The sensus fidei and Synodality: Theological Epistemology and the munus propheticum

IN THE YEARS before and after the Second Vatican Council, Yves Congar famously called for a renewed ecclesiology that integrated both Christological and pneumatological approaches to the Church. The French Dominican sought a synthetic vision in which the themes of the Church’s apostolicity and the hierarchical powers transmitted by Christ would be framed within a rich understanding of the Church as a communion of grace, in which the Church’s perennity would not exclude her historicity or the Spirit’s work today.¹ One can approach the overall program of advancing synodality as a way better to accentuate the pneumatological element of ecclesial life.

Congar’s vast corpus of ecclesiological writings remains a treasure for the Church today, partly because of his astounding grasp of the theological tradition, and partly because his systematics remained animated by the properly theological task of faith seeking understanding. In this way, from his early writings on the theology of the laity forward, Congar exemplified a way of thinking about synodality and its pneumatological potential: to draw widely from the Church’s long tradition, to acknowledge the historicity of the Church’s structures while refusing to give strictly sociological or political categories the last word, and to avoid one-sided theological solutions (such as a return to early modern Christo-monist ecclesiologies that reduce the laity to passive listeners of a teaching Church, or Pneuma-monist approaches that evacuate the apostolic tradition or ecclesial hierarchy altogether).

The present article adopts a Congarian approach to believers’ supernatural sense of the faith (sensus fidei), specifically, by a modest proposal as to how we can best articulate the way in which this supernatural mode of cognition comes about. This article proposes the outline of a subchapter of theological epistemology in view of today’s ecclesial and theological debate on the true meaning of synodality.

The theological payoff for seeking such an epistemology is manifold. Much confusion reigns around the question of how exactly the sensus fidei can be identified. Should we especially consult practicing Catholics, such as the laity most engaged in parochial life and evangelization, or faithful members of religious orders? What about fallen-away or barely practicing Catholics? What are we to make of voices on the margins, among so-called progressives or traditionalists? Do charismatic gifts inform the sensus fidei? And more broadly, how are we to interpret the sensus fidei in light of Scripture, Tradition, and magisterial teaching? The questions surrounding the role of the sensus fidei and its noetic character touch on numerous core ecclesiological issues.

I. Preliminary Considerations

The link between the sensus fidei and synodality has emerged with some frequency in recent magisterial documents and theological literature. Pope Francis’s apostolic constitution on the Synod of Bishops, Episcopalis Communio (2018) makes this connection explicit, and we find it several times in the International Theological Commission’s document Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church (2018).² The same commission’s other recent text, Sensus fidei in the Life of the Church (2014) offers the most extensive teaching to date on the sensus fidei by a body of the Roman curia.³ Several recent collections of theological essays and monographs also take up this link, directly or indirectly.⁴ Still, much work remains to be done on the sensus fidei in general, and on its noetic aspects in particular.⁵

An epistemological lacuna remains in the theology of the sensus fidei, though part of its foundation has been laid. The work of John Henry Newman on the need to consult the lay faithful and Yves Congar’s preconciliar writings on the place of the laity in the Church helped to inspire the fathers of Vatican II to overcome the premodern dichotomy between the teaching and the listening Church.⁶ Newman’s theology on this question arose from his historical studies of the Arian crisis, while his conviction about the importance of consulting the laity is linked to his theology of faith as a work of grace in man’s conscience and the...