“Love One Another”: Synodality and Diocesan Life, Part III

Editor’s Note: This essay is the third installment of three on synodality and diocesan life. You may find the first installment HERE and the second installment HERE.

Part Three: How To Live Synodality in Diocesan Life

In the previous two installments of this series, I considered why Francis placed an emphasis on synodality and what synodality is. Now, it is time to reflect on how we should live synodality in diocesan life. The Final Document asks us to identify “concrete ways and formation pathways to bring about a tangible synodal conversion in the various ecclesial contexts” (Final Document, no. 9). Please note the word context. During the synod assembly, there was a “recognition and appreciation of the particularity of the context of each local Church, along with its history and tradition” (Final Document, no. 124). Thus, it is impossible to propose a one-size-fits-all template instructing all local churches on how to implement the Final Document. Instead, the document provides a list of guiding principles that we should follow to respond to the particular needs of local communities. As Francis explains in his introduction to the synod’s document, in fact, different local churches should find solutions better suited to their culture, tradition, and local needs (Final Document, no. 14).

The first and most important principle to keep in mind to live synodality is that “every new step in the life of the Church is a return to the source. It is a renewed experience of the disciples’ encounter with the Risen One” who enfolds us in his mercy and draws us to his beauty, thus creating unity and harmony amid differences (Final Document, no. 1). “The living Christ,” the document continues, “is the source of true freedom, the foundation for a hope that does not disappoint, the revelation of the true face of God and humanity’s ultimate destiny” (Final Document, no. 14), which is why the Church exists “to bear witness in the world to the most decisive moment in history: the Resurrection of Jesus” (Final Document, no. 4). Yet, “to enter into [the] Easter faith and become witnesses to it, it is necessary to acknowledge our own inner emptiness, the darkness of fear, doubt and sin” (Final Document, no. 14). It is only by being conscious of our utter poverty and need that we can realize that we are being sought, called by name, offered forgiveness, and sent out to our brothers and sisters. Thus, there is no possibility of living synodality without entering into a path of repentance and conversion — something that the Synod of Bishops modeled by opening the proceedings with a penance service.

As Francis teaches us in his encyclical Dilexit Nos, in Christ, God chooses to meet us in condescension and littleness and thus points us toward the path of meekness, gentleness, and abasement. Without such humility, without our abandoning our pride and ego, Christ cannot make himself known to us and others (Dilexit Nos, no. 202). Pride and sin are obstacles to letting Christ’s love shine in us and reach others, which is why without the grace of forgiveness, without bringing our sins to Christ in the confessional to ask for his mercy and healing, we are incapable of living the communion and mission to which the Lord calls us. This is very important. As the Final Document clarifies in unequivocal terms, communion, participation, and mission are a grace, a gift from above (Final Document, no. 142). Without such a gift, all our efforts at synodality will be void. Synodality is first and foremost a “continuous conversion,” it is “growing in love ‘to the measure of the full stature of Christ’ (Ephesians 4:13) and being open to the gifts of the Spirit for a living and joyful witness of faith” (Final Document, no. 142). Thus, nothing is more important to live synodality than to learn “little by little to make Jesus’s practices our own,” that is, to let the Holy Spirit conform our hearts to his (Final Document, no. 51).

We return here to the centrality of the sacramental life for the practice of synodality: communion and mission — growing into Christ, conforming to his heart — happen primarily through the gift of grace that reaches us by hearing the Word of God and receiving the Lord sacramentally in the Eucharist.¹ The Final Document goes back to the need for conversion of heart often: “synodal conversion calls each person to enlarge the space of [her] heart” so that our bonds of communion may go beyond the few people that immediately resonate with us (Final Document, no. 110). Synodality requires “asceticism, humility, patience and a willingness to forgive and be forgiven. It welcomes with gratitude and humility the variety of gifts and tasks distributed by the Holy Spirit for the service of the one Lord (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:4–5). It does so without ambition, envy or desire for domination or control, cultivating the same attitude as Christ who ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave’ (Philippians 2:7)” (Final Document, no. 43).

Synodality — which is another way to say, the Christian life — is about letting the Lord sanctify and save us so that we may “acknowledge Him in truth and serve Him in holiness” (Final Document, no. 16, quoting from Lumen Gentium, no. 9). It is not the product of our effort but of the unmerited grace we receive. We must depend upon the Lord completely and remove all the obstacles that sin would place before the expansion of Christ’s love in us by throwing ourselves often into the healing embrace of God’s mercy. All of this is to say that if we want to live synodality — if we want to foster communion, participation, and mission and touch people’s lives with the fire of God’s love — we should become saints. That’s it. The synodal Church is a Church filled with saints, that is, filled with sinners who depend completely on the mercy of the Lord and let the flame of Christ’s love burn away everything that would keep them separate from him. Francis emphasized this element by quoting from the Pentecost Sequence: we need the aid of the Holy Spirit who “bends the stubborn heart and will, melts the frozen, warms the chill, guides the steps that go astray.”²

I insist a lot on the necessity of conversion — which is another way to say that I insist a lot on the necessity of grace, the necessity of the Word of God and of the sacraments of confession and of the Eucharist — because I fear that such an insistence that is present all throughout the Final Document is often forgotten. We are tempted to think that all this talk about conversion, grace, and the sacraments is just boring piety we need to endure before we get to the true synodal stuff, so to speak. But Pope Francis has been warning everybody about the temptation to flatten synodality to what we do and what we change from the very beginning of the synodal journey. He repeated it often; it is an illusion that the Church will grow simply by reforming structures or by issuing new guidelines and programs. “Conversion is a never-ending story,”³ Pope Francis explains. “The worst thing that could happen to us is to think that we are no longer in need of conversion, either as individuals or as a community.”⁴ In fact, “to be converted is to learn ever anew how to take the Gospel message seriously and to put it into practice in our lives. […] Where the Gospel is concerned, we are always like children needing to learn. The illusion that we have learned everything makes us fall into spiritual pride. Our current reflection on the Church’s synodality,” he concludes, “is the fruit of our conviction that the process of understanding Christ’s message never ends, but constantly challenges us.”⁵ Without a change of mentality, without a move away from pride and all the bad habits that it entails, all our efforts at practical improvement will be in vain.

Without authentic conversion, not only would our efforts be useless, but they could actually be damaging. Pope Francis is not blind to the challenges that the synodal reform he is calling for entails. Accordingly, from the beginning of the synodal journey, the Holy Father has identified several sins, temptations, and perversions that might prevent us from embodying in an authentic way the proposals the Final Document makes.

First, there is the danger of trying to transform the Synod of Bishops, and with it all the Church’s structures, into a parliamentary battle that pits people against each other in the attempt to create majorities and minorities. Such a view of synodality reduces it to debating opinions on this or that single aspect of the Church’s teaching.⁶ Second, there is the danger of remaining stuck in formalism; we go through the motions of what is asked of us but without truly giving our hearts to it. We might talk a lot about synodality — sadly, it is indeed becoming a buzzword that people use all the time — but without letting the full breadth of its proposal invite us on a journey. Such formalism is often connected to a fear of discovering and naming problems and questions. We prefer to let business continue as usual, so to speak, rather than having to be challenged by what the Holy Spirit might make us discover.

Third, there is the danger of intellectualism and pride, namely, the idea that our particular understanding is the solution to every problem and that, accordingly, there is no need to be open to what the Holy Spirit might want to communicate to us. Such an attitude leaves us stuck in the familiar partisan divides. Fourth, there is the danger of complacency, namely, of remaining attached to old habits and solutions, preemptively shutting down any possible suggestion that might come from the common discernment. Fifth, there is the danger of wanting to find “immediate results that produce quick and media-pleasing consequences,”⁷ rather than engaging in the slow process of building up the faith of the People of God.

Sixth, as Pope Francis wrote in a letter to the German faithful, there is the danger of believing that “the solutions to current and future problems would come only from purely structural or bureaucratic reforms […] ‘It is a sort of new Pelagianism, which leads us to place trust in administrative structures, in perfect organizations. (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, no. 32).’ At the heart of this temptation there is the thought that, faced with so many problems and shortcomings, the best response would be to reorganize things, make changes […] to adapt the life of the Church to the prevailing logic or the logic of a particular group.”⁸

Seventh, there is the danger of thinking that the challenges the Church face will be solved by, as Pope Francis said in the same letter, “trusting and focusing solely on her own strengths or methods, on her intelligence, will or prestige,” thus missing how we need to open ourselves to the grace of the Lord who is the one who takes the initiative and renews the Church.⁹

Eighth, there is the danger of misunderstanding what mission and evangelization are. Some are tempted to consider them an “act of conquest, domination or territorial expansion.”¹⁰ Others identify them as a “quest to recover habits or practices that made sense in another cultural context.”¹¹ Ninth, there are those, the Holy Father warns us, who confuse them with change that adapts “the Church to the spirit of the time but makes her lose her originality and prophetic identity.”¹²

Lastly, there is the danger of considering synodality as an exclusively human effort, rather than, as I have insisted so far, something that puts prayer, penance, and adoration at its center. As Pope Francis said at its opening ceremony, “the synod is a process of spiritual discernment, of ecclesial discernment, that unfolds in adoration, in prayer and in dialogue with the Word of God. [. . . ] That Word summons us to discernment and brings light to that process. It guides the synod, preventing it from becoming a Church convention, a study group or a political gathering, a parliament, but rather [ensuring that it is] a grace-filled event, a process of healing guided by the Spirit.”¹³

As you can see, Pope Francis is not naïve and has been explicit in identifying and condemning the misunderstandings that might twist the reception of the synodal journey. As it happened with the Second Vatican Council — and Benedict XVI spoke of this beautifully on multiple occasions — even when it comes to the synod, there was the real synod and the synod of the media. Sadly, it is the latter, not the former, that captures people’s attention the most. But, while the real synod was a journey that happened in light of faith — it sought to look at the signs of the time and to find in God the answer for them — the synod of the media followed worldly categories. When that happens, we reduce synodality and everything that happens in the Church to a political struggle, a fight for power between different trends in the Church. Let us be mindful of the ideological lenses through which the media — even the Catholic ones, sadly — present to us the life of the Church. We must resist the lure of such distorting ideological lenses and protect our people from them as well. We need to be attentive to and be living witnesses of the real synodality proposed to us by the Final Document and not the virtual one concocted by today’s click-baiters and polemists.

Let me now highlight the main guiding principles spelled out by the document. By learning about them, we can then reflect on how they might apply to our specific contexts, such as the parishes or dioceses we serve and the needs of their communities. For the sake of clarity, let me group them around the three themes at the heart of the synod: communion, participation, and mission.

First, communion. We build unity in our communities by fostering a climate of encounter and mutual understanding (Final Document, no. 39). Such a goal requires us to listen to one another, walk with one another, and recognize the gift of each person’s story and charism (Final Document, no. 24).

Second, participation. We build co-responsibility and participation in our communities by engaging in an ongoing exchange and sharing of vocational gifts (Final Document, no. 7). Furthermore, participation is fostered by organizing decision-making processes that involve the community in an ecclesial discernment¹⁴ based upon broad involvement, a climate of mutual trust, and prayer. Finally, participation entails the creation of a culture of transparency, accountability, and evaluation (Final Document, nos. 79–80).¹⁵

Third, mission. We live and foster mission in our communities when, guided by the Holy Spirit, we gain “a profound vocational and missionary awareness” that makes us witnesses to the joy of the Gospel (Final Document, no. 141). We must allow the variety of ecclesial vocations and charisms that the Lord gives for the common good to be shared and put at the service of the flourishing of the Christian community and society as a whole (Final Document, no. 57).

These are the guiding principles the Final Document offers us. In light of them, the document makes many different proposals, spanning from the institution of a new ministry of listening and accompaniment to the proposal of an ecumenical synod on evangelization. There are also proposals regarding the relationship between the Latin and Oriental Catholic Churches, changes to Canon Law, a greater emphasis on pastoral regions and continental assemblies, the establishment of a research initiative on disability, a more frequent use of diocesan synods, reforms of the episcopal conference’s areas of competence, and more. Many essays should be written to consider each one of them in detail. In this one, I will limit myself to highlighting a few concrete practices that flow from the guiding principles listed above that might be a helpful source of reflection for diocesan communities.

First, the parish plays a fundamental role in the lives of all Christians because it offers a place where people may receive the grace of the sacraments, creating the soil to develop meaningful relationships of closeness and reciprocity. At the same time, though, the parish should become a place of support for those who bear witness to their faith in the world, keeping in mind that the first task of lay women and men is exactly to permeate and transform earthly realities with the spirit of the Gospel (Final Document, no. 66). It should not be primarily focused on the activities that happen within it or on its organizational needs. The parish should be at the service of the mission that the faithful carry out within society, in the family, and in their places of work. Furthermore, in a context in which many people do not go to the parish anymore, new forms of pastoral action that take the initiative to go out in the spaces where the lives of people unfold might be needed (Final Document, no. 117). We cannot simply continue to value the useful structures and ways of doing things that we have employed so far. The Final Document explains that “we also need ‘missionary creativity’ to explore new forms of pastoral action” that reach people in the environments where they live and work (Final Document, no. 111).

Second, given the changed context, the way we organize faith formation at all levels should change as well. On the one hand, formation should become an exchange of gifts between different vocations (so as to foster communion), be done for the sake of a service to be performed (so as to foster mission), and in a style that requires collaboration (so as to foster participation) (Final Document, no. 147). On the other hand, formation will not limit itself to telling people what the Church teaches but will also enter into dialogue with people’s questions and search for meaning (Final Document, no. 145). This is important because, as Francis teaches, “in the complex and rapid epoch change we are living, only people endowed with a mature conscience [that is, people who are personally convinced and have abiding reasons for their faith] will be able to exercise, in society, a healthy evangelical agency in the service of their brothers and sisters.”¹⁶ For example, only if we understand and experience that fidelity to the Lord is a path to happiness will we be able to overcome the difficulties and sacrifices that it will inevitably entail.¹⁷ But to help people, especially youth, achieve this level of certainty, we must be willing to walk with them in daily life, having the patience to accompany them in a thoughtful and patient way (Final Document, no. 62). Overall, we need to offer formation that is “integral, ongoing and shared. Such formation must aim not only at acquiring theoretical knowledge but also at promoting the capacity for openness and encounter, sharing and collaboration, reflection and discernment in common. Formation must consequently engage all the dimensions of the human person (intellectual, affective, relational and spiritual) and include concrete experiences that are appropriately accompanied” (Final Document, no. 143). And this is possible only if there are formators “capable of demonstrating with their lives what they transmit with their words. Only in this way will formation be truly generative and transformative” (Final Document, no. 143).

Third, given that the connection between decision-taking and communal discernment is truly one of the most important elements of the Final Document’s proposal, we should ensure that the deliberative bodies that Canon Law already provides for are actually convened and run effectively. Their “existence, efficiency and effective vitality” is necessary (Final Document, no. 104), which means we must move beyond a mentality that makes them exist only on paper and turn them into occasions to engage in the communal discernment for mission the synod calls for instead. Given the importance of this aspect, the Final Document gives us an extensive account of the best practices that should inform the work of the Church’s deliberative and participatory practices at all levels. These include: a) clarifying the object of discernment and disseminating the information necessary to engage in it; b) giving sufficient time for prayerful preparation to address the question at hand; c) fostering a commitment to the pursuit of the common good rather than personal interests; d) listening attentively and respectfully to each person’s voice; e) searching for the widest possible consensus without hiding conflicts or searching for the lowest common denominator; f) allowing the participants in the discernment to say whether the description of the consensus is accurate or not (Final Document, no. 84). These best practices, coupled with transparency and moments of ongoing evaluation, ensure the possibility to engage in a real exercise of participatory co-responsibility that will help communities grow in unity and respond to their call to mission better.

In this context, the Final Document also spells out the bodies and practices that are necessary to ensure accountability and ongoing evaluation. They include finance and pastoral councils, audited financial reports, periodic evaluations of the pastoral planning, reports regarding safeguarding, and regular evaluations of all the ministries and roles within the Church (Final Document, no. 102). Looking at the list, it is certainly encouraging to notice that almost all these recommendations are already standard practice in most ecclesial communities in the U.S. However, as Jesus makes clear in the Gospels, we can sometimes follow the letter of the law in our exterior actions without letting our hearts be truly changed by it, which means that there is always space to grow into the community of love, participation, and mission that the synod’s vision lays out. Also, we must recognize that there are still leaders at all levels of the Church who need to grow in their way of exercising their authority by engaging in “a wider distribution of tasks and responsibilities and a more courageous discernment of what properly belongs to the ordained ministry and what can and must be delegated to others” (Final Document, no. 74).

Here, it is worth placing a special emphasis on the difficulties that many in the synodal process have identified in the relationship between men and women in the Church. Following Jesus’s example and teachings, such relationships should be based on equality, respect, mutuality, reciprocity, collaboration, and love (Final Document, no. 52). Yet, they need a special conversion to re-establish the equal dignity and reciprocity that God created us to live. Of course, much more should be said to do justice to the full complexity of the women’s experiences in the Church. Suffice it to say that the Final Document singled out the relationship between men and women, in general, and women and clergy, in particular, as one in which the Church needs to grow. Thus, the synod encourages all pastors to make use to all opportunities already provided for in canon law to involve women of all ages and states of life in the leadership and ministry of their communities, making sure that no unfounded obstacles or prejudices prevent them from sharing their gifts and putting them at the service of the common good of the community and its mission (Final Document, no. 60).

Moving toward more participatory forms of co-responsibility would not only foster communion and increase the effectiveness of the Church’s mission, it would also help ordained ministers overcome burnout, loneliness, and the sense of being overwhelmed that so often plague them (Final Document, no. 74). Finally, it is worth pointing out that none of these participatory practices will happen automatically. Formation that encompasses and communicates clearly the technical, theological, biblical, and spiritual elements present in common discernment and deliberation is urgently needed, and the Church will need to invest significant resources in making suitable formators available if she wants to pursue the synodal vision laid out by the Final Document.

As Leo XIV taught in his first Pentecost homily, the Church must be like a training ground “of fraternity and sharing.” It is called to be a place where the Spirit of Jesus changes the world by changing our hearts, that is, by helping us reject “self-assertion, complaining, rivalry and the temptation to control consciences and resources.” Only by “making Jesus’ words a reality in our lives” will we experience the joy and hope that come from the communion with the Lord. As we grow in communion, we will also grow in contribution to evangelization, which is “not our attempt to conquer the world, but the infinite grace that radiates from lives transformed by the Kingdom of God,” men and women who follow in Jesus’s path, the path of charity and the Beatitudes, and who, accordingly, “have no need of powerful patrons, worldly compromises, or emotional strategies.”¹⁸ Evangelization is God’s work and is the primary mission of the Church. Synodality names the set of theological, spiritual, and practical commitments that make our participation in such essential work possible. The synod’s implementation phase is a fruitful time in which we are called to renew our personal encounter with Christ, let him heal our wounds and sins, and follow his commandment to announce him to all the nations.