AS WE BEGIN THE SYNOD’S CONTINENTAL PHASE

On August 26, 2022, a Press Conference was held at 7 A.M. (1 P.M. in Italy) at the Holy See Press Office to present the second stage of the synodal process: the Continental Stage of the Synod on Synodality.

For the occasion, Cardinals Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod, and Jean-Claude Hollerich, General Rapporteur for the next Synod, provided some data on the Syntheses that have reached the General Secretariat of the Synod and have been produced from the unprecedented worldwide consultation of the People of God that took place in the previous months, as well as some information on the ways in which the Document for the Continental Stage will be produced.

The event was livestreamed with simultaneous translation into English, Spanish, French and Italian on the Vatican News YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/VaticanNews and is still available for viewing.

Click here for a Synod website report on the press conference. There you will find links to the speeches, however, presently only two of them are in English. Below is an unofficial translation of Cardinal Grech’s speech obtained using Google Translate. Should official translations not appear in the next few days, we will use this mean for translating the other speeches.

Press Conference Speech by Cardinal Mario Grech, General Secretary of the Synod

(unofficial translation obtained using Google Translate)

We meet one year after the press conference for the presentation of the XVI Assembly of the Synod. Then the synodal process appeared as a blank page entrusted to discernment in the Spirit of the local Churches. Today we can give some information on the path that has been done.

At the present time we are experiencing the first phase of the synodal process, with the conclusion of two decisive moments: the consultation of the People of God in the particular Churches and the discernment of Pastors in the Episcopal Conferences. Starting from the summaries of the Bishops’ Conferences, the Secretariat of the Synod, with a qualified group of experts, will meet shortly to draft a summary document which will initiate the continental phase.

Precisely in this consultation the nature of the synodal Church is revealed as “walking together” of the People of God. The summaries received will reveal how much this ecclesial principle (style) was lived in local churches and from the result we will understand how much we can still work to make everyone more responsible and involved. We are under no illusion that the consultation principle has been applied with the same care in all Churches: we are at the beginning of an ecclesial journey that requires patience, demands awareness that all be made participants, each according to his own condition and function, in ecclesial life and therefore of the synodal journey. The important thing is to have shown and continue to show that the path of the Church begins and takes strength from listening.

In any case, I address you today and those who follow us from home with a sense of gratitude and a lot hope for the future of the synodal Church. Regardless of the contents that will emerge from the reading of the syntheses, the experiences heard or lived show a living Church, in need of authenticity, healing and that yearns more and more to be a community that celebrates and announces the joy of the Gospel, learning to walk and discern together.

I wish to thank all the People of God who participated. Precisely because in the Church no one has the exclusive rights of the truth, the consultation of the People of God asks for discernment. To understand the synodal process, we need to think of a fruitful circularity of prophecy and discernment. If all are prophets in the People of God (cf.Nm 11,29), not everything said is the voice of the Spirit: it is necessary to grasp the voice of the Spirit within the sound of the voices. Here it is function of discernment, which is already operative in the listening process, when the community converges on one point. It is a question of having full intelligence of what the Spirit says to the Church through a reading process in depth, which resembles a decanting process. The certainty of this that the Spirit says to the Church comes only with feeling together, or rather the consenting, the converge in the faith of the People of God, which occurs through listening to one another. But the discernment continues in the Assemblies of Bishops which are the principle of the unity of theirs Churches. More than one argues that the summaries of the Bishops’ Conferences will be the tomb of the prophecy. It is time to overcome this suspicion, this reservation which certainly has its reasons historical, but which contrasts with the nature of the Church, which is “the sacrament of unity”, that is, people saint gathered and ordained under the guidance of the bishops “(SC 26). If the Church is the body of the Churches, because every Church is such because the Bishop is the bearer of the branch of apostolicity (cf. LG 20), we must have trust in each other, not by pitting a Church of the People against a Church hierarchical and making relations in the Church dynamic and fruitful: of every portio Populi Dei with the his Bishop and his presbytery, and of all the Bishops among themselves and with the Bishop of Rome, “visible principle and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the multitude of the faithful “, but also of all the Churches (cf. LG 23).

The synodal process in progress is regulated by this principle of circularity, guaranteed by an act that does so it makes it operative in the ecclesial life: that of restitution to the Churches, which will take place in the next ones months. With the results of the consultation of the People of God and of the discernment of the Conferences episcopal, the Secretariat of the Synod will be able to elaborate a Summary Document that would be could become the instrumentum laboris for the assembly phase that will be celebrated in Rome. Instead, the inclusion of a continental level was intended to ensure even more compliance with the consultation of the People of God. To prevent the various passages from impoverishing what the Spirit is he told the Churches in the consultation, this further moment of discernment was thought, in which the continental Assemblies are called to reread the Document produced by the Secretariat of the Synod, indicating whether it effectively expresses the synodal horizon that emerged in the particular Churches of that continent.

This further level of discernment cannot in any way be reduced to the celebration of an ecclesial assembly. For this it is necessary that the principle of circularity be realized through an act of restitution of the Document not to an Assembly, but to particular Churches. There it took place consultation, there the Document returns. This restitution guarantees the respect of the actors of the synodal process: in effect, making the subject of consultation the fruit of listening to them, it offers itself the possibility for each particular Church to respond with another eminently ecclesial act: that of reception. With this act, each Church makes the Document, its contents and its contents its own evaluates the correspondence with her identity as a Church that she is called to embody in a place the Gospel of Christ. For this reason, every Bishop is required to bring the Document to the attention of the Church of her and to make a careful reading of it at least in the organs of participation and to draw up with the synodal team any observations to be forwarded to the Bishops’ Conference or to the Secretariat of the Continental Assembly.

Consequently, the Continental Assembly will be able to start its critical reading task of Document based on the observations from the Churches. Anyone can become aware of how the act of restitution is able to activate the synodal dynamics through the circularity between the subjects and levels of ecclesial life. We are confident that despite the difficulties in translating a synodal style is underway, where we are all apprentices, the signs of a change of mentality already they see.