
The Synod has changed two of its senior personnel. Has it changed direction? Disappointingly for anyone who actually cares about the Church the CVs suggest it has not changed one jot.
Pope Leo XIV has appointed Fr Giacomo Costa SJ & Sister Elena Massimi as undersecretaries of the General Secretariat of the Synod. The odious author of the notorious (& heretical?) Maltese guidelines Cardinal Mario Grech incredibly, remains in charge. Nathalie Becquart has been replaced, which can only be good news, but there is no substantiated evidence that her departure constitutes a rebuke and no confirmed next appointment has emerged in the reporting I have checked.
Costa is already deeply embedded in the enterprise. Born in Genoa in 1967, he entered the Jesuits in 1992, was ordained in 2002 and studied political & moral sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He edited Aggiornamenti Sociali from 2010–2021, chaired Milan’s San Fedele Cultural Foundation from 2007–2025, and has served as national spiritual guide to ACLI, the Christian Associations of Italian Workers. More immediately relevant, he was special secretary of the 2018 youth synod and the Synod on Synodality. At this month’s Amoris Laetitia meeting, he was responsible for methodology. His promotion places an experienced organiser of the process in its permanent leadership.
Massimi, born in Rome in 1975, is a Salesian Nun, a lecturer in liturgy & sacramental theology at the Salesian Pontifical University, president of Italy’s association of liturgy professors and scholars, and responsible for liturgical music within the Italian bishops’ National Liturgical Office. Her intellectual interests are particularly revealing. Her 2025 book, Liturgia e sinodalità, explores how worship expresses and forms a synodal Church. Her congregation’s own website also records her thanking Francis for Traditionis custodes, which she described as indicating “the safe path to follow”. 🤬 That is worth remembering whenever we are assured that synodality means making room for different experiences of Catholic life. How generously does that principle extend to Catholics attached to the inherited Roman liturgy?
Set these appointments beside Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s recent denunciation of the German Synodal Way. In his Gibbons Institute interview, reported by El Debate, the former doctrine prefect argued that the German process had elevated contemporary ideology over Revelation and that its published documents possessed no magisterial authority (so it is a huge waste of time then). His wider warning was against treating the Church as a permanent deliberative assembly.
The German Synodal Way and the worldwide Synod are distinct initiatives; these appointments do not establish that Costa or Massimi endorses the German proposals. But Müller’s challenge raises a question which reaches beyond Germany: what governs the process, and what limits its conclusions? Catholic teaching cannot acquire or lose its truth according to the outcome of a consultation. Listening can help the Church understand people’s circumstances, correct pastoral failures and preach more effectively. It cannot authorise her to contradict what she has received.
Grech presents these appointments as serving the implementation phase. That makes clarity more urgent, because implementation turns discussion into decisions affecting dioceses, parishes and worship. Before more structures are built, Catholics deserve a clear account of what those structures may decide, by whose authority, and within which doctrinal limits. A process that asks the faithful to listen must also be prepared to answer.