In these difficult times, the Catholic Church places great hope in the Synod on Synodality. Many of us expect strong proposals and decisions for the future. But the fruits will be commensurate with our ability to imagine new ways of exchanging our experiences with respect for others, to progress in the expression of our ideas but also in listening, to share by agreeing to let ourselves touched by the word of the other.
As a teacher in the two faculties of philosophy and theology at the Center Sèvres, we set to work asking ourselves how such an institution finds itself relaunched in its vocation to train actors in the Church. The Synod sounded like a call for us to become aware of what already marks our way of doing things, to share it and to ask ourselves about what could help us to make it more synodal. These are the elements of reflection that we share with you; they will be able to constitute a – modest – contribution to this mission which, perhaps, will be relaunched by the synod.
The daily exchange between clerics and laity
Since its foundation in 1974, the Center Sèvres-Facultés ésuites de Paris has been training Jesuits, but not exclusively. His project, anchored in the spirit of Ignatian pedagogy, was intended to be open to a plurality of audiences from the outset. The founders were aware that future priests and religious would benefit from the daily exchange with lay people, men and women, and vice versa. Today, women represent a third of our students, as well as those who do not belong to religious life. The teaching body has also been feminized and secularized. The training provided takes into account the need, for future actors of the Church, not only to acquire knowledge, but to develop a set of skills, in particular a Christian way of being in the world where we learn from each other others. This is what, no doubt, puts us on the path of a synodal practice.
An intuition presided over the founding of the Center Sèvres: people called to listen, confess, transmit, give the sacraments, animate a community, accompany young people, fragile beings or those in great suffering cannot be formed solely by the acquisition of ‘a knowledge. The pedagogy of the Center Sèvres wants to be respectful of the progress specific to each one, it values the listening of the professor but also of the other students, the freedom in the appropriation of the questions and the fraternal search for the expression of the truth. It privileges not the accumulation of knowledge and intellectual domination but the ability to let oneself be taught by other paths of life, intelligence and faith.
Revival of the “disputatio”
This project requires a different approach to the different stages of academic training, namely courses, seminars and exams. As it should be in Ignatian land, alongside the lectures, the exercises are highly valued. Students are invited to speak spontaneously in seminars, practice discussing and listening. We honored the argument, academic exercise long practiced in Jesuit colleges which consists in exchanging contradictory arguments in a respectful way, by reformulating the opponent’s thought. The end-of-year exam consists, on the part of the student, in constructing “proposals” which reflect his ability to develop a dialectical and personal reflection based on what he has learned. Exercise is not just a form of knowledge acquisition, it is the path to self-transformation with others and for them.
Our practice requires philosophy to play a special role in training. It is not designed as a preparation for theology but as a privileged place to address questions of the Church independently and in dialogue with the theological field and magisterial teaching. We are convinced that the human sciences are also essential for reflection on the place of women, ministries, sexual and spiritual abuse, liturgy. This year, a research seminar on forgiveness is led by a philosopher and a psychologist, it allows us to question the possibility, the conditions, the effectiveness, the ritual. This reflection is essential to imagine in theology the possible reconfiguration of the sacrament of reconciliation.
It is by moving away from Jerusalem, that is to say from the burning place of their experience, that travelers on their way to Emmaus begin to discuss and wonder about the events that have just struck them. It is in the gap, even the distance, in dialogue without acrimony and without fear that free reflection can begin to encounter Christ. At the Center Sèvres, we are convinced that the method of the Emmaus pilgrims is that of the synodality hoped for today in the Church. But it is not obvious and requires as much an interior arrangement as adequate devices.
“The human sciences are essential for reflection on abuse, the liturgy or the place of women”