In the early 80s, while studying for my Masters in Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York with the late, great scripture scholar Fr Raymond Brown SS, I worked in a Redemptorist parish on the Lower East Side. My role was “accompanist” to a collaborative parish team of priests, brothers, sisters and a lay pastoral assistant. The parish team was the radical – for its time -- initiative of the parish priest, Arthur Wendel CSSR, and I was employed to support the work in the parish by an equally visionary SSND sister, Barbara Valuckas, using a process developed in Latin America. This was essentially to listen, and only listen – to meetings of the team, the parish pastoral council, various sub team meetings and one-to-ones and to write summary feedback reports with questions to stimulate reflection. Listening, summarising, asking incisive questions – this was an extraordinary discipline to develop so early in my working life in the Church and it underpinned all the work I did during the late 80s and through the 90s in adult formation with lay people and clergy for three dioceses.
Imagine my delight to see that a new “ministry of listening and accompaniment” is proposed in “A Synodal Church in Mission”, the synthesis report of the Synod on Synodality, which has just finished the first of two stages of its work in Rome. In my view, the Synod process and summary document exceed all expectations and have the potential to transform the Roman Catholic Church.
There were 365 participants in the synod, of whom 300 were bishops, and 54 of the remainder were lay women. It was preceded by a global process to which all Catholics were invited to contribute via their dioceses. A summary document, an Instrumentum Laboris, was prepared as the basis for the Synod, which employed a process which was itself a radical departure for the Church: Conversations in the Spirit, using listening, prayer, silence and speaking, to discuss the topics from the document, with participants seated in groups around tables in the synod hall and every participant able to offer interventions. At the end of the three weeks of discussion (preceded by a three-day retreat) a 40-page report was produced, each of its 81 paragraphs voted on and approved by at least a 2/3 majority.
A further remarkable feature of the synod process was the Pope’s request, lamenting the influence of public opinion on past synod gatherings, that participants should abstain from speaking to journalists to maintain the “priority of listening”. Journalists who had traveled to Rome to cover the Synod were left empty-handed and frustrated. In fact I heard a number of fascinating podcasts including interviews with people, including several women, who had been involved in preparation for the processes. No soundbite headlines emerged but participants offered discrete reflections on the progress inside the Synod hall. But when Reuters sums up the Synod report as “Vatican Synod ends without clear stances on women deacons, LGPT” it becomes clear that the Church cannot rely on a secular or perhaps even a Catholic press to adequately convey the staggering implications of this process for church reform.
“We used to say ‘trust in God’ and now we say ‘trust in the process', and why not for God is surely in the process”, wrote an author I read long ago whose name now escapes me, though I have never forgotten the quote. The synod report confirmed that Conversation in the Spirit enabled authentic listening, that “conversion is at play in conversation” and that within it “the Holy Spirit’s unmistakable voice can be heard”.
There are echoes of the work done by many of us during the 80s and 90s: the catechumenal journey of initiation, co-responsible pastoral councils, appraisals of clergy (now to include deacons and bishops and even nuncios), involvement of lay people in clergy formation, the preferential option for the poor, lectio divina. These were all themes of the work of adult formation during the last decades of the 20th century, also rooted in facilitated small group processes. They emerged from a remarkable series of post-Vatican II documents, including Christifideles laici, on the shared responsibility of all the baptised for communion and mission, Redemptoris missio, on evangelisation, Pastores dabo vobis, on the role of the priest, the revised Code of Canon Law, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, the General Directory of Catechesis. That work fell into abeyance in the later years of Popes St John Paul II and Benedict XVI but it has now emerged from what has seemed like a long winter into fuller fruition. Given a stronger mandate in this document, the ideas and proposals are knitted together in the concept of synodality and have a fresh coherence and authority because they are rooted in the painstaking process of the Synod to date and the experience of the global church, now also sanctioned with a papal blessing. Some of the specifics in the document that strike me are:
· Recognition of the abuses of the Church – sexual abuse, abuse of power and of women. This abuse of power is explicitly linked to clericalism, which is “a distortion of the priestly vocation”. “A chauvinist mentality and inappropriate expressions of authority continue to scar the face of the Church and damage its communion”. “Profound spiritual conversion is needed as the foundation for any effective structural change.”
· Acknowledgement of the fear of change and among some clergy – a fear of losing power and privilege. It is crucial that going forward the synod process involves all the clergy more actively, and it is “decisively” dependent on the bishop being “an example of synodality for all”.
· Synodality, the report makes clear, is an ongoing process of co-responsibility for the mission of the Church with accountability built in at every level.
· There is a massive emphasis on the role of women: The pastoral leadership of women should increase in all areas of the Church’s life and mission. Women’s access to diaconal ministry should be explored. Women should be included as seminary teachers and as students “to foster better formation of ordained ministers”. There is a need for inclusive language in liturgy and church documents. Women should be formed as judges in canonical processes. Attention should be given to abuse in religious life, especially of women ….
· Two new ministries are proposed: lector, which could also include preaching, and the ministry of “listening and accompaniment”. Both would of course be open to women.
· There is an emphasis on poverty and the climate crisis, forcefully expressed: “the cry of the earth and the cry of the of those living in poverty are the same cry”.
· Diaconal ministry needs to be rethought, and deacons and priests are asked to reconsider their exercise of authority. Formation for ordained ministry also needs to be reevaluated in the light of synodality.
· The Code of Canon Law should be revised and also the 1978 document on the relationship between bishops and religious.
· There should be structures and processes for review of bishops’ performance and a review of the criteria for selecting candidates for the episcopate.
· Need for more formation – in social doctrine and the teaching of Vatican II, and in the skills required for synodality. Clergy, religious and lay should engage in formation together.
· A dialogue between theology and psychology – this one particularly close to my heart, since I have Masters degrees in both theology and humanistic psychology and continually see resonances between them.
These are only a few of the proposals in this document. No-one, surely, can complain at the lack of content. Though it is true that some people hoped for more decisive action on LGBT issues, divorced and remarried, the ordination of women to the diaconate. All of these issues are referenced under “matters for consideration”, and nothing is “off the table” – those of us who have been waiting for decades for change in the Church and who have sensed the Church treading water since the millennium may have to wait a little longer. But the document is primarily about process – the three-year process of the Synod and the process of conversion of the culture of the Church that is required to underpin structural change. Synodality is about “a set of processes and a network of bodies enabling exchange between the Churches and dialogue with the world”. Synodality comprises co-responsibility, conversion and conversation, the catechumenal journey, equality of dignity through Baptism, accountability, collegiality, relational renewal, mission and shared formation.
This report balances process and content. It contains the elements of an entire culture shift in the Church, which is about continuing the momentum and spirit of Vatican II – which has never been fully embedded in the Church and which itself required updating for the needs of the 21st century – for a church and a world which could never have been predicted during the 1960s. Vatican II was intended to be an “aggiornamento” – an updating, implying the need for continual renewal; a “balzo avante” – a great leap forwards; in the words of John XXIII, an ”opening of the windows of the Church”.
However, the continued success of the process depends, the report makes clear, on the further involvement of deacons, priests and -- particularly and “decisively” -- bishops to promote an ongoing process of conversations in the Spirit about the report over the next year. “The bishop is called to be an example of synodality for all.” There remains a risk that the report will be ignored or sidelined, damned with faint praise, or dismissed for what is not explicitly mentioned or finally decided. Sixty of us in my parish engaged in the preparatory process and some cynicism was then expressed about what the outcomes might be – but the potential of this report and the ongoing synodal process go above and beyond anything we might have hoped for. The crucial thing now is that it be widely and fully read and given further impetus through continuing “conversations in the Spirit”.