Pope Francis names Diocese of Knoxville resident as only American in Synod role
By Gabrielle Nolan
Sociologist, researcher, and Knoxville resident Tricia Bruce is contributing to the second session of the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican this month, being held Oct. 2-27.
A lifelong Catholic, Dr. Bruce was appointed by Pope Francis in February to be a consultor to the General Secretariat of the Synod. Out of the six consultors in this round, she is the only American.
She received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara, as well as a bachelor’s degree in sociology and communications from Southwestern University.
Dr. Bruce is currently the director of Springtide Research Institute, a nonprofit and non-partisan organization that uses social science to gain knowledge from and about young people ages 13 to 25.
She also is an award-winning author whose books include Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church (Oxford University Press, 2017); Faithful Revolution: How Voice of the Faithful is Changing the Church (Oxford University Press, 2011/2014); and How Americans Understand Abortion (forthcoming with University of California Press).
Her writing has been published in notable publications such as Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Journal for the American Academy of Religious, U.S. Catholic Historian, and others.
This appointment for the Synod is not something that Dr. Bruce originally pursued; rather, Cardinal Mario Grech, who serves as secretary general of the Synod on Synodality, contacted her directly.
“It’s a huge honor,” Dr. Bruce shared. “The way that I think about it is that it’s really not about me. I mean, literally, the work that I’ve done has just connected to hundreds and hundreds of Catholics, and those who … interact with Catholicism; in the U.S. especially is where most of my work has been focused. And so I think of myself as a bridge and a funnel to those voices and those perspectives, and in all of my work I’ve tried to surface those different ways of thinking and including from both those holding formal leadership positions, whether priests or bishops or lay Catholics who are in … either volunteer positions or paid positions, and then just everyday people, everyday Catholics, and also non-Catholics.”
Dr. Bruce said that in many ways she wants “to stay invisible” in this process.
“I think for me it’s an honor, it’s an obligation, it’s a responsibility,” she said. “I want to just be a way to connect to the kind of work, the specific work that I have done in terms of my research and also the kind of work that I do, the ways that I do it, and also recognize that it just has to be put in conversation with theologians, with historians, with canon lawyers, with others who are thinking about this differently.”
As a consultor, she will review documents, provide feedback and insights, and be available as needed during the meetings. Her appointment extends into 2025.
“I honestly think that my participation is going to be potentially more intense after the actual in-person gathering,” she shared. “I think it’s going to be more so about the documents that result from it. Much like last year, there were the reports that emerged from it, and again with this year, I was able to offer commentary on the Instrumentum Laboris before it was released publicly. I think that’s where my role will come in and hence the overlap in 2025.”
Although she has visited the Vatican a handful of times before, one checkpoint remains to be crossed off her list.
“I haven’t actually met Pope Francis yet, so I would like to meet him,” Dr. Bruce said.
Dr. Bruce first pursued sociology as a degree because it gave her “a language for the kinds of curiosities and questions I had about how is it that different backgrounds play out to impact people differently in terms of their life choices, their life outcomes.”
Because her father was in the Army, she moved around often, and this way of life caused her to have many questions about the world around her.
“We were quite literally picking up and moving to a wholly different context pretty often, and so it was this kind of jarring reset in terms of trying to figure out what the world was, how it worked, how people inside of it worked,” Dr. Bruce said. “And then for us, too, the Church was always a place where we would come back to as home base, no matter where we went. And that opened up a set of questions for me that then once I got to college and realized, oh, sociology is kind of asking these kinds of questions, this is a way for me to explore that. Then it really became something I fell in love with and pursued for my career.”
When the Synod on Synodality began in October 2021, Dr. Bruce said that she had “a great deal of optimism.”
“The word listening kind of came up early and often with the Synod process, and so did the idea of actually opening up an invitation to listen to so many different people in the Church from different perspectives, including those whose voices aren’t necessarily included all the time or maybe whose experiences can feel more marginalized,” she noted. “And as someone who has done so much of this kind of work interviewing priests and immigrants and racialized minorities and all sorts of groups who tend to be on the sidelines … I, through my work, knew how important that was, and so was excited to hear this initial prospect of it.”
Dr. Bruce said that she sensed the Synod was another opportunity, similar to the Second Vatican Council, to “do the same kind of thinking about who we are, who is the Church, and how is it moving forward together, while including so many kinds of voices in that process, too.”
The themes of the Synod on Synodality are communion, participation, and mission. As a sociologist, Dr. Bruce is analyzing those aspects within the Catholic Church.
“There’s both a magical and overwhelming sense of unity in what the Church is, both in the U.S. and globally, but just in that high level of polarization and different kinds of experiences and perspectives and inequalities that I think have to be attended to,” she said. “So, the Synod conversation is being super intentional about surfacing those, and social scientists have tools to do that.”
“I continue to look forward to a positive future, and to me the sign and the actual action of things like the Synod is something that says, hey, this is a Church that is trying to lead positively with faith towards a positive future, and that’s something I absolutely would like to support,” Dr. Bruce shared.
The Synod on Synodality is a three-year process of listening and dialogue that began with a solemn opening in Rome Oct. 9-10, 2021, with each diocese and church celebrating the following week on Oct. 17.
Every diocese in the world convened groups of people to provide input into the Catholic Church, from its organizational structure to its goals for the future.
Reports from those conversations were then compiled, synthesized, and delivered to the Vatican.
They became the basis for the synodal process over a three-year period. That synodal process is completed this year with the conclusion of the last phase.
However, additional dialogue is expected to continue into 2025 on key issues the Church will likely address separately.
For more information on Dr. Bruce, visit her website at triciabruce.com.
To stay updated with the Synod on Synodality, visit the official website at synod.va/en.html.
