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The final round of the World Synod will convene in Rome in October this year.
Bishops, priests, and laypeople will vote on new consultation and decision-making processes in the Catholic Church.
The working paper, Instrumentum Laboris, is the crucial guideline for this process and is expected to be available soon.
The Synod Secretariat announced at the end of June that the working paper should be available from the beginning of July.
It will serve as the basis for the reform debates needed across the Universal Church, and the decisions made then will serve as a foundation for the Pope’s decisions that follow.
Once the Working Document is available, it will have undergone several consultation stages with bishops’ conferences across the globe.
Hopefully, the bishop’s consultation reflects their local consultations with parishioners and clergy.
From June 4 to 16, twenty theologians from four continents gathered in Rome to compile the Working Document, based on feedback from more than 100 bishops’ conferences, so it is clear that not every bishop’s conference has taken the opportunity to participate.
In addition, the consultation material was sent to around seventy people worldwide who represent the diversity of the positions.
This group included priests, religious, laypeople, and theologians.
The last part of the preparation is reviewing the current draft document by the Council of Cardinals. After the Synod Council reviews the Cardinal’s feedback, the final draft version of the document will be submitted to the Pope for approval.
Consultation and feedback
Consultation with parishioners, religious and a wide range of church groups was crucial in the first round of the synodal process.
Various methods were used, and specific vital sometimes challenging ideas emerged internationally, such as
- Gay rights and participation in the Church,
- priestly celibacy and lifestyles, and
- the admission of women to the ordained priesthood.
In many countries, these issues were backgrounded by the clergy abuse scandal and the episcopal avoidance of responsibility over many decades.
The lack of clergy feedback prompted this year’s meeting with parish priests from April 28 28 to May 2 near Rome.
This meeting’s focus was parish life, with particular attention on mission, participation and discernment as aspects of parish life and renewal.
The feedback from the English-speaking participants (Parish Priests for the Synod – Group 7 Report, April 30 2024) reported the participants “renewed understanding that the Synodal Church is the community of all believers open to transformation and change, which happens through the reciprocal accompaniment and confident acceptance of the journey we are already walking with the Risen Christ and each other.”
Where this is true, the practice of synodality, as the shared participation and collaborative voice of all the baptised in the life of the Church, will go a long way toward fulfilling Vatican II’s liturgical precept of Active Participation, which was affirmed in the Novus Ordo but missing in the performance of the 1962 Rite.
The parish priests wrote of their “excitement” in participating “in Christ’s saving mission present and fulfilled in a renewed culture/mindset, attentive and inclusive of all people, their diverse gifts, needs, cultural backgrounds and life situations.”
Here is an apparent reference to the purpose of the synodal process and an antidote to a harking back to a past ideological or idealised age that is counterproductive to the spread of the Gospel today.
In preparing
for October’s Working Document,
there has been
very little communal discernment
at the parish and diocesan levels.
Synodal consultation
The synodal process’s use of consultation as a critical platform for ecclesial change is only sometimes well-defined.
Synodal consultation has four characteristics:
- dialogue
- discernment
- decision-making, and
- communication, which are elements in the more extensive process of ecclesial change.
In his work, ‘I and Thou,’ Martin Buber describes dialogue as the prerequisite of an authentic relationship between people, humanity, and God.
Buber characterises “true dialogue” as open, honest and mutual. Vatican II also emphasised dialogue with the world, other Christians and political authorities.
In the English translations, the Latin words colloquium, meaning discussion and dialogus, meaning dialogue these terms became fused.
Physicist David Bohm wrote of dialogue as a conversation between people that explores their assumptions on meaning, values, society and communication.
In this process, the participants do not debate but seek to listen and consider what they hear.
An authentic dialogue starts with a question and the intention of discovering the answer.
Dialogue is inclusive and, at times, time-consuming.
Finding the answer to the question in dialogue also means that the answer is not a single given but a response to various influences.
Dialogical answers are not set in stone but will be further discussed as situations and needs change.
Discernment, as in the Ignatian concept, is a process of contemplation, meditation and prayer, individually and in groups, to consider if the one calling to change is the Holy Spirit.
Discernment is judging between right and wrong, truth and error.
It involves making careful distinctions, not only in significant matters but also in seemingly insignificant areas. It concerns paying attention to the small things, inner peace or disquiet, and external realities as positive or negative influences.
Discernment enables an individual or a group to evaluate information, test it against God’s Word, and make wise choices that honour God and, in doing so, guide us in the journey of holiness.
The first phase of the synodal process firmly focused on discernment, which surprised many participants.
Still, in preparing for October’s Working Document, there has been very little communal discernment at the parish and diocesan levels.
Synodal decision-making is about power-sharing, but unfortunately, these are not always free from power games!
Consultative decision-making models in the Church tend to drift between being
- a consultative conversation with the laity and priests, where the bishop listens to the opinions of others and then makes his decision, and
- a consultative decision-making process, where the bishop and others jointly discern, decide and share the responsibility for the decision’s outcomes.
The tension is between a pastoral view of the world and a clericalist one.
Parishioners and clergy get caught in the middle of this process, as the common-sense world says the clergy are not skilled to make all parish decisions, and the clericalist view says that clergy are ordained to make decisions.
In New Zealand, this is further confused by the discrepancy between the parliamentary establishment of the dioceses, where all the goods and wealth of a diocese and its parishes are invested in the person of the bishop and the Church’s Canon Law that separates the rights, ownership and decision-making between a bishop, a parish priest, a diocese and a parish.
Consequently, decision-making through power-sharing is complex in highly clericalised, hierarchical institutions such as the Latin Rite and Catholic Church, where so much of the historical lived Tradition.
The dogmatic formulations support a particular worldview where decision-making is a function of the ordained clergy.
It is not easy when partners are not seen as equal, and in this context, shared decision-making based on shared power almost always fails.
Consultation is a form of communication.
Communication is about sharing information and providing opportunities to include voices.
It is more than just giving information about events; it is about engagement.
Communication is the first job of any management group in the Church; indeed, the sacraments themselves are forms of communication that we revere, but they are, as the Second Vatican Council teaches authoritatively, not the only form of communication.
Synodal communication processes seek to communicate and engage the baptised through dialogue, discernment and decision-making in difficult conversations about how we live our Christianity in our current, unique contexts.
Communication opens up conversations on complex issues but does not resolve them or shut down irritating conversations.
Communication is about giving people a voice and allowing different opinions to be heard, except those opinions framed in hate language or ideological rhetoric.
According to Cardinal Grech, Secretary General of the Synod, the purpose of the synodal process is “not about solving individual problems” in each country or every instance.
Instead, it is about achieving synodality as a form of being Church.
The object of the exercise is to move away from being a clericalist or clericalising church to a church that talks and decides together.
Thus, a Synodal Church doesn’t want to be a clericalist church.
As a result, its management functions (parish, diocese, bishops’ conference) also want to be consultative at their core.
This means reshaping decision-making, management, communication, and pastoral dialogue processes to reflect this change.
Where this is possible (where it is wanted), it will provide what Cardinal Grech describes as “a dynamic of pastoral conversion.”
Consultation frees us from the bind of “knowledge is power”, and that power belongs to some and not others because they have the power to know and decide.
- Dr Joe Grayland is a Liturgical Theologian and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen (Germany). He has been a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North for nearly thirty years. His latest book is: Catholics. Prayer, Belief and Diversity in a Secular Context (Te Hepara Pai, 2021).
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