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A world meeting of parish priests will later this month prepare for this year’s Synod on Synodality.
The priests at the April 29–May 2 Rome-based meeting will reflect on the theme “How to Be a Synodal Local Church in Mission”.
The invitation
The synod’s General Secretariat has invited several parish priests to attend the second and last session of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
The number of participants was determined according to a criterion similar to that which bishops’ conferences used for electing members of the Synod Assembly (about 200).
In selecting participants, bishops’ conferences and Eastern Catholic Churches were asked to take into account, as far as possible, those “who have significant experience with the perspective of a synodal Church”.
They were also asked to “favour a certain variety of pastoral contexts of rural or urban origin or specific sociocultural contexts”.
Listening, prayer and discernment
The Ordinary General Assembly’s second and last session will be held at the Vatican next October.
Bishop Luis Marín de San Martín from the Sybod’s General Secretariat says the meeting will involve “listening, prayer and discernment”.
The meeting has strong Vatican support from the General Secretariat of the Synod and from the Dicasteries for the Clergy, for Evangelisation and for the Eastern Churches, Martin says.
The meeting will also respond “to the recommendations of the participants in the first session of the Synod of Synodality who suggested listening more to the voice of the parish priests”.
The objectives
Marín says the objectives are to “listen to and enhance the synodal experience that they are having in their respective parishes and dioceses” and “enable dialogue … experiences and ideas”.
Another objective is for the meeting to “provide materials that will be used in the drafting of the Instrumentum Laboris (working document) for the Synod’s second session.
These will add to the consultation summaries which the bishops’ conferences coordinated and to the results of theological-canonical studies carried out under the auspices of the Synod’s General Secretariat.
On the last day of the gathering, May 2, the parish priests will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican, finishing with a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.
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