So … what happens when you have a good process and an initially willing leader, and then they throw a wrench into the result and go off and do what they wanted anyway?
7) How can we deal constructively with cases in which those in authority feel they cannot confirm the conclusions reached by a community discernment process, taking a decision in a different direction?
I think it’s important to realize there are consequences to behavior like this, even in a dictatorship. There’s an economy at work in terms of personal behavior, especially in a volunteer-driven system like the Church. Chanceries and workplaces might run smoothly on the surface. But if a pastor decides he likes a certain new color scheme and overrules a committee, it may not have immediate consequences. The next redecoration might be many years in the future. People may or may not forget. Or they might migrate to another area of parish interest.
How do we deal with such cases? People deal, and leaders experience consequences more or less.
What kind of restitution should that authority offer to those who participated in the process?
8) What can we learn from the ways that our societies and cultures manage participatory processes? What cultural models, where adopted by the Church, prove, by contrast, an obstacle to building a more synodal Church?
Mmm, let me count the ways …?
9) What can we learn and receive from the experience of other Churches and ecclesial Communities, and from that of other religions?
Possibly a lot, and perhaps more if we are less concerned about a cultural orthodoxy.
What stimuli from indigenous, minority and oppressed cultures can help us to rethink our decision-making processes?
We have to get accustomed to listen to them–and that includes lay people.
What insights can be gained from experiences in the digital environment?
Looking carefully, and often enough, not doing what we do.
Catholic Sensibility 