Jens Van Rompaey: Weaving the synodal Church. New threads and the entire story
In September and October 2023, the Catholic Church in Belgium faced another significant media crisis related to sexual abuse. This time, it was not so much about new facts, but victims of abuse told their stories candidly in a televised documentary. Telling their story destabilised and challenged many of the Catholic Church’s narratives once again. Although many reactions focused on past failures, it was also noted that the Catholic Church is currently striving to be more synodal, to walk with people, to allow people to tell their own stories, and is not yet successful in doing so. This article analyses theCatholic Church’s inability to incorporate diverse narratives into its story and, using the metaphor of Penelope’s weaving, aims to offer a new approach to the story of the Catholic Church becoming more synodal by adding new threads and removing harmful ones from the ecclesial fabric.
Jens Van Rompaey (Lier, 1995) is fellow fundamental research of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and a doctoral researcher in the Research Unit Systematic Theology and the Study of Religions, at KU Leuven. He holds degrees in both philosophy (University of Antwerp) and theology and religious studies (KU Leuven), and employs a creative approach to engaging both fields, with a particular focus on systematic theology and ecclesiology.
His doctoral research focuses on synodality in the Catholic Church with a particular focus on ecclesiology and cultural philosophy. In particular, the mythological inspiration of Penelope’s painstaking and patient weaving and reweaving guides his research. This continuous endeavor considers the threads and traces of the past and repeatedly brings them together and loosens them in the present, to offer a potential perspective on the future. In recent publications, he explored how synodality was practiced in the Belgian context, and what lessons to draw from that. But also on a more macro level, synodality is reconfiguring the Catholic Church.