[Vatican City] – After members of the Synod of Bishops approved their final document, Pope Francis announced that he would not write the customary post-synodal apostolic exhortation but would offer the final document to the entire church to implement.

“There are already highly concrete indications in the document that can be a guide for the mission of the churches in the different continents and contexts,” he told Synod members late Oct. 26.

“For that reason, I do not intend to publish an apostolic exhortation. What we have approved is enough,” he said. Instead, he ordered the publication of the Synod’s final document.

With the exceptions of the first synods convoked by St. Paul VI in 1967 and 1971, all ordinary assemblies of the Synod of Bishops have been followed by an exhortation on the Synod’s themes and discussions by the pope.

Members of the Synod on Synodality, after meeting for a month in 2023 and again from Oct. 2-26, approved their final document by voting on each of the 155 paragraphs. All paragraphs passed with the approval of more than two-thirds of the members present and voting.

Pope Francis Greeting at the Conclusion of the Synod of Bishops – LINK

The document (currently only available in Italian) presented synodality as a style of Christian life and ministry based on the “equal dignity of all the baptized” and a recognition that they all have something to offer to the mission of proclaiming salvation in Christ.

The practical suggestions included making pastoral councils mandatory for every parish and ensuring the bodies are truly representative of the parish members, recognizing the contributions of women to the life and ministry of the church and hiring more women and laymen to teach in seminaries.

The 10 study groups the pope set up in the spring to research some of the more complicated issues raised by the Synod — women’s ministry, seminary education, relations between bishops and religious communities, the role of nuncios — will continue to work before offering him proposals, the pope said. “Time is needed, to arrive at choices that involve the whole Church.”

However, he promised that “this is not the classical way of postponing decisions indefinitely.”

Instead, he told Synod members, it “corresponds to the synodal style with which even the Petrine ministry is to be exercised: listening, convening, discerning, deciding and evaluating. And in these steps, pauses, silences, prayer are necessary. It is a style that we are learning together, little by little.”

Much of the 2021-2023 process for the Synod on Synodality, the pope said, involved listening sessions on a parish, diocesan, national and continental level and included helping Synod members themselves learn to listen to each other respectfully and listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit in those conversations.

The final document “is a triple gift,” he said, one given to him first of all. “The bishop of Rome, I often remind myself, needs to practice listening and wants to practice listening so as to respond each day to the words of the Lord, ‘Confirm your brothers and sisters in the faith. Feed my sheep.'”

The task of the pope, he said, “is to safeguard and promote — as St. Basil teaches us — the harmony that the Spirit continues to spread in God’s church, in relations among the churches, despite all the struggles, tensions and divisions that mark its journey toward the full manifestation of the Kingdom of God, which the vision of the Prophet Isaiah invites us to imagine as a banquet prepared by God for all peoples — all, with the hope that no one is missing.”

Pope Francis repeated the phrase that has become a refrain since he first said it at World Youth Day in Portugal in 2023: “Everyone, everyone, everyone! No one excluded, everyone.”

Harmony is the goal, he said, not uniformity. It is a sign of the Holy Spirit, just as it was on Pentecost when people of different nations heard the disciples proclaiming the wondrous works of God in their own languages.

The church, the pope said, “a sign and instrument of how God has already set the table and is waiting. His grace, through the Spirit, whispers words of love into the heart of each person. It is given to us to amplify the voice of this whisper, without hindering it; to open doors, without erecting walls.”

“How bad it is when women and men of the church erect walls,” he said. The Gospel is for “everyone, everyone, everyone! We must not behave as if we were dispensers of grace who appropriate the treasure and tie the hands of the merciful God.”

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Synod calls for quick steps to involve more people in church life

By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service

“Without concrete changes in the short term, the vision of a synodal Church will not be credible and this will alienate those members of the People of God who have drawn strength and hope from the synodal journey,” the members said in the final document they approved Oct. 26.

Pope Francis convoked the Synod in 2021 and called on parishes, dioceses and bishops’ conferences to hold listening sessions before the first Synod assembly in Rome in 2023. The current assembly, including most of the same members, began with a Mass at the Vatican Oct. 2.

Members voted on each of the 155 paragraphs of the document, which made suggestions and requests to Pope Francis that included long-term projects, such as continuing discernment about the possibility of women deacons, the need to reform seminary training and the hope that more lay people would be involved in the selection of bishops.

But they also included actions that could and should be implemented immediately, including hiring more women and laymen to teach in seminaries or having bishops make pastoral councils mandatory for every parish and pastors ensuring those bodies are truly representative of the parish members and that he listens to their advice.

Synod officials said all the paragraphs were approved by the necessary two-thirds of Synod members present and voting; 355 members were present and voting, so passage required 237 votes. A paragraph devoted to increasing women’s profile in the church received, by far, the most negative votes of any paragraph with 97 members voting no and 258 voting yes. The paragraph, which required 66% of the votes, passed with 72%.

“In simple and concise terms,” members said, “synodality is a path of spiritual renewal and structural reform that enables the Church to be more participatory and missionary, so that it can walk with every man and woman, radiating the light of Christ.”

In a synodal church, the document said, members have different roles, but they work together for the good of all members and for the mission of the church.

Like the synthesis report from the first assembly of the Synod in 2023, the final document did not use the term “LGBTQ” or even “homosexuality” and spoke only briefly about the need to reach out to people who “experience the pain of feeling excluded or judged because of their marital situation, identity or sexuality.”

The document repeatedly referred to the “equal dignity” of men and women by virtue of their baptism and insisted the Catholic Church needed to do more to recognize women’s contributions to the life and mission of the church and their potential to offer more.

“Women continue to encounter obstacles in obtaining a fuller recognition of their charisms, vocation and roles in all the various areas of the Church’s life,” it said. “This is to the detriment of serving the Church’s shared mission.”

Members of the Synod called for the “full implementation of all the opportunities already provided for in Canon Law with regard to the role of women,” and said, “there is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the Church. What comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped.”

“Additionally, the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open,” they said. “This discernment needs to continue.”

The question of women deacons was among several questions Pope Francis assigned to study groups last spring. Synod members asked the General Secretariat of the Synod “to continue to watch over the synodal quality of the working method of the study groups,” which are supposed to report to the pope in June.

The Synod process, members said, was a “call to joy and renewal of the Church in following the Lord, in committing to service of His mission and in searching for ways to be faithful.”

But the document repeatedly acknowledged the crime and sin of clerical sexual abuse and abuse of power, and insisted that a commitment to synodality, particularly to learning to listen and to necessary forms of transparency and accountability, were essential to preventing abuse.

Synodality, members said, “will also help to overcome clericalism, understood as use of power to one’s own advantage and the distortion of the authority of the Church which is at the service of the People of God. This expresses itself above all in forms of abuse, be they sexual or economic, the abuse of conscience and of power, by ministers of the Church.”

Lay men and women have many talents that can and should assist bishops and parish priests in the smooth functioning of their dioceses or parishes, Synod members said. Tapping into those talents can help bishops and priests, who often feel overworked.

Where church law requires the bishops to consult their priests’ or pastoral council or pastors to consult the parish council, the document said, they “may not act as if the consultation had not taken place.”

“As in any community that lives according to justice,” it said, “the exercise of authority does not consist in an arbitrary imposition of will.”

Synod members also said listening, consulting, praying and discerning before making a decision is not the end of the process. “It must be accompanied and followed by practices of accountability and evaluation in a spirit of transparency inspired by evangelical criteria.”

Ensuring accountability and regularly evaluating all those who minister in the church’s name “is not a bureaucratic task for its own sake. It is rather a communication effort that proves to be a powerful educational tool for bringing about a change in culture,” Synod members said.

One issue that prompted debate during the Synod involved the authority of national bishops’ conference, particularly when it came to doctrinal matters.

The Synod members, in the final document, called for a study of the theological and juridical status of bishops’ conferences and for a clear definition of “precisely the domain of the doctrinal and disciplinary competence” of the conferences.

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© OSV News / Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 2024 – from CNS Vatican bureau, used with permission.

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