The Marian Principle for a Synodal Church: A Catholic Perspective on Active Receptivity

This article examines how the Marian principle can contribute to the understanding and actualisation of a synodal Church. In light of the two ways in which the principle has been received in the papal magisterium and contemporary theology—one relating it to the role of women in the Church, the other interpreting it ecclesiologically—the study privileges the latter. It understands the Marian principle as an expression of the active receptivity of the Church as a whole, which does not generate its own life, identity, or mission but receives them at God’s initiative and responds to that initiative in faith and freedom. In constructive dialogue with Balthasar’s foundational intuition, as well as with biblical, conciliar, and sacramental ecclesiology, the article demonstrates how this receptive structure is shaped through listening to the Word of God and takes on a communional form in the Eucharist. Their transformative action gives rise to an affectus synodalis, understood as an enduring spiritual–ecclesiological disposition of shared obedience to God’s initiative. Such a disposition enables the Church to practise mutual listening and communal discernment, to embrace the diversity of charisms, and to give ecclesial authority the form of service. The Marian principle therefore does not replace institutional reform but gives it a form shaped by the Gospel: synodal structures can authentically serve communion only if they are sustained by a Church that allows itself to be formed by the Word and the Eucharist.