We could all learn something about managing conflict from the Vatican’s bootcamp

Conflict is inevitable wherever human beings interact. Marriage researchers like John and Julie Gottmann, Scott Stanley, Howard Markham and Susan L Blumberg have been saying for over thirty years that happily married people have the same number of irreconcilable differences as people who divorce. The key difference is how those conflicts are managed.

On a communal and national level, especially in, but not confined to, the US, conflict often rapidly escalates to toxic ideological polarisation.

The spaces where sincere, open conversations can take place are shrinking and the bunkers of social media from which people emerge only to take potshots at each other do not help.

This is as true of the Roman Catholic Church as it is anywhere. Although they may not break down into neat categories like liberal and conservative, deep differences exist. Some people were openly talking of schism before the recent Synod on synodality.

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Some have also expressed disappointment at how anodyne the synthesis document from the first phase of the Synod appears to be. There is speculation that it is just a holding document and that the real changes will happen after the final phase of the Synod in a year.

However, Christopher White of the National Catholic Reporter puts his finger on something important when he describes the Synod as a ‘bootcamp’.

The participants were seated at round tables to demonstrate equality between them. Some might roll their eyes at the fact that most tables had only one woman, usually a religious sister, but in fact, it marked a significant departure from previous practice.

More importantly, each session followed a formula, beginning with prayer. Then everyone got to present their viewpoint for three minutes without interruption. This was followed by short responses where everyone again listened and finally by interaction among the participants. Then a rapporteur summarised the points of agreement, disagreement, tensions and questions and presented them to the plenary session.

If it was a boot camp, it was a boot camp on listening. There seems to have been a deliberate policy to ensure a variety of viewpoints at each table. It is difficult to spend three weeks with people, not just in formal sessions, but also at meal times, and to remain in polarised bubbles.

Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, former master of the Dominican Order and Mother Maria Ignazia Angelina, an Italian Benedictine sister, facilitated a three-day retreat before the Synod formally began. Fr Radcliffe’s presentations were in his usual free-flowing style, but returned again and again to two themes – friendship and truth. “Friendship flourishes when we dare to share our doubts and seek the truth together,” he told the participants.

He said that “Conversation needs an imaginative leap into the experience of the other person to see with their eyes and hear with their ears. We need to get inside their skin. From what experiences do their words spring? What pain or hope do they carry?”

The temptation is to demonise those with whom we disagree, to retreat to our tribe. The Synod participants had no choice but to listen to each other in a way that is rare in our world. The Pope participated in every session and remained available to anyone who wished to speak to him at the end of each session.

Going back to the analogy of a successful marriage and the inevitability of conflict, it is only when what the Gottmans call the Four Horsemen appear that marriages enter into deep trouble. They are criticism (not in the sense of complaint but criticism of someone’s whole being), contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling (shutting down and tuning out their partner.)

One would like to think that none of these would be present in people claiming to follow the example of Jesus but given that from the time of the earliest disciples, there was division and jockeying for power, one would be sadly mistaken.

The Synod was a boot camp on how to see those with whom you disagree as people and fellow Christians. It is also a reminder that a Church that is busy tearing itself apart in bitter wrangling will fail to carry out its most important missions.

It is instructive to look at Pope Francis’ final homily, which returns to basic and simple premises – loving God with our whole life and loving our neighbour as ourselves. He breaks it down even further, to adoration and service. He reiterates the importance of adoring Christ in the tabernacle ‘in every diocese, in every parish, in every community’.

He then talks about service: ‘washing the feet of wounded humanity, accompanying those who are frail, weak and cast aside, going out lovingly to encounter the poor’. Guess that covers just about everybody. Who is not wounded, or frail, or weak? But anyone who has ever even dabbled in this kind of service will tell you it is messy, frustrating, discombobulating, disorienting and difficult – a bit like being a member of a church riven by divisions and attempting to navigate them gracefully.

I suspect that Pope Francis is well pleased at what has happened so far in his synodal process.