Dear Friends,
We continue our reflections and readings about the two-year Synod process that was begun last month. What follows are further reflections from the preparation documents to help us understand what the Synod is hoping for. Those of you who follow Church history will know of the meetings that took place over recent decades in South and Central America to move the Catholic Church forward in its care for the full human family. Pope Francis is asking the whole Church to do what the Church in South and Central America did:
“It is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the third millennium. What the Lord is asking of us is already in some sense present in the very word ‘synod’,” which is “is an ancient and venerable word in the Tradition of the Church, whose meaning draws on the deepest themes of Revelation.”
It is “the Lord Jesus who presents Himself as ‘the way, the truth, and the life’,” and “Christians, His followers, were originally called ‘followers of the Way”. Synodality, in this perspective, is much more than the celebration of ecclesial meetings and Bishops’ assemblies, or a matter of simple internal administration within the Church; it is “the specific modus vivendi et operandi of the Church, the People of God, which reveals and gives substance to her being as communion when all her members journey together, gather in assembly and take an active part in her evangelizing mission.” Thus are intertwined the main axes of a synodal Church that the title of the Synod proposes: communion, participation, and mission.
In the first millennium, “journeying together”—that is, practicing synodality—was the ordinary way in which the Church, understood as “People united in the unity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” acted. To those who were creating divisions in the ecclesial body, the Church Fathers opposed the communion of the Churches scattered throughout the world, described by St. Augustine as “concordissima fidei conspiratio,” that is, the agreement in faith of all the Baptized. Here are the roots of the broad development of a synodal praxis at all levels of the Church’s life—local, provincial, and universal—that reached its highest manifestation in the Ecumenical Council. Within this ecclesial horizon, inspired by the principle of the participation of all in the life of the Church, St. John Chrysostom was able to say that “Church and Synod are synonymous”. Even in the second millennium, when the Church emphasized more strongly the hierarchical function, this way of proceeding did not cease: if, alongside the celebration of ecumenical councils, and that of diocesan and provincial synods is well attested, when it came to defining dogmatic truths, the Popes wished to consult the Bishops in order to know the faith of the whole Church, by appealing to the authority of the sensus fidei of the entire People of God, which is “infallible ‘in credendo’”.
The Second Vatican Council is anchored in this dynamic of Tradition. It emphasizes that “God, however, does not make men holy and save them merely as individuals, without bond or link between one another. Rather has it pleased Him to bring men together as one people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness”. The members of the People of God are united by Baptism, and “if by the will of Christ some are made teachers, pastors and dispensers of mysteries on behalf of others, yet all share a true equality with regard to the dignity and to the activity common to all the Faithful for the building up of the Body of Christ”. Therefore, all the Baptized, participants in Christ’s priestly, prophetic, and kingly functions by “exercising the variety and ordered richness of their charisms, their vocations and their ministries,” are active subjects of evangelization, both individually and as the entire People of God.
The Council emphasized how, by virtue of the anointing of the Holy Spirit received in Baptism, the totality of the Faithful “cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole Peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when ‘from the Bishops down to the last of the lay Faithful’ they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals”. It is the Spirit who guides the faithful “to all truth”. Through action of the Spirit, “this tradition which comes from the Apostles develops in the Church” so that the People of God may grow “in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts.”
Peace,
Fr. Damian