The Synod on Synodality: a “Nothingburger”?

In the States, Americans love their unhealthy, disgusting fast food from McDonald’s, etc. But we also love a good, healthy and wholesome burger on the grill, celebrating the Fourth of July or the baseball game or whatever. In Michigan, we love hunting deer and thus we have the venison burger, which is a wonderful thing over the grill especially to break the St. Martin’s Lent fast after Christmas begins.

And so, because we love burgers so much, it’s a big disappointment if a burger is not very good. It’s extremely disappointing if a burger is bad. In other words, it becomes a “nothingburger,” which offers nothing of what we hoped for out of the burger. I’d rather feed it to my dog, who will appreciate it much more than me.

And so the term “nothingburger” has passed into American English in recent years to describe a thing which had a lot of expectations behind it, but ultimately turned out to be a huge flop. That’s what might be happening with the Synod on Synodality. In our recent podcast, OnePeterFive contributing editor Eric Sammons and I discuss the fizzling out of the Synod on Synodality. Sammons points out how Pope Francis himself undermined the synod by stealing all the thunder and releasing his own document about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which quickly obscured anything the Synod put out (which he declined to make his own – at least in terms of optics – by means of another document with his name). Is this a sign of the Holy Father’s contrition before death? We discuss all of this and our analysis of the historical framework of this Synod and many Synods going back to the First Vatican Council (and even before).