Cathy Harmon-Christian’s SUV has been getting quite a lot of attention these days. Last yr, after a nun and priest friend asked her to work full-time holding listening sessions for the worldwide Synod on Synodality with individuals who Catholic parishes might need a tough time reaching, she printed a large decal of Pope Francis extending his hand in blessing. Above the image, this message appeared: “Pope Francis wants to listen to from you!” and below, an email address was given: synodality@gmail.com.
“It was larger than my window, unfortunately,” Dr. Harmon-Christian said, “so I did should do some maneuvering.” The sign covers the back window of her Subaru and extends onto the door below.
And her idea worked: Dr. Harmon-Christian has received emails from individuals who have seen her driving around Atlanta. She has been stopped on the gas station and asked questions. She even had a listening session along with her mechanic, who left the Catholic Church for the evangelical church.
Dr. Harmon-Christian’s listening work has not been limited to those she encounters on the road. She has held listening sessions on Zoom, in cafés, outdoors with people experiencing homelessness, and even received a protracted letter from a jail inmate in Texas. Although she has not received confirmation that the fruit of her listening sessions were accepted by either her diocese or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—her 600-page report far exceeds the 10-page limit that the united statesC.C.B required from each diocese—she has received messages of support from officials on the Vatican’s synod office (officially called the General Secretariat of the Synod), who’ve all encouraged her to proceed her work.
But why is the Vatican gathering all of this feedback from people around the globe?
In a recent deep dive episode of “Contained in the Vatican,” America Media’s weekly Vatican news podcast, we interviewed top officials within the Vatican’s synod office together with Catholics like Dr. Harmon-Christian—who’re holding listening sessions around the globe—and someone who’s more critical of the synod, to assist explain the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality; what its puzzling name means, what has happened to date and what it expects to perform.
What’s synodality?
When the Vatican announced the “Synod on Synodality,” many individuals were confused about what it could entail. Synodality is just not a straightforward word to define, and a synod on synodality left Catholics, ordained and never, much more perplexed. Once I asked one priest about his parish’s plans, he asked me, “Isn’t this just a gathering about having meetings?”
Stephen P. White, the director of the Catholic Project on the Catholic University of America, who has written critically concerning the synod, gives voice to this confusion. “My initial hesitation concerning the synod on synodality is just that I didn’t know what it was,” he told me in an interview for the most recent “Contained in the Vatican” deep dive episode. “The concept of a synod is an ancient idea within the church, however it was clear, fairly early on on this pontificate, that Francis was using it in a novel way.”
Mr. White continued, “The more I checked out it, the more it made sense to me.” He defines synodality, succinctly, as “‘Lumen Gentium’ in motion.” “Lumen Gentium” refers back to the Second Vatican Council’s foundational document that outlines the central role the laity—or the “people of God,” because the document notes—plays within the church’s mission of evangelization and growing in holiness.
The concept of synodality, as outlined within the synodal process, takes that concept of lay people as protagonists in evangelization and asks what practical application this could have when considering how the laity and hierarchy work together. It’s a broad query, with broad implications: What does “working together” seem like within the context of the liturgy, for instance, or in church governance?
The brand new process underway for this synod goals to reply that query by bringing together lay individuals with priests, religious, bishops, cardinals and so forth, for discussions about—because the synod theme puts it—“communion, participation, and mission.” It takes place over three phases: First, there may be the local consultation phase that began in the autumn of 2021—the one Dr. Harmon-Christian was gathering responses for—which aimed to assemble as many individuals as possible, especially those on the margins of the church, for small group conversations about how the church is fostering communion, participation, and a way of mission, and the way it could do higher.
The second phase, the continental phase, will gather bishops and lay people to speak concerning the findings from the primary phase and find common threads, and begin coming up with ideas for learn how to move forward.
The third and final phase will occur in Rome in October 2023 and can involve bishops and doubtless lay people, who will work together to draft proposals for the pope. The pope is then expected to make decisions based on the deliberations and proposals, which might likely be published in an apostolic exhortation, a kind of official document that the pope publishes after most synods.
It is a very different way of “being church” than the top-down hierarchical model the Catholic Church has had for hundreds of years, which presents some challenges each in communicating the concept and in getting people on board.
Thierry Bonaventura, the communications director for the Vatican’s synod office, has the thankless task of trying to speak this complex concept in an accessible way.
“I’m quite hardly using the word ‘synodality,’” Mr. Bonaventura told me. “I prefer to speak about a ‘listening church,’ [or] ‘walking together.’”
Phase One: The most important consultation in human history
Early on in Mr. Bonaventura’s tenure on the secretariat, his office needed to quickly change course. When the Vatican announced the synod in March 2021, some dioceses, especially those who had previously held local synods and thus had some familiarity with synodality, got straight to planning listening sessions. Other dioceses were more hesitant; they wanted step-by-step guidelines before they began planning.
The synod office produced those guidelines in September, only a month before the synods were alleged to open. So when the rules got here out, explaining the method and learn how to hold listening sessions, some dioceses complained to the Vatican that they didn’t have enough time and hadn’t allocated any resources of their budgets to perform the work, while others objected to the strategy and were strongly proof against the changes proposed by the pope. When the synod opened in October 2021 only about half of U.S. dioceses had taken step one of appointing an area synod coordinator.
[Read: We contacted every diocese in the U.S. about their synod plans. Here’s what we found.]
The Vatican’s synod office adjusted course. Quite than having dioceses turn of their listening session summaries to their national or regional bishops’ conference in time for the bishops’ conference to then send a report back to the Vatican by April 2022, they prolonged the deadline for the bishops’ conferences’ reports to August. The revised timeline gave dioceses nearly 10 months to plan and hold listening sessions and send them to the bishops’ conference to be synthesized.
And despite the shaky start, Mr. Bonaventura confirmed with America that, by early October this yr, 112 of the world’s 114 bishops’ conferences had sent their reports to the Vatican.
Creative approaches from around the globe
“My impression is de facto that individuals have been listened to,” said Nathalie Becquart, X.M.C.J., a consecrated religious woman who’s considered one of two undersecretaries within the Vatican’s synod office. “There have been listening sessions, listening groups, [with] alternative ways to do the method in response to the methodology we suggested within the preparatory document, but in addition with quite a lot of creativity.”
That creativity, she said, was geared toward reaching individuals who may not ordinarily be included in church conversations.
Sister Becquart listed a number of the more creative attempts at synodality. “I often say that synodality begins with a coffee,” she told me. The concept of synodal conversations over a cup of coffee comes from a diocese in the US.
The Diocese of Davenport, Iowa, launched its “58,000 Cups of Coffee” initiative, which meant it could distribute 58,000 coasters—three for every Mass-going Catholic within the diocese—and challenge its faithful to start out synodal conversations with three people: someone who goes to church, someone who has not been back in church because the pandemic and someone who has never been Catholic or left the religion way back.
Two dioceses straddling the U.S.-Mexico border also took a more creative approach to the synod, holding a cross-border listening session with participants from the dioceses of Brownsville, Tex., and Metamoros, Mexico. Deacon Luis Piñeda of Brownsville told me that the listening sessions raised discussion about his community’s material struggles: inflation on each side of the border, poverty, drug use and immigration. He said it also gave people a spot to speak about how they’d been hurt by the church.
“Individuals are offended with the church—and it’s O.K.—we want to listen to those that are hurt,” Mr. Piñeda said. “Possibly a priest ignored someone or didn’t wish to have fun a baptism or a marriage or a quinceañera, you recognize, whatever it’s…We’d like to take heed to those that are hurt in order that we will help them to heal.”
I asked if any of the feedback surprised him, but he said it hadn’t, because he has been working on synodal listening processes for greater than 20 years, first organizing a diocesan synod in Brownsville starting in 1999, and most recently working on the V Encuentro, a synodal process focused on Hispanic ministry, which was the most important synodal effort in the US until the present global synod.
“What the Encuentro, if anything, told the larger church is that we want to listen to the growing numbers or population of Hispanics within the U.S.,” Mr. Piñeda said. He said he hoped that that extra attention would lead the U.S. church to take a position more in lay leadership, the way in which that Latino churches do. “To me, lay ministry formation is a reminder of the role of the laity within the church, that you simply don’t should be a bishop or a priest or a deacon or a spiritual to serve the church.”
For Marie-Hélène Dupré La Tour—a Xavière sister from the identical congregation as Sister Becquart, but working in N’Djamena, Chad—bringing synod listening sessions to the marginalized has meant listening to the smallest voices in her parish.
Sister Dupré La Tour saw that her parish was hosting listening sessions for ladies, for men, and for young people, but there have been still voices that went unheard. In response, she proposed hosting two listening sessions—one in French and one other in Chadian Arabic—specifically with and for youngsters. About 15 or 20 children aged 5 to 13 got here. It was an excellent turnout for her small parish, and he or she made sure to incorporate a number of the orphans within the parish, who, she said, usually are not often treated well by their prolonged relations who take them in.
She was surprised by what the kids said within the session. “We children wish to go to the burials of older people,” she told me, repeating a few of what she had heard within the sessions. “Nobody wants us to come back, however it concerns us. We wish to go, too. They continued, older people don’t take heed to us very much. Once we tell them the reality, they don’t prefer it. They don’t take heed to us. Don’t we have now a must speak?”
She is just not sure what effect her listening sessions could have inside the parish, she said, much less in the broader church. But, she said, “it modified my relationship with these children.” Sister Dupré La Tour has resolved to listen more to the kids and to assist them speak up, and be heard, in the neighborhood.
That is the intangible goal of the synodal listening sessions, which Pope Francis often points to: the transformative power of encountering others and interesting in conversation; or, as he often puts it: “the culture of encounter.”
The query that is still is just how such transformative conversations will filter up through several rounds of synthesis, and what decisions Pope Francis might take at the tip of the method.
Criticisms of the synod
In Stephen White’s view the method has focused an excessive amount of on internal church issues and never enough on the church’s mission of evangelization.
“I believe quite a lot of people in quite a lot of places have promoted the synod as a sort of referendum or political activity inside the church,” he told me in an interview for the deep dive. “The concept that is the Catholic Church becoming a democracy where everyone gets to have their voice heard,” he said. “It’s not true.” He added that with feedback passing through several rounds of synthesis, “sooner or later the concept that is Rome hearing my voice is just silly almost to the purpose of being insulting.”
Mr. White can also be concerned that the share of Catholics participating within the synod has been as little as “1 percent,” he said. (The Vatican’s synod office was unable to substantiate that statistic since the reports it has received haven’t all included statistics on how many individuals participated.)
Cardinal Grech, the overall secretary of the Secretariat of the Synod, responded to this criticism by drawing attention to the depth of the responses and their geographic spread: Reports arrived from 112 out of 114 bishops’ conferences; and within the case of the 2 outstanding regions that’s because these are countries where there may be war or civil unrest.
“We usually are not after numbers,” the cardinal added.
For Mr. White, “in a way, the numbers matter tremendously,” he said, immediately adding that “in one other sense, they don’t, particularly.” The issue, he said, is that “there’s an inclination to play fast and loose with the difference between actual discernment and sociology.”
Synthesizing and discerning
The Vatican is anticipated to release a 30-page report on Oct. 18, synthesizing all of the feedback from the 112 bishops’ conference reports, plus the countless reports that got here in from “unofficial” efforts like those of Dr. Harmon-Christian.
For 2 weeks from late September to early October, a gaggle of 35 experts from five continents—around 50 percent laypeople and 50 percent clergy—gathered at a retreat house in Frascati, Italy, to wish, reflect upon, and synthesize the reports.
Little information has been published to date about what the Vatican’s report will include, though Sister Becquart did share just a few of the predominant points that had emerged: “The query of young people, the query of ladies, is in every single place. The query of welcoming people who find themselves more on the margins can also be coming from in every single place. There may be a really strong feedback that we want to do away with clericalism.”
Although Sister Becquart sees synodality as the alternative of clericalism, some synod skeptics wonder if a process that seemed at first to be one-directional—a round of listening to put people followed by several rounds of synthesis and discernment by bishops and an ultimate decision by the pope—would actually incorporate lay people in decision-making in a meaningful way.
Cardinal Grech pushed back on that in an interview with America Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell for “Contained in the Vatican.”
[Read: Exclusive: Cardinal Grech on drafting the first global synod synthesis—and what’s in store for phase 2]
The cardinal shared that the worldwide report assembled in Frascati could be approved by a council of bishops, approved by the pope, after which immediately sent to local bishops, who’re expected to assemble their lay and ordained advisory groups, he said, and “to see whether the document reflects his church” and second, to concentrate on the feedback coming from other parts of the world.
The responses to the report, together with any suggested changes, will then be made by early next yr, in time for phase two: the continental assemblies.
Phases Two and Three: Continental Assemblies and Rome
The cardinal was unable to detail the plans for the continental phase. They’re being planned by the bishops of those continents, he said, but he expects they’ll include regional meetings of lay people, priests and bishops and culminate in a continent-wide gathering within the spring of 2023. The continental meetings are expected to have two “moments,” he said, one for the complete group to debate ideas together and one other solely for the bishops to speak their conclusions. “Obviously,” the cardinal stressed, [the bishops] could have to offer a reason” for his or her decisions to the larger, lay-inclusive group.
Few details have been decided or published concerning the final Rome meeting. In previous synods it has been normal for lay people to be invited to participate, although voting on proposals is proscribed to bishops and heads of men’s religious orders. (There may be some speculation this might change this yr, together with the unconfirmed possibility that Sister Becquart could possibly be given voting rights.)
The voted-on proposals are then passed along to the pope who accepts or rejects a number of the suggestions and leaves others unanswered.
Ordinarily, the pope would release an official teaching document wrapping up the synod process. But Cardinal Grech said he doesn’t consider this synodal process ends in Rome and moderately with the local churches that may implement the synod and, hopefully, proceed to supply a listening ear. “There’s this kind of circularity,” Cardinal Grech said. “What departs from, starts from, the people of God should arrive to the people of God.”
Where does all this leave us?
There are quite a lot of unknowns that come together with taking up such a recent and open-ended process, and quite a lot of questions that remain about what’s going to result from the synod and whether it could achieve its goals.
What is evident to date is that there was a large geographic spread in participation, and that many regions’ reports have revealed that their synod conversations are broaching difficult topics that they could never have discussed openly before, like women’s ordination, the experiences of L.G.B.T. people and clericalism.
People around the globe, like Deacon Piñeda, Dr. Harmon-Christian, and Sister Dupré La Tour, are coming up with creative ways to incorporate marginalized people within the synodal journey, even in the event that they usually are not sure where that journey will lead. Even Mr. White, who was more critical of the synod, has held listening sessions on the Catholic University of America.
At any time when I asked the people I interviewed why they’ve put a lot effort into such an uncertain process, their answer has repeatedly been the identical: The Holy Spirit is guiding the method.
Or, as Mr. Bonaventura plainly put it, “We’re still satisfied because we have now this proof that, really, the project is just not in our hands. We usually are not alone.”
Gerard O’Connell contributed reporting.