Parrhesia: Speaking Freely in a Synodal Church

Pope Francis has made parrhesia a signature word of his papacy, framing “speaking freely” and “courage, frankness, and boldness” as necessities for a synodal church. Although parrhesia is a Greek word that appears several times in the New Testament, Francis’s call for a parrhesiastic turn in the church is quite radical. As Dermot Roantree pithily notes, “We are not used to popes telling Catholics to speak out freely.”[1]If it is a ressourcement of an ancient strand of the Christian tradition, it is also something new. 

While journalists frequently note Francis’s use of the word, there has been little academic discussion of parrhesia’s theological underpinnings. And there has been even less work on the dynamics of what parrhesia might look like in practice, in an ecclesial culture too often characterized by caution, secrecy, silence, surveillance, cover-up, and even outright deception. This paper aims to explore these related questions about parrhesia, both theoretical and practical.  

In the first, shorter section on theory, I will unpack the origins of parrhesia as explicated in Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures – the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the term from antiquity. Most noteworthy here is that parrhesia is a freedom to speak the truth, characterized by a) the truthfulness of one’s speech; b) a guileless manner of speaking (as opposed to rhetoric); c) a level of risk in the act of speaking the truth; and d) a truthfulness that coheres with the way the parrhesiast lives, what Foucault calls their bios. I then turn to Francis’s use of the term in homilies, addresses to brother bishops, and magisterial documents to explore his unique take on parrhesia, arguing that he underpins the term with a pneumatology consistent with his broader synodal vision.

I then take a practical turn, considering what the ecclesial culture shift towards parrhesia that Francis calls for might require. To illustrate the stakes of such a shift, I consider four case studies of postconciliar theologians whose parrhesia had been curtailed by the institutional church. Although Vatican II documents embraced categories of human freedom, this theory did not extend to the Vatican’s treatment of theologians. While the Index of Forbidden Books was officially closed in 1966, the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, as well as certain bishops’ conferences, created a culture of censorship, particularly for theologians who were vowed religious.

I focus on four theologians from three different continents, all of whose controversial theologies emerged from faithful reflection on their life experience, and all of whom demonstrated courage and risk in their encounters with ecclesiastical scrutiny. To use the Foucauldian definition above, all four are parrhesiasts because their bios corroborated the truth of their theologies.

Jacques Dupuis (1923-2004) was a Belgian Jesuit whose teaching experiences in India led him to creative theologies of religious pluralism. The Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928-2024), founded the Catholic liberation theology movement from his lifetime of ministry with the poor in Latin America. Elizabeth Johnson (1941-), the first woman to receive a theology doctorate from the Catholic University of America, broke new ground with her feminist approaches to the doctrine of God and the figure of Mary. And Ivone Gebara (1944 - ), a Brazilian theologian, centered her work on ecofeminism, attending to the poor, to women, and to the earth. Each figure encountered significant conflicts with the CDF that explicitly curtailed their parrhesia, including but not limited to public investigations, private tenure battles, forced silence under vowed obedience, books critiqued or outright condemned. The paper will briefly explicate each figures’ experiences to highlight what Foucault would call the anti-parrhesiastic pole of the Catholic Church, and to illustrate what needs to change to fully realize the shift for which Francis calls.

Finally, the paper concludes by reflecting on the need for parrhesia in a synodal church through the lens of a question: what role could theologians play in a parrhesiastic church? Could such a culture shift repair the lamentable disconnect between academic theology and ecclesiastical theology, a disconnect largely due to the anti-parrhesiastic culture cultivated by the institutional church? If parrhesia becomes an ecclesial virtue instead of an ecclesial vice, could we embrace a model of parrhesiastic theologian who creatively places tradition in conversation with the ongoing developments of the world? Might a more robust pneumatology underpinning parrhesia give us more confidence in the theologians’ role in helping to discern where the Holy Spirit is speaking through the people of God?

Before Francis foregrounded parrhesia as a constitutive part of his synodal vision, theologians were already doing this kind of courageous work. Vatican II laid groundwork for this culture shift, but left much unfinished business. Our four case studies were caught in the crosswinds of such a shift, and the lessons they offer us might help to inaugurate a more parrhesiastic era in the church.

[1] Dermot Roantree, “The Courage to Speak Freely,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review (2022), 5-12 at 5.