The Catholic Church is called to be an instrument of communion with God and unity among all people, but it requires grace and “learning to ‘bear with’ reality, gently, generously, lovingly and courageously for the peace and salvation of the whole world,” a theologian told the assembly of the Synod of Bishops.

“Communion is the beauty of diversity in unity. In a modern world that tends toward both homogenizing and fracturing, communion is a language of beauty, a harmony of unity and plurality,” said Anna Rowlands, a professor of Catholic social thought and practice at Durham University in England.

As synod participants began work on the second section or module of the assembly’s working document Oct. 9, their discussions about promoting communion with God and with others were preceded by reflections offered by Rowlands and by Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe, a theologian and former master of the Dominican order.

While still seated at round tables according to language, many of the 364 synod members were at different tables than the week before. The new groupings were organized by the themes members indicated they wanted to work on; the topics including promoting unity through works of charity and justice; ecumenism; being more welcoming to people who feel excluded from the church, like members of the LGBTQ community; and valuing the cultural, linguistic and racial diversity of the church.

Pope Francis had been expected to attend the morning session, but “unforeseen commitments” arose, said Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office. While not saying what those commitments were, Bruni said Pope Francis was not one of the four synod members who were absent that day because they were diagnosed with COVID.

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, relator general of the synod, introduced the module by telling participants that a key question from the synod’s preparatory process — which included listening sessions on the parish, diocesan, national and continental levels — was, “How can we be more fully a sign and instrument of union with God and of the unity of all humanity?”

God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is “the basis of all communions,” he said, and “this God, who is love, loves the whole of creation, every single creature and every human being in a special way.”

“All are invited to be part of the church,” the cardinal said. “In deep communion with his father through the Holy Spirit, Jesus extended this communion to all the sinners. Are we ready to do the same? Are we ready to do this with groups which might irritate us because their way of being might seem to threaten our identity?”

Father Radcliffe reminded participants that the issue of “formation,” which is broader than training or education, came up repeatedly in the synod’s first week discussions of how to promote a synodal church, one where people walk together, listen to each other and all take responsibility for mission.

“A synodal church will be one in which we are formed for unpossessive love: a love that neither flees the other person nor takes possession of them; a love that is neither abusive nor cold,” he said.

But too often, Father Radcliffe said, “what isolates us all is being trapped in small desires, little satisfactions, such as beating our opponents or having status, grand titles.”

“So many people feel excluded or marginalized in our church because we have slapped abstract labels on them: divorced and remarried, gay people, polygamous people, refugees, Africans, Jesuits,” the Dominican said to laughter. “A friend said to me the other day: ‘I hate labels. I hate people being put in boxes. I cannot abide these conservatives.'”

Rowlands told the synod members and participants that it is in the Eucharist that the different dimensions of communion meet because “this is the place where the communion of the faithful is made manifest (and) where we receive the gifts of God for God’s people. The sacramental order teaches us, by feeding us, communion.”

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Pope Francis opened the work of the assembly of the Synod of Bishops asking members to meditate on ancient theological texts about the Holy Spirit, have the courage to be honest about their disagreements and focus much more on listening than on sharing their opinions.

The synodal process “is not easy, but it’s beautiful, very beautiful,” Pope Francis told some 364 other synod members and 85 non-voting experts, ecumenical delegates and facilitators the afternoon of Oct. 4 as the synod work began in the Vatican audience hall.

“A certain asceticism” is needed for the synod, the pope said. He asked forgiveness from journalists trying to cover the monthlong meeting but insisted “a certain fasting from public words” would be needed to ensure the proper spiritual atmosphere for the synod members.

And, in fact, the synod rules distributed that evening said, “In order to guarantee the freedom of expression of each and all regarding their thoughts and to ensure the serenity of the discernment in common, which is the main task entrusted to the assembly, each of the participants is bound to confidentiality and discretion regarding both their own interventions and the interventions of other participants.”

Pope Francis also repeated what he has said many times: “the synod is not a parliament” where the ideas of opposing parties will be debated and voted up or down along party lines. Neither, he said, is it “a meeting of friends” getting together to exchange opinions and try to solve problems they see around them.

“The synod is a journey that the Holy Spirit makes,” he said, so constant prayer and listening are necessary to follow the path the Spirit indicates.

“The Holy Spirit triggers a deep and varied dynamism in the Christian community, the confusion of Pentecost,” when people from every nation heard the disciples speaking in their own languages, the pope said. From the experience, the Spirit creates not uniformity, but harmony.

Differences of opinion will surface, he said. “If you don’t agree with what that bishop or that nun or that lay person says, say it to their face. That’s what the synod is for. To tell the truth, not the chatter under the table.”

Pope Francis also acknowledged how people outside the synod members are offering “hypotheses about this synod — ‘But what will they do there?’ ‘The priesthood for women?’ — these are the things that are being said outside.”

But what is happening, he said, is that the universal church has gathered in Rome to pause and to listen.

“The church has stopped, as the apostles stopped after Good Friday, on that Holy Saturday,” closed in the Upper Room, he said. “But they were afraid; we are not. … It is a pause for the whole church to listen.”

Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary-general of the synod, told the members, “Today the church is at a crossroads, and the urgent challenge, strictly speaking, is not of a theological or ecclesiological nature, but how at this moment in history the church can become a sign and instrument of God’s love for every man and woman.”

“God’s love is the medicine that can heal today’s wounded humanity, and as the church our mission is to be a sign of this love,” he said.

In discerning the best ways to do that, Cardinal Grech said, participants should remember the assembly is not “an isolated act,” but part of a process that began two years ago with local, diocesan, national and continental listening sessions.

The presence of members who are not bishops — some 70 priests, religious, lay men and women — is not meant to represent “the totality of the People of God,” he said, but to “remind us with their presence” of the whole synod process and its invitation for all Catholics to participate, sharing their experiences of things that help or hinder their sense of communion, participation and mission.

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, relator general of the synod, noted how the members were gathered at round tables in the Vatican audience hall rather than in the rows of the synod hall to promote conversation but also to remind them of similar experiences they had at listening sessions in their parishes and dioceses.

“Bishops who were not very active in the process but have been elected by their (bishops’) conferences,” he said, “may face challenges at the beginning. On the other hand, there are the members who are not bishops. Many among them were particularly involved in the continental stage of this synod and are called to testify their experience.”

In the synod discussions, he urged members to remember that each person, with his or her differences, is a Christian trying to follow the Lord.

“The church is the people of God, walking through history, with Christ in her midst,” Cardinal Hollerich said. “It is only normal that there is a group walking at his right, another at his left, while some run ahead and others lag behind.”

From any of those positions, he said, when a person looks at the Lord, “they cannot help but see the group that is doing the opposite: those walking on the right will see those walking on the left, those running ahead will see those lagging behind.”

“In other words, the so-called progressives cannot look at Christ without seeing the so-called conservatives with him and vice-versa,” he said. “Nevertheless, the important thing is not the group to which we seem to belong, but walking with Christ within his church.”

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VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Catholics gathered at the continental level say the Catholic Church must be united, not uniform, and embrace its many forms of expression throughout the world, said members of the synod preparatory commission after a weeklong meeting at the Vatican.

“I think one of the most important things we have experienced during these ecclesial, continental assemblies, is that there is in fact more than one way of being the church,” said Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of Perth, a member of the commission and president of the Australian bishops’ conference.

“We’re beginning to experience a profound unity, which is not grounded in uniformity,” he said at a news conference at the Vatican April 20. “There are universal principles that are a kind of positive expression of uniformity, but they all have to be incarnated in context of the local reality.”

The commission gathered in Rome to reflect on findings from the continental stage of the process leading up to the assemblies of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican in 2023 and 2024.

Archbishop Costelloe said that while it’s true “some people have struggled with the synodal process” and “don’t understand it,” he said the synod’s global outreach is an invitation for the church to “identify, hear and recognize the voice of the Holy Spirit in this multiplicity of voices that are coming forward” through the synodal process.

“Diversity is already a reality in the church and something we need to acknowledge and begin, more and more, to celebrate and be grateful to God for,” he said.

Xavière Missionary Sister Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary of the synod, said the aim of the continental stage of the synod, which brought together bishops’ conferences and other church assemblies, was to “to integrate this idea of circularity among all levels of the church.”

“We need a new way to relate between the center of the Roman Curia and the local churches,” she said, recalling how during her visit to Oceania’s continental assembly a bishop told her, “usually, it’s us coming to Rome, this time it’s Rome coming to us.”

Archbishop Costelloe said that the commission’s meetings with the prefects and staff of the Vatican’s many dicasteries allowed for an exchange that connected the work of the Curia and the realities of the local church.

“It’s never good for people to walk around in some kind of little bubble in which all they hear is people who agree always with them,” he said. “We need to break out of that bubble, and this was one of the ways in which that could happen.”

Part of that effort also involved an ecumenical element, in which “Catholic listeners” from the General Secretariat of the Synod attended four conferences on synodality in other Christian traditions.

Reflecting on the many realities of the church she witnessed in attending continental synodal assemblies, Sister Becquart said that the synodal process “helps us realize that we are not only in a multipolar world, but also church.”

She explained how churches in different continents offer unique cultural “gifts” to the spirit of synodality: Africa and its understanding of the church as family, Asia and its pursuit of harmony and the Middle East which is marked by a long history of ecumenism.

Those contributions, she said, show how “diversity can also be a path toward unity.”

The findings from the synod’s continental stage will be assembled into the working document for the synod’s universal phase, which will bring representatives of the world’s bishops and others to the Vatican in October.

Archbishop Costelloe said while it is “tempting to want the conclusions now,” it is important to remember that the synod is a long process of prayer and communal reflection, the outcome of which no one can predict.

“We have to be open to a very different approach to these things rather than be very analytical or calculated,” he said. “It’s not just an intellectual exercise, it really is an exercise in discernment.”

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NEWARK, N.J. (OSV News) — Some say that doors opened for women when Pope Francis appointed Sister Nathalie Becquart as an undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops in 2021, the first woman to hold the position. A French religious sister of the Congregation of Xavières, she is part of a team advising the pope on matters important to the church, coordinating the Synod on Synodality and has voting rights at the synod.

Prior to her appointment as undersecretary, she was a consultor to the Synod of Bishops. She worked with youth from 2008 to 2018, overseeing the national service for the evangelization of young people and for vocations within the French bishops’ conference.

Sister Becquart sat down with Jersey Catholic, the news website of the Archdiocese of Newark, during her visit with Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, Dominican Sister Donna L. Ciangio, chancellor of the archdiocese, and Melissa Else at the archdiocesan center in March to discuss women’s roles, and the role of the laity in general in the Catholic Church and how that has changed with Pope Francis. A recent Vatican News survey showed that currently 1,165 female employees are working for the pope, compared to only 846 in the year Francis took office in 2013.

Jersey Catholic: What do you think are the current challenges for the promotion of women in the church?

Sister Becquart: Well, you know, it’s really about the promotion of the laity first, and understanding that we are called to be a synodal church. That means a church in which everybody — all the baptized — protagonists (laypeople) are missionary disciples. What I see is that many women are the driving force of synodality. So, it’s really about our vision of the church. And the challenge is to move from a pattern of a clerical church to move forward to a synodal church. So, there is an urgent call coming from all over the world for more women in leadership. And, it is important to note that this was a goal in recent synods, such as the synods on the Family, Youth, and the Amazon. When women are involved, it helps to foster teamwork and the development of pastoral teams. And when you work together, men and women, priests, laypeople, and religious, you are always better.

Jersey Catholic: In the last 10 years, since Pope Francis was elected pontiff in March 2013, how do you think things have changed for women in the church?

Sister Becquart: We can see that Pope Francis has emphasized the importance of having participation and leadership of women in the church. He is trying to carry on the vision of a synodal church, in which the pastor is working together with all the community to carry out the mission of Christ and the church. When Pope Francis began, 19% of the people working at the Roman Curia were women. Now it is 23.4%, which is a big change. And, he also has appointed more and more women in communications. He also thinks that is very important. He has opened ministries for women, such as lectors and acolytes, and instituted the ministry of catechists, with a rite of installation. In the Synod on Synodality, we have a team of men and women, clergy, laity, and religious. We also have women in all the commissions of the synod. In many countries, often there might only be a priest in a parish doing pastoral ministry, and today there are parish and diocesan teams that include women. So, changes are happening, not only at the Vatican, but also in local churches all over the world.

Jersey Catholic: Is it important to start at the parish level?

Sister Becquart: Changes taking place at the Vatican are extremely important, but it is not enough. Change takes place at the grassroots level and often causes change in other areas. To me, change in parishes and in the diocese, it is the most important. It is there that collaboration in practice makes a huge difference. Today, we see more and more women who are well-educated — they are studying theology and being formed in many areas of the faith. It’s really about lay empowerment and key to that is formation so that the laity are better informed and can walk together to serve the mission of the church.

Jersey Catholic: As for women’s ordination, do you think there’s another alternative to that? Or a step before?

Sister Becquart: I would just highlight what Pope Francis is doing, which is to disconnect leadership from ordination. In other words, leadership does not depend on ordination. So, where it’s a possibility he has appointed women to leadership in the Roman Curia. And now with the new constitution for the Roman Curia, “Praedicate Evangelium” (“Preach the Gospel”), it’s rather clear that a woman can be also a prefect of the dicastery. For example, there is a layman for prefect for the Dicastery for Communication. The new constitution fosters and embraces women’s participation in order to have more women in the decision-making process and leadership.

It is not easy to do that at all levels and in all parts of the world. There is not one way that is unanimous for everybody in the world, so we have to be aware that the aim is to reach a consensus. And for the moment, there is a quasi-unanimity about code and the need to rethink women’s participation, to foster women’s participation in leadership. The conversation needs to be ongoing in order to reach understanding and consensus. The ordination of women is a topic, but it’s not coming from all, even all Catholic women.

Jersey Catholic: What can women do now to have a bigger voice within the church?

Sister Becquart: The most important is not just to have some women at the Vatican but at all levels of the Church and realize how, as a synodal church, we are called to journey together to carry on the mission of Christ. So how we foster a way to listen to each other, discern together, and do pastoral ministry together is such an important way forward. If we really work together and build pastoral teams, my experience shows that we will be better.

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VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In their discussions about the life of the church and “synodality,” or walking together, Catholics in United States and Canada noted the negative impact “polarization” is having on the church, said Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas.

“Politics gets mixed into it, and it’s not that politics doesn’t have a place in the way the church thinks about things,” he said, but the situation seems to have gotten to where Catholics “immediately sort of categorize people. I think people are aware of that and really want to find a way out of that, so that we can talk to each other as Catholics, as baptized trying to be faithful to Christ.”

Figuring out how to deal with social issues in a Christian way “is going to take a lot of work, and it’s OK to disagree,” he said. “But you don’t have to demonize the other person who thinks differently than you do.”

Bishop Flores, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, spoke to Catholic News Service April 12 about the release of the final document from the North American continental stage of the process leading up to the assemblies of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican in 2023 and 2024.

The Texas bishop, who had shepherded the U.S. portion of the synod process, was at the Vatican for a weeklong meeting of the synod preparatory commission.

The discussion of polarization in the 12 listening sessions for the U.S.-Canadian continental consultation is related to participants’ emphasis on “baptismal dignity” as the source of communion in the church, of shared responsibility for the church’s mission in the world and of the call to be more inclusive, Bishop Flores said.

“We’re bound to Christ by baptism,” he said, which “also necessarily means we’re connected to each other. And that’s part of the of the whole reality of who we are. We don’t control who we’re connected to, Jesus does, and so we need to let that dignity show itself.”

Bishop Flores encouraged people to read the continental report trying “to imagine the voices of people speaking from many, many different walks of life” and remembering that all of them making the effort to participate in the sessions is “a sign of their love for the church and their desire to do something good together.”

Reading the document “with an open heart,” people will find things they agree with and ideas they do not share, “but that’s OK,” the bishop said. “It’s a big church, and we need to at least hear each other before we can kind of think together as to how to move forward.”

From the listening sessions held for participants from the United States and Canada, Bishop Flores said one of the themes that came out most strongly was “wanting to be a church that continues this experience of communion in a practical sense, of being able to get together and speak about matters of the faith and matters of the church that are very important to people.”

People “were really happy just to have been asked to share their experience of the life of the church,” Bishop Flores said, and they would like to have similar opportunities in the future.

In the North American report and in the other regional reports he has read, Bishop Flores said he sees a common theme of Catholics feeling “the world is changing so fast” and wanting to find the best ways for the church to respond to those changes.

Certainly in North America, but also in most other parts of the world, he said, Catholics highlighted a need for “formation” and not primarily as a call for religious education classes, but “formation in a synodal mindset,” one that helps people understand and appreciate being “a people of the Word of God who gather together and talk about it and pray together and then let that inform us as we move forward.”

On a whole range of issues, including on the repeatedly stressed issue of reaching out to and involving young people in the life of the church, Bishop Flores said the discussions were not about “what the church needs to do” but “‘how can we do this better’ — and that’s an important shift.”

The North American synthesis also includes a separate section, titled “Bishops’ Reflections on the Experience of Synodality in North America.”

Bishop Flores said the key reflection was that bishops found their diocesan listening sessions “very invigorating” and want to find ways to continue having that kind of interaction with the variety of people that make up the church in their dioceses.

“A bishop needs to find new ways to kind of stay in touch with what his people are living, are thinking and are praying about,” he said.

The bishops, like many other people who participated in some stage of the synod process, he said, also have questions about what it means, on a practical level, to be a “synodal church” that listens to and relies on the gifts of everyone while also being a “hierarchical church.”

And that is a discussion that will continue, he said, including at the synod assemblies.

The continental phase also again heard calls for the church to be more welcoming and inclusive. “The groups named during the continental stage included women, young people, immigrants, racial or linguistic minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, people who are divorced and remarried without an annulment, and those with varying degrees of physical or mental abilities,” the report said.

Bishop Flores said he expects “lively discussion” on that topic as well.

“What does it mean as a church to be open and welcoming to people, especially in the context of the dignity of the baptized,” is a question to be explored, he said. “The continental document does not offer us a solution to these things, it just raises them up. This is what people really are thinking about.”

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(OSV News) — The final document for the North American phase of the 2021-2024 Synod on Synodality was released April 12, capturing a process of dialogue and discernment that two participants described as ‘messy,’ ‘joyful’ and unifying — like the synod itself.

“It’s amazing what comes about when … you invoke the Holy Spirit in the conversation,” Julia McStravog, a theologian and co-coordinator of the North American team for the synod’s continental phase, told OSV News.

“The synodal approach provoked a genuine appreciation and joyfulness on the part of the people of God to be able to engage in conversation, even if they were talking about difficult issues,” team co-coordinator Richard Coll told OSV News. Coll also serves as executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development.

Led by Catholic bishops from Canada and the United States, McStravog, Coll and their fellow team members have now synthesized the results of synod listening sessions throughout the two countries, producing a 36-page fInal document available for download at usccb.org/synod. (According to the USCCB, the Catholic Church in Mexico is participating in the global synod with the Latin American Episcopal Council, or CELAM, given its long partnership with that conference.)

The North American synod team — consisting of eight bishops, three laywomen, two priests, two laymen and two women religious — spent time in prayer, silence and discussion to distill responses for inclusion in the text, which forms a response to the Document for the Continental Stage issued by the Holy See’s General Secretariat for the Synod of Bishops in October 2022.

The final document for the continental stage from North America, along with the contributions of the six other continental assemblies, will form the basis of the “Instrumentum Laboris,” the global synod’s working document, to be released by the General Secretariat in June.

Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, who leads the North American team with Canadian Bishop Raymond Poisson of Saint-Jérôme-Mont-Laurier, Quebec, presented the document at the Vatican April 12.

Launched by Pope Francis in October 2021, the multi-year synod of bishops — the theme of which is “communion, participation and mission” — seeks to cultivate an ongoing dynamic of discernment, listening, humility and engagement within the Catholic Church.

The North American report highlighted three key themes: the implications of baptism, communion with Christ and one another, and missionary discipleship as a living out of the baptismal calling.

“Our baptismal dignity is inseparable from our baptismal responsibility, which sends us forth on mission,” the document stated. “Every human person possesses the dignity that comes from being created in the image of God. Through baptism, Christians share in an exalted dignity and vocation to holiness, with no inequality based on race, nationality, social condition, or sex, because we are one in Christ Jesus.”

By virtue of their baptism, participants in the synod’s North American phase expressed “a desire for a greater recognition of, and opportunities for, co-responsibility within the church and her mission,” with greater collaboration “among the laity and the clergy, including bishops,” said the document. It stressed “there can be no true co-responsibility in the church without fully honoring the dignity of women.”

An “authentic acknowledgment and respect for the gifts and talents of young people is another vital aspect of a co-responsible church in North America,” said the document.

Amid “polarization and a strong pull towards fragmentation,” synod participants in North America emphasized the need to “maintain the centrality of Christ,” especially in the Eucharist.

The document candidly acknowledged that a “significant threat to communion within the church is a lack of trust, especially between bishops and the laity, but also between the clergy in general and the lay faithful.”

The clergy sexual abuse crisis in particular has caused “major areas of tension in North America,” as have “the historical wrongs found in the residential (and) boarding schools for Indigenous people, which … included abuse of all kinds,” said the document.

In their introduction to the document, Bishop Flores and Bishop Poisson admitted the need to “(make) efforts to listen more effectively to those from whom we have not heard, including many who have been relegated to the margins of our communities, society and church.” They noted their “absence” in the synodal process was “not easily interpreted but was palpably felt.”

Among those often missing from synodal sessions were priests, with bishops acknowledging their responsibility to address that lack “by example and by conveying the transparency and spiritual/pastoral fruitfulness of synodality.”

Synod participants listed women, young people, immigrants, racial or linguistic minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, people who are divorced and civilly remarried without an annulment, and those with varying degrees of physical or mental abilities as marginalized within the church.

Outreach and inclusion of these groups is ultimately driven at the local level by the faithful actively living out their baptism, McStravog told OSV News.

At the same time, “the bishops really took to heart the call … to reach out to the periphery,” Coll told OSV News, who added that virtual synod sessions enabled broader participation.

Synod participants consistently articulated a longing for better formation in the faith and in Catholic social teaching, the document said.

As the synod process moves into its next phase, Coll and McStravog pointed to the need for humility and openness to God’s will.

“We don’t have all the answers, and none of this is pre-packaged,” said Coll. “You have to trust that the Spirit will be there to guide us despite the messiness — or maybe because of it.”

Note: The Final Document for the Continental Stage in North America, available in English, Spanish and French, can be viewed and downloaded at usccb.org/synod.

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