By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service
[Vatican City – CNS] – Pope Francis told members of the Synod on Synodality that they should respect and honor the faith of all baptized Catholics, including the women, trusting “the holy, faithful people of God” who continue to believe even when their pastors act like dictators.
“I like to think of the church as the simple and humble people who walk in the presence of the Lord — the faithful people of God,” he told participants at the assembly of the Synod of Bishops Oct. 25.
In a rare intervention as the assembly was nearing its conclusion, Pope Francis told members to trust the fidelity of the people they listened to in preparation for the Synod over the past two years.
“One of the characteristics of this faithful people is its infallibility — yes, it is infallible in ‘credendo,'” in belief, as the Second Vatican Council taught, he said.
“I explain it this way: ‘When you want to know ‘what’ Holy Mother Church believes, go to the magisterium, because it is in charge of teaching it to you, but when you want to know ‘how’ the Church believes, go to the faithful people,” the Holy Father said.
To illustrate his point, Pope Francis shared the “story or legend” of the fifth-century Council of Ephesus when, the story goes, crowds lined the streets shouting to the bishops “Mother of God,” demanding that they declare as dogma “that truth which they already possessed as the people of God.”
“Some say that they had sticks in their hands and showed them to the bishops,” the pope added. “I do not know if it is history or legend, but the image is valid.”
“The faithful people, the holy faithful people of God” have a soul, a conscience and a way of seeing reality, he said.
All of the cardinals and bishops at the Synod, he said, come from that people and have received the faith from them — usually from their mothers and grandmothers.
“And here I would like to emphasize that, among God’s holy and faithful people, faith is transmitted in dialect, and generally in a feminine dialect,” he said.
“This is not only because the Church is mother and it is precisely women who best reflect her,” he said, but also because “it is women who know how to hope, know how to discover the resources of the church and of the faithful people, who take risks beyond the limit, perhaps with fear but courageously.”
It was the women disciples, after all, who at dawn “approach a tomb with the intuition — not yet hope — that there may be some life,” he said.
“When ministers overstep in their service and mistreat the people of God, they disfigure the face of the church with chauvanistic and dictatorial attitudes,” the pope said.
He reminded Synod members of a speech at the assembly by Sr. Liliana Franco Echeverri, a member of the Company of Mary and president of the Confederation of Latin American and Caribbean Religious, who spoke about the ongoing service, commitment and fidelity of Catholic women despite often facing exclusion, rejection and mistreatment.
“Clericalism is a whip, it is a scourge, it is a form of worldliness that defiles and damages the face of the Lord’s bride,” the church, the pope said. “It enslaves God’s holy and faithful people.”
Pope Francis described as “a scandal” the scene of young priests going in to ecclesiastical tailor shops in Rome “trying on cassocks and hats or albs with lace.”
Nevertheless, he said, “the people of God, the holy faithful people of God, go forward with patience and humility enduring the scorn, mistreatment and marginalization on the part of institutionalized clericalism.”
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© OSV News / Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 2023 – from CNS Vatican bureau, used with permission
Synod assembly calls on everyone to ‘concretely participate’ in synodality
By Justin McLellan, Catholic News Service
[Vatican City – CNS] – The Catholic Church must continue discerning its future by listening to everyone, starting with the poorest and excluded, after the assembly of the Synod of Bishops closes its first session, participants said in a letter addressed to the “People of God.”
The two-and-a-half-page letter published Oct. 25 recounted the spirit and activities of the assembly’s first session, held at the Vatican Oct. 4-29, and looked ahead to the assembly’s second session, expressing hope that the months leading up to October 2024 “will allow everyone to concretely participate in the dynamism of missionary communion indicated by the word ‘synod.'”
“This is not about ideology, but about an experience rooted in the apostolic tradition,” the Synod assembly wrote.
While the letter does not raise specific topics or questions to be addressed in the assembly’s next session — a synthesis report reflecting the work of the first session and next steps is expected to be published Oct. 28 — it did say that to “progress in its discernment, the church absolutely needs to listen to everyone, starting with the poorest.”
“It means listening to those who have been denied the right to speak in society or who feel excluded, even by the Church,” the letter said, specifying the need to listen to victims of racism, particularly Indigenous populations.
“Above all, the Church of our time has the duty to listen, in a spirit of conversion, to those who have been victims of abuse committed by members of the ecclesial body and to commit herself concretely and structurally to ensuring that this does not happen again.”
The letter made special reference to the need for listening to the laity, catechists, children, the elderly, families and those who want to be involved in lay ministries and “participate in discernment and decision-making structures” of the church.
It also specified that the church must gather more experiences and testimonies from priests, bishops and consecrated persons, while being “attentive to all those who do not share her faith but are seeking the truth.”
The drafting of the letter was approved by the Synod assembly and was discussed both during small group working sessions and among the entire assembly Oct. 23, the Synod general secretariat said.
It began by recounting the “unprecedented experience” of men and women participating in discussions and exercising voting rights in a Synod assembly by virtue of their baptism and not based on ordination.
The assembly, it said, took place in a “world in crisis, whose wounds and scandalous inequalities resonated painfully in our hearts, infusing our work with a particular gravity, especially since some of us come from countries where war rages.”
The letter also highlighted the “significant room for silence” made at the Pope Francis’ invitation, meant to “foster mutual listening and a desire for communion in the Spirit among us.”
“Trust,” the Synod assembly wrote, is what “gives us the audacity and inner freedom that we experienced, not hesitating to freely and humbly express our convergences, differences, desires and questions.”
“Day by day, we felt the pressing call to pastoral and missionary conversion,” the assembly said. “For the Church’s vocation is to proclaim the Gospel not by focusing on itself, but by placing itself at the service of the infinite love with which God loved the world.”
The letter also shared that homeless people near St. Peter’s Square were asked about their expectations of the church on the occasion of the synod and they replied: “Love!”
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© OSV News / Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 2023 – from CNS Vatican bureau, used with permission