Dear Friends,
You might recall that our parish participated in the listening process for the World-Wide Synod to take place in Rome over the next two years. Our results were sent to the Chancery where the Archbishop’s staff compiled all the input from parishes sending it on to be a part of the report from the United States. The reports from each country in the world are being compiled by a group working at the Vatican to have it all ready for the first session of the Synod which will take place in October.
Last week, the Vatican released the first of the working papers for the upcoming Synod. The paper let everyone know that the approach to this Synod will be different from others that have taken place since Vatican Council II. In the past, it has been a gathering of bishops from all over the world focusing on particular issues facing the church. This time, besides bishops, both lay men and women are participating as well as women and men religious. This is something new for Rome but for the church throughout the world, this is nothing new. Women and men have been working together in dioceses and making decisions side by side for a long time. In our sister diocese of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, they hold an extensive decision-making process every ten years with representatives from every parish in the diocese attending for long periods of time. Out of this discussion they create the direction the diocese is going to take for the next ten years.
Here are a few tidbits found in the Vatican working paper. “A synodal church is founded on the recognition of a common dignity deriving from baptism, which makes all who receive it sons and daughters of God, members of the family of God, and therefore brothers and sisters in Christ, inhabited by the one Spirit and sent to fulfil a common mission.” When talking about itself, the paper said that it “is not a document of the Church’s Magisterium, nor is it the report of a sociological survey; it does not offer the formulation of operational indications, goals and objectives, nor a full elaboration of a theological vision.” It is “part of an unfinished process.” It draws on but also goes beyond the insights of the first phase and articulates “some of the priorities that emerged from listening to the People of God, but avoids presenting them as assertions or stances. A roadmap has not been presented. Instead, it expresses them as questions addressed to the synodal assembly,” which “will have the task of discerning the concrete steps which enable the continued growth of a synodal church, steps that it will then submit to the Holy Father.”
It says the synodal journey so far has revealed the existence of “shared questions” and “part of the challenge of synodality is to discern the level at which it is most appropriate to address each question.” That same journey also showed there are shared tensions in the church, but, the document says, “we should not be frightened of them, nor attempt at any cost to resolve them, but rather engage in ongoing synodal discernment” so that these tensions can “become sources of energy and not lapse into destructive polarizations.”
One of the hopeful signs to me is the stress in the upcoming Synod of having the participants at tables praying with one another and for one another before the conversations begin. One of the planning committee members described this method as “shared prayer in view of a common discernment, by which participants prepare themselves through personal reflection and prayer” before the discussion. He said this method “opens ‘spaces’ in which to face together controversial subjects, around which in both society and in the church there are often clashes and confrontation, in person or through social media.” The description of the prayer format that they are going to use reminds me of what all of our Cabrini Communities are experiencing each month when we pray the Lectio Divina section. By quietly praying together with the word of God, we open our hearts up to hearing each other and loving each other. Even when we do not see eye to eye, we can love each other with the tenderness that the Holy Spirit brings us. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can also speak a deeper truth to each other that can be heard and accepted. With the Holy Spirit leading the Synod through prayer, it could be a powerful gathering indeed.
I am sure you have seen reports listing all the different topics that were raised through the listening sessions. There is no way that those who gather for the Synod will ever be able to tackle them all but maybe they can help the Church move along the path. As the working document states, the Synod has three main priorities—communion, participation and mission—and each of these require bringing about a profound conversion and cultural change in the way of being Church in our time.
Peace,
Fr. Damian