Sr. Nathalie Becquart blames synodality resistance on “fear and ignorance,” defends unchecked local experiments and wildly divergent paces—risking irreversible fragmentation of Catholic Church until 2028.
Newsroom (21/11/2025 ) In an extraordinary display of Vatican confidence bordering on dismissal, Sr. Nathalie Becquart, the French Xavière nun who serves as undersecretary of the Synod Secretariat and was ranked by Forbes in 2024 among the world’s 50 most influential women, has publicly diagnosed the growing opposition to Pope Leo XIV’s synodal project as little more than “fear and a lack of understanding.” Her remarks, given in a lengthy interview with the German Catholic portal Katholisch.de published this week, reveal the unyielding mindset driving the most ambitious structural overhaul of the Catholic Church since Vatican II—regardless of the mounting alarm from bishops, priests, and theologians who warn that the process is veering toward doctrinal ambiguity and de facto schism.
Speaking just days after the Jubilee of Synodal Teams in Rome, Becquart celebrated what she called “remarkably diverse appropriation” of synodality, praising Latin America’s aggressive lead and Asia’s “enthusiastic” new commissions while quietly admitting that large swaths of Africa and much of the rest of Asia remain “particularly reluctant.” Yet rather than address the substance of the objections—concerns over the dilution of episcopal authority, the politicization of ecclesial governance, and the specter of a Church splintered into progressive Western European prototypes and conservative African strongholds—Becquart, echoing Pope Leo XIV, reduced the entire controversy to psychological and pedagogical shortcomings on the part of the critics.
“Resistance often stems from fear and a lack of understanding,” she repeated, citing the Pope’s own words. In other words: the problem is not the project; the problem is that its opponents simply haven’t experienced it yet. Once they do, she insisted with almost evangelistic certainty, “they change.” This is the official Vatican line now: disagreement is not principled; it is pathological. Dissenters are not defending the deposit of faith; they are afraid of the Holy Spirit.
The interview laid bare the radical implications of the “no standardized model” mantra that has become the synodal rallying cry. Becquart explicitly ruled out any universal template: “The Church is not seeking a model in which every single country says: this is how it must be done.” Translation: Germany may continue barreling toward lay-led “synodal councils” with veto power over bishops; Belgium may experiment with blessing same-sex couples; Amazonian dioceses may push for married priests and female deacons; while Nigeria, Poland, and Kazakhstan dig in and refuse almost every innovation—and all of this, in the Vatican’s view, is not a crisis of unity but the glorious flowering of “legitimate diversity.”
To drive the point home, Becquart repeatedly invoked the permanent diaconate as precedent: restored globally by Vatican II yet embraced enthusiastically in North America and Europe while virtually ignored in Africa and most of Asia. “That is not a problem,” she declared. Critics are left to ask: at what point does “diversity” become two irreconcilable Churches sharing only a mailing address in Rome?
Perhaps most startling was her candid endorsement of open-ended “pastoral experiments” in ministries, decision-making, and participatory structures—experiments that have already begun and that she described with words like “creativity,” “new practices,” and “concrete steps.” When pressed on limits, Becquart offered only the vaguest reassurance that everything must remain within “discernment foreseen by law.” In practice, that appears to mean very little constraint at all. Dioceses are already forming “synodal teams” that sideline traditional structures, elevating lay (often progressive) voices while seminarians are re-educated in “synodal leadership.” The possibility that some of these “experiments” will cross into territory previously condemned—women’s ordination, democratic governance, the normalization of practices at odds with the Catechism—seems not to trouble the Synod Secretariat in the slightest.
Becquart acknowledged that continents are moving at “very different speeds,” with Latin America and progressive European churches racing ahead while Africa and conservative Asia lag. Pope Leo XIV, she said, finds this perfectly normal and has urged patience: “We do not all walk at the same pace.” But patience for whom? For the African bishops who have repeatedly warned that the synodal path risks imposing a Western ideological agenda? Or patience for the German Synodal Way, which has already voted for texts incompatible with Catholic doctrine and now enjoys Vatican tolerance under the banner of “contextual creativity”?
The timeline is locked in: local implementation through December 2026, evaluations in 2027, continental assemblies in early 2028, and a final “ecclesial assembly” in Rome in October 2028. The theological study groups—originally Francis-era bodies examining women deacons, married priests, and mandatory synodality for bishops—have been delayed by the death of Pope Francis and the conclave but are now due to report definitive proposals by December 31, 2025. Whatever emerges from those groups will be fed into a process that Becquart insists is irreversible.
In the end, Sr. Becquart’s interview is less a status report than a declaration of intent: the synodal revolution will proceed full speed, regional variations and all, while those who object are diagnosed as fearful, uninformed, and in need of re-education through personal encounter with the process. For a Church that has spent centuries warning against the dangers of relativism and national churches, the irony is breathtaking. What is being built, under the guise of “listening” and “walking together,” looks increasingly like a confederation of regional churches free to reinvent doctrine, discipline, and governance according to local preference—held together only by the increasingly elastic concept of “communion.”
Critics are not merely afraid. They are watching, in real time, the deliberate construction of a post-Catholic future—and being told that their alarm is the real problem.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Katholisch.de
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