionalist Catholics reinventing practices like veil-wearing as countercultural acts.
A related discussion focused on communities, including families, ecclesial movements, and parishes. Steven Millies of the Bernardin Center at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago argued that problems in both our Church and politics stem from a failure to understand what a community, a nation, and a people really are. Millies suggested starting with the concept of fraternity, as described in Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti.
Community organizing could help the Church rebuild its public voice, said Juan Soto of the Gamaliel Network of Metro Chicago. One tactic: Start with people, not the program. “The Church often reverses this, rolling out pastoral programs without doing groundwork,” Soto said, adding that synodality requires “deep listening” grounded in relationships across difference. He recommends that every bishop commit to doing fifty intentional one-on-ones a year with people outside his normal circles, asking the question, “What keeps you up at night?”
“The question is not whether the Catholic Church will change. It will,” he said. “The question is will we shape that change through intentional, relational power building, or will we let it happen to us?”
One of the most evocative presentations came from three young adult women with graduate degrees in ministry struggling to find a place in a Church that doesn’t seem to respect them.
“As a woman in the Church, I don’t have a place at the table, so I’ve always had to imagine something that doesn’t exist,” said Claire DesHotels, who says she feels called to preach but is unable to do that in a traditional parish setting. Catholic social teaching and the Gospel keep her Catholic, although she and the other panel members worship at an alternative house church.
Panelist Charlotte Ahern finds hope in Laudato si’, Pope Francis’s encyclical on environmental justice. “For as many things I can think of that are wrong, something calls me to stay,” she said.
Religious women have inspired Kascha Sanor, who works as the director of social and environmental justice for the Sisters of St. Joseph in LaGrange, Illinois. But the Synod on Synodality is what excites her the most.
“The synod was transformative for me,” she said. “I no longer am in the Church despite it but because of it.” Yet she recognizes that few of her peers have the same level of enthusiasm about the process, including her two co-panelists and the majorities of U.S. Catholics who did not participate in the synod consultations.
Sociologists, however, can’t help but praise the massive data-gathering in the leadup to the Synod on Synodality, what some have termed the largest consultative process in human history. An organization that hasn’t always been positive about the social sciences, in essence, said “tell us about your lived reality,” said Dillon, although she acknowledged that the Vatican’s methodologies don’t always match those of sociologists.
But too often, data is ignored, and stories are not heard. The Church can’t consult but then act as if consultations had not occurred, as has happened in the past. Change will happen in the Church—as sociologists have long documented—but the question remains: Will that change come from actually listening to one another? Not if it’s only sociologists and Church leaders who are excited about, or even know about, synodality.
