This week in Christian history: CS Lewis converts to Christianity, Pope Leo the Great consecrated

Synod of Pistoia ends – Sept 28, 1786

This week marks the anniversary of the conclusion of the Synod of Pistoia, a gathering of the Italian Catholic Church centered on promoting Jansenism. 

The synod had opened on Sept. 18 in the Italian city of Pistoia, and advocated for Jansenism, a movement within Catholicism that embraced predestination and restricted papal power.

Attendees of the gathering championed things like having liturgy in the vernacular language, disbanding the Inquisition, and elevating bishops so that their power was comparable to the pope.

Shaun Blanchard of the National Institute for Newman Studies wrote in January that the synod “is remembered as a failed attempt to instantiate many practices that only widely came to fruition in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.”

“Recently, Traditionalist prelates like Carlo Maria Vigano and Athanasius Schneider have evoked the Synod of Pistoia as a purported dress-rehearsal for the calamites of Vatican II and Pope Francis’ synodality,” wrote Blanchard.

“Since Vatican II … there has been periodic interest in this strange moment in church history, when a group of Jansenists (purportedly a gloomy, elitist sect) seemed to anticipate many of the most compelling, overdue, and cherished of Vatican II’s reforms: an emphasis on the lay baptismal priesthood, active participation in the liturgy, increased use of the vernacular in the Mass, and an emphasis on personal Bible reading.”