Editor’s note: Following the listening phase of the Synod on Synodality, a mixture of spiritual, clergy and lay people gathered in Frascati, Italy, to synthesize reports from around the globe. Austen Ivereigh took part and offers this insider’s account.
At the tip of our first day in Frascati in late September, struck by the solemnity of the duty that faced us, I messaged a friend to say that a lot of my fellow “experts” felt the hand of history and the burden of responsibility on our shoulders. “I hope you’re keeping a diary,” my friend pinged back.
I didn’t just mean the pressure to create, in two short weeks, a document that harvested the fruits of the greatest-ever exercise in listening and consultation the Catholic Church has ever carried out. It was more solemn than that. As Cardinal Mario Grech, the final secretary of the Synod of Bishops, had told us that morning, we were on res sacra, holy ground. The documents that the 26 members of the reading/writing group had been entrusted with had been written with tears and even sometimes with the blood of martyrs. To read them superficially, or to make use of them within the service of some agenda or other, can be disrespectful not only of the people but of the Holy Spirit acting through the sensus fidelium. “We’re the center and ears of the church, to listen to the cry of the people of God,” Cardinal Grech, speaking in Italian, told us.
“We’re the center and ears of the church, to listen to the cry of the people of God,” Cardinal Grech, speaking in Italian, told us.
Our task was to present, in a single document accessible to the entire church, the hopes and dreams of God’s individuals who had assembled in unprecedented numbers over many months across the globe for the primary phase of the Synod on Synodality.
Reminding us of Pope Francis’ famous 4 principles (time is bigger than space, realities are greater than ideas, unity prevails over conflict, and the entire is bigger than the part), Cardinal Grech said the primary phase was about allowing the voice of the Spirit to emerge above conflicts and divisions; about listening to experience quite than discussing ideas; and about capturing the larger picture, “what the Spirit is saying to the entire church, not only to 1 a part of it.” Many individuals, he reminded us, had not taken part within the synod or done so skeptically due to previous experiences by which they’d spoken but what they said had not been heard or acted on. This time needed to be different.
To be the voice of God’s people, added Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J., the synod’s relator, “you wish not only your mind but your whole selves to be present.” It meant being attentive, for instance, to the way in which by which in some synod reports filters had been applied to what the people were saying by bishops keen to decorate or groups with agendas.
“Be open to the overflow,” Giacomo Costa, S.J., told us. “Where is it? What are we being called to?” Father Costa, a veteran of the 2018 Synod on Youth and an authority in processes of group discernment, was the engineer of our process. But that first day, he was more like a retreat guide, urging us to open to the graces we wanted: to be open, to trust the method and to work collaboratively—not only in writing a document together but to be on the service of the broader mission. In being faithful to what we had heard from the people, we were called to be attentive to what the Spirit had stirred in us, to capture the “latest thing” God was offering his church in our time, which is what Pope Francis means by el desborde, the overflow.
The method and spirit of Frascati
Called by the synod secretariat to Frascati, a town on the outskirts of Rome, between Sept. 22 and Oct. 2, we got here, it seemed, from every corner of the globe. A mixture of spiritual, clergy and lay people of many places—amongst them Lebanon, France, Canada, Singapore, Hungary, Portugal, Peru, Kenya and Korea—we fell into three overlapping categories. Most were theologians, canon lawyers and Scripture scholars; some were facilitators of synodal processes and leadership programs; two of us were in church communications. Many were also members of the synod’s 4 commissions: theology, methodology, spirituality and communications. The one bishop within the invited readers/writers group was Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, S.D.B., of Perth, the president of the Australian plenary council.
Adding our 26 members of the reading/writing group to the three superiors of the synod secretariat and the 4 members of the coordinating group of the synod, 33 people were directly involved within the elaboration of the document, 12 of them women. Although the reports we read could be in any of the five languages allowed by the secretariat, with a view to ease the Frascati process, we used only English and Italian in our deliberations.
Each member of the reading/writing group arrived having read some 15 to twenty of the 10-page “national synthesis reports” sent in to the secretariat by 112—that’s, just about all—of the world’s bishops’ conferences and Oriental churches.
Called by the synod secretariat to Frascati, a town on the outskirts of Rome, between Sept. 22 and Oct. 2, we got here, it seemed, from every corner of the globe.
These local church reports, each a synthesis of diocesan processes, were the foremost material we worked on. But we also kept in view the reports that the synod secretariat had sifted through already: syntheses from the superiors of spiritual orders internationally; a single submission from 150 associations of lay faithful; reports from 17 dicasteries of the Roman curia; and a report compiled by “influencers” within the digital world whose breakthrough online listening exercise drew in over 100,000 people. Finally, we heard a presentation on the submissions from greater than 1,000 individuals or groups who had chosen, for various reasons, to write down on to the secretariat quite than through their local churches.
The fortnight was divided roughly into three periods. First got here 4 “listening” days of working in small groups to discover core elements—whether reflecting consensus or minority, prophetic voices—that we summarized in presentations to the plenary sessions. Then got here one other 4 “writing” days of compiling a primary draft. After a free day on a bunch visit to the papal palace and gardens of Castel Gandolfo, the ultimate days were spent in reviewing and revising, with the assistance of the synod’s council of 16, mostly cardinals, who needed to approve the ultimate draft. And we met Pope Francis.
The method was intense and tiring, and the duty a race against time. But to take part in it was also a privilege. Spending a whole lot of time in one another’s delightful company—at meals, in liturgies and in spiritual conversation, working in small groups and infrequently walking to town for coffee and gelato—helped to form a discerning instrument. As we tuned up to one another, to the voices within the reports and eventually to the Holy Spirit, what seemed not possible at first began to offer technique to the conclusion that something essential was being born.
The method was intense and tiring, and the duty a race against time. But to take part in it was also a privilege.
Father Costa consistently shifted the makeup of the groups: first by continent, then by gender after which by ecclesial status. So within the morning, for instance, I used to be in Europe-Italian, within the afternoon in men-English and the next morning in lay people-Italian. All this was to make sure that our particular perspectives weren’t lost, while also producing content for the report in the shape of paragraphs with supporting quotes from the documents. These quotes, catching not only what but additionally how people within the local churches expressed themselves, got here to be known in Frascati as “the pearls of the people of God.”
The foremost tension I felt inside the groups was that some seemed anxious to desert these pearls in favor of abstract commentary. The temptation to theologize, as if what the people had said couldn’t be allowed simply to face, was ever present in Frascati, an comprehensible resistance amongst highly competent and educated people to the humility our synthesizing demanded of us.
Within the groups, I experienced the temptation as a sort of dead weight of dullness and banality, and I discovered it frustrating. Just let the people speak! This became my prayer and my hope for the document. Cardinal Grech and Father Costa were aware of the temptation, too, and went out to fulfill it. “We’ve got been summoned here with the duty of listening to the people of God,” Cardinal Grech reminded us. “If in our synthesis we don’t represent what the people of God are attempting to say, then we’ve failed.”
The message landed. The ultimate document stays rooted within the people. But having experienced the temptation in our groups, I became aware of how hard it’s, in synodal processes, to essentially hearken to the people, especially for those of us accustomed to analyzing and opining. It made me way more aware of the temptation within the synod reports, a lot of which had applied the anxious “filters” Cardinal Hollerich had warned about on the primary day.
“We’ve got been summoned here with the duty of listening to the people of God. If in our synthesis we don’t represent what the people of God are attempting to say, then we’ve failed.”
I had two extreme cases in my very own batch of national syntheses: In a single, the filter was a clerical establishment that was obviously unused to the concept the Spirit speaks through odd people. In one other, the filter was applied by a lay establishment convinced it already possessed all of the answers to the questions, such that listening to people in parishes can be useless. I reached the tip of each reports with no idea what the people considered anything, let alone what the Spirit could be saying through them.
But they were the exception. Most reports, whether or not written directly by bishops or by teams they’d appointed, made great efforts to capture what the people had said, passing it on without judgment.
Finding the lost sheep
In Frascati, I also learned the importance of not only including everyone but additionally going in quest of the missing. We were told so as to add an empty chair to our groups and to ask several questions: Where were the minority voices that were constant within the reports yet risked getting lost within the concentrate on the celebrity issues? Whose prophetic voice had not been heard? Which perspective has not yet come up? The plenary that followed was suddenly crammed with voices that were within the reports yet had not yet been well heard by us.
The reports from internationally said it: The highest-down structures and modus operandi of the church today are drained and don’t fit the missionary context, whether the church be old or young. The present containers are usually not adequate to carry the variety of the church, nor to enable the participation of all within the mission. It was time to place flesh on the bones of the Second Vatican Council’s understanding of the church as people of God.
In Frascati, I also learned the importance of not only including everyone but additionally going in quest of the missing.
Yet the voice that got here through didn’t demand or hector; it was a more humble, loving voice, one which spoke directly and firmly, naming realities that needed to be faced yet that trusted within the wisdom of the synod process to discern the correct responses. The decision that had begun to seek out shape in Frascati was right there, in that hope for spaces of belonging by which all could express themselves without fear of exclusion, by which each commitment to Gospel truth and the unconventional inclusion of all might be higher brought into fertile tension.
In what emerged, I started to understand the reality of what Pope Francis says in “Evangelii Gaudium,” that “God furnishes the totality of the faithful with an instinct of religion—sensus fidei—which helps them to discern what is actually of God.” It’s an instinct that comes, the pope goes on, with a certain sort of wisdom, “to understand those realities intuitively, even after they lack the wherewithal to offer them precise expression.” What the Spirit was saying to the church was, in spite of everything, right there within the reports, in that “instinct of religion” within the voices pained by fragmentation and division, that longed for a maternal, embracing, patient, more capacious church, one that would gather in those left outside, one which was higher able to holding in tension difference and disagreement and that takes seriously the concept all of the baptized are called to mission and to take a seat on the table where decisions are discerned.
Despite our fatigue, we felt buoyed by this realization. The people of God were on the move. We would have liked to assist the church move with it.
An enormous-tent church
It was some time into the meeting, at the tip of the primary week, that the concept arose amongst us that became the icon at the center of the Frascati document. The tent of meeting in Isaiah 54:2 has the tabernacle at its center and is firmly anchored by sturdy pegs; yet it’s able to being enlarged and moved because the mission demands. It struck us as an ideal metaphor for what the people of God were calling for, which the document calls the “missionary synodal church.”
Some might be surprised that the document doesn’t go more deeply into the problems that the synod raised but leaves them hanging, noting the disagreements where they exist and alluring them to be wrestled with. Many of the document is given over to not the problems but to “process.” Process, in spite of everything, is the purpose of a synod on synodality, and it’s where the document breaks essential latest ground by harvesting and giving expression to the will within the reports for a synodal way of proceeding. Hence the dream within the report from religious superiors of “a worldwide and synodal church that lives unity in diversity” and that adds, “God is preparing something latest, and we must collaborate.”
It was time to place flesh on the bones of the Second Vatican Council’s understanding of the church as people of God.
What is that this something latest, this big-tent church? Inspired by “Evangelii Gaudium,” paragraphs 30-33 of the continental document note the 2 spiritual temptations facing a various church: on the one hand, to turn out to be trapped in conflict and polarization; on the opposite, to disregard the tensions that diversity brings, pretending they don’t exist in a sort of fragmented coexistence. Nobody can read the reports and never find the people lamenting each of those in our church: Each polarization and fragmentation within the church today show that the containers we’ve are inadequate. What the Frascati document offers is a hermeneutic tool for a latest container, one that enables us to create that bigger-tent church more able to holding together diversity and disagreement in a generative tension.
Drawing from suggestions within the reports, the document offers a broad number of approaches for the following stages of the synod to take forward in regional assemblies in February next 12 months. But what could also be missed is what this implies for the usually thorny issues raised by the national synod reports. It means, initially, that as a church we should always not regard those issues as problems to be immediately “resolved” or “decided” but as dynamic tensions that—if we handle them in ways which might be open to the Spirit—are life-giving. The invitation is “to articulate them in a means of constant continual discernment in order to harness them as a source of energy without them becoming destructive.”
Pope Francis has prolonged the synod process because of this, in order that it concludes not with a single assembly in Rome in October 2023 but a second one a 12 months later. This can give time for the Spirit to enter into those tensions in order that they turn out to be latest possibilities quite than causes of deepening conflict.
It was through such processes that in its early, missionary era the church was in a position to grow so rapidly across boundaries of race, language and culture. Through the extraordinary assembling of the worldwide faithful that began in 2021, what has emerged is the dream of a way of proceeding that regenerates that synodal tradition in ways appropriate for today’s global church of immense diversity.
The concentrate on synodal processes could also be frustrating for those impatient to see particular changes that, viewed a minimum of from Manhattan or Munich, seem self-evident. To others who suspect the entire synod process is a dilution or capitulation, it’s going to sound dangerously vulnerable and open-ended. But nobody can doubt, reading the local church reports as we did at Frascati, that the sensus fidelium has awoken and has spoken, and that we cannot possibly confront these tensions without first creating the capability for a synodal church. If we’ve managed to bottle that decision and share it in order that others can grasp it, our mission in Frascati is achieved.