Time & Perspective Quote by Karl Lehmann

Forty years is doing double duty here: it is a timeline, but also an argument. Karl Lehmann frames the Synod of Bishops not as a bureaucratic mechanism but as a formative experience, a place where the Church teaches itself how to think beyond national habits and local anxieties. Calling it a "good school" is a strategically modest metaphor. Schools are patient, incremental, sometimes tedious; they legitimate slow change without declaring a revolution. Lehmann is praising the Synod while lowering the temperature around it.

The subtext is ecclesial politics. The Synod, established after Vatican II, was meant to express collegiality: bishops sharing responsibility with the pope rather than simply receiving instructions from Rome. Lehmann, a German cardinal formed in the post-conciliar era, signals loyalty to that vision by emphasizing the Synod's "universal dimension" - code for resisting the temptation to let any one culture, faction, or curial office define Catholicism. It's a gentle corrective to both provincialism (the idea that my local Church is the whole story) and centralism (the idea that universality equals uniformity dictated from the center).

The intent is also pastoral PR, in the best sense. By describing the Synod as something that has been "for all of us" a school, he turns a high-level institution into a shared apprenticeship. He invites bishops and laity alike to see global Catholicism not as abstraction but as lived encounter: diverse problems, languages, and spiritual instincts forced into the same room. The line sells the Synod as an instrument of maturity - a slow, institutional way of learning to be bigger than yourself.