Angelus News | October 6, 2023 | Vol. 8 No. 20
Divides in politics, religion, and education get blamed for many of society’s problems today. But what if the differences between age generations — i.e. millennials, baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Z — matter more than those? On Page 10, contributor Elise Italiano Ureneck takes a close look at a popular psychologist’s research into the “generation wars” and the cost of progress, before asking: Can faith succeed where technology has failed?
Divides in politics, religion, and education get blamed for many of society’s problems today. But what if the differences between age generations — i.e. millennials, baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Z — matter more than those? On Page 10, contributor Elise Italiano Ureneck takes a close look at a popular psychologist’s research into the “generation wars” and the cost of progress, before asking: Can faith succeed where technology has failed?
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experimented with regularly scheduled<br />
synods. What they found is that<br />
meeting too often in councils led to a<br />
politicizing of the Church, including<br />
ongoing lobbying, in which metropolitan<br />
bishops could manipulate the<br />
voting by creating more dioceses in<br />
their areas, so that they could create<br />
more bishops, so that their area would<br />
have more voting power.<br />
Later, in the East, even the famous<br />
St. Basil the Great gave in to the<br />
temptation to make his brother and<br />
friend bishops just so they could support<br />
him and his projects. In actual<br />
practice, synods of the early Church<br />
could be as uneventful as a routine<br />
office or parish meeting, or they could<br />
be full of drama, complete with shouting<br />
matches and fistfights.<br />
As time went on, new crises resulted<br />
in new synods. In the second century,<br />
a controversy over how to calculate<br />
the date for Easter resulted in synods<br />
in Rome and in other cities. In the<br />
third century, a controversy over the<br />
sacrament of reconciliation resulted<br />
in synods in Rome and Carthage. In<br />
the fourth century, the question of<br />
clergy celibacy (among other things)<br />
resulted in a synod in Elvira, Spain,<br />
but because the Church was illegal<br />
and persecuted, travel was difficult.<br />
And being regional synods, their decisions<br />
were technically only binding<br />
on that region (although the synods<br />
of Rome would come to have more<br />
weight, since the bishop of Rome, the<br />
pope, ratified their decisions).<br />
When the emperor Constantine<br />
legalized Christianity, he also gave<br />
Christian bishops the right to use the<br />
Roman transit system, which was until<br />
this time reserved for government<br />
officials (those government officials<br />
would soon complain that there were<br />
so many Christian bishops traveling to<br />
synods that they found it hard to get a<br />
seat in the wagon!).<br />
The first synod attended by the<br />
emperor was the Synod of Arles in<br />
A.D. 314. But this, too, was a regional<br />
synod, and it quickly became clear to<br />
everyone that what was really needed<br />
to face the current crises (not least<br />
would be the heresy of Arianism), was<br />
a worldwide council — one where<br />
every bishop in the world was invited,<br />
and the decisions would be binding<br />
on the whole Church. This was the<br />
Council of Nicaea, in the year A.D.<br />
325. It would come to be called the<br />
first “ecumenical” (or worldwide)<br />
council.<br />
Incidentally, Nicaea was the last time<br />
(for a long time) that laypeople were<br />
invited. They became a distraction, in<br />
part by treating the living saints like<br />
“The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon,” by Vasily<br />
Surikov, 1848-1916, Russian. | WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />
rock stars (hermits came in from the<br />
desert for the council, people who<br />
had been tortured in the last round<br />
of persecutions showed up with their<br />
scars, and the famous St. Nicholas was<br />
there). After 325, councils would be<br />
limited to bishops and their assistants.<br />
The Council of Nicaea clarified the<br />
doctrine of the Trinity in opposition<br />
to the Arian heresy, and wrote the<br />
first draft of the Nicene Creed. The<br />
Second Ecumenical Council, the<br />
Council of Constantinople in A.D.<br />
381, added to the creed, especially in<br />
the paragraph about the Holy Spirit.<br />
This gave us (essentially) the Nicene<br />
Creed that we recite in Mass every<br />
week.<br />
In the early centuries of the Church,<br />
sometimes a council was convened by<br />
an emperor, but not without the sanction<br />
of the pope, who would generally<br />
determine who chaired the council.<br />
Sometimes the pope couldn’t attend,<br />
but he was always represented by a<br />
delegation from Rome. When the<br />
Rome delegation read Pope St. Leo’s<br />
statement at the Council of Chalcedon<br />
in A.D. 451, it was reported that<br />
the assembled bishops cheered, “Leo<br />
speaks for Peter!” That may be a bit of<br />
an exaggeration, but the point is that<br />
the voice of the pope carried great<br />
weight at a council, even when he was<br />
not physically there.<br />
In fact, one of the times that people<br />
tried to convene a council without the<br />
sanction of the pope, and where the<br />
pope’s statement was rejected — this<br />
council was determined to be invalid,<br />
and is now referred to as “The Robber<br />
Synod” (A.D. 449).<br />
So although the words “synod” and<br />
“council” are basically synonymous,<br />
we can make a distinction between<br />
regional synods or councils and a<br />
general (or ecumenical) council,<br />
which is universal — that is, every<br />
bishop in the worldwide Church is<br />
invited, and the canons (resolutions)<br />
will be binding on the whole Church.<br />
In actual practice, the pope has a kind<br />
of de facto line-item veto, even of the<br />
canons of the ecumenical councils.<br />
For example, popes rejected individual<br />
canons from the Councils of<br />
Constantinople and Chalcedon.<br />
Historically, the impact of any<br />
council — especially an ecumenical<br />
<strong>October</strong> 6, <strong><strong>20</strong>23</strong> • ANGELUS • 23