Rome Newsroom, Apr 29, 2024 / 15:00 pm (CNA).
The World Meeting of Parish Priests for the Synod opened on Monday to discuss “how to be a synodal local Church in mission,” allowing priests from around the world to discuss questions raised during the ongoing synod and share their personal pastoral experiences.
The four-day meeting, which is taking place from April 29 to May 2 at the Fraterna Domus retreat house in Sacrofano, Italy, just north of Rome, is attended by about 300 priests from around the globe and is divided into several sessions, taking cues from different themes and questions raised in the synod’s synthesis report.
“The parish priest is a man of the people and for the people. Like Jesus, he is open to the crowd, constantly open to the crowd, to help each and every one understand that they are a letter from Christ,” said Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the General Secretariat of the Synod, in opening the event on Monday morning.
Monday’s discussion was based on the theme “The Face of the Synodal Church,” while Tuesday’s discussion will focus on “All Disciples, All Missionaries.” On Wednesday participants will come together to study “Teaching Ties, Building Communities.”
In reflecting on the overall scope of the Synod on Synodality, which will reconvene in October for its second and final assembly, Grech told participants on Monday that at the center of this process is an understanding, and sharing, of personal narratives.
“Our stories are human stories, but human stories in which God, Jesus, is present,” the cardinal remarked.
“Sometimes we need others to help us see God’s presence in our stories. This is our mission, this is the mission entrusted to us, to you, my dear brothers,” he said.
Grech told the clergy gathered that “being synodal does not simply mean walking together, but rather walking with God, or better to say, God walking with us.”
“Synodality is about God, before being about the Church,” he continued.
The World Meeting of Parish Priests for the Synod was first announced in February and is jointly organized by the Dicastery for the Clergy and by the General Secretariat of the Synod in response to the first synod assembly’s synthesis report, which identified a need to “develop ways for a more active involvement of deacons, priests, and bishops in the synodal process during the coming year.”
“There is no synod without a bishop, but allow me to say today there is no synod without a parish priest,” Grech said to participants on Monday. “That is the reason why we felt the need to make this meeting, and so that we can enrich our preparation in view of the next session for the synod of bishops.”
This week’s meeting will culminate with an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Thursday, followed by Mass, celebrated by Grech, in St. Peter’s Basilica.
According to Bishop Luis Marín de San Martín, undersecretary of the General Secretariat of the Synod, another purpose of the meeting is to “provide materials that will be used in the drafting of the Instrumentum Laboris [working document] for the synod’s second session, together with the summaries of the consultation coordinated by the bishops’ conferences and the results of the theological-canonical study carried out by five working groups formed by the General Secretariat of the Synod.”
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Be with us O Mary along the way – Guide every step we take.
From the back bleachers, we’re encouraged to read that ““Synodality is about God, before being about the Church” or “simply walking together.” Five comments:
FIRST, it was with insight like this clearly in mind, at the very beginning of the Second Vatican Council, that Fr. Ratzinger prepared Cardinal Frings to deliver the opening paper on the nature of Revelation (Dei Verbum) which–rather than only citing earlier Church documents–focused directly on the historical event of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Triune God. This was the beginning of the so-call “revolution” which the later Benedict XVI correctly insists was not a paradigm-shift revolution…
SECOND, we have the solid anchoring of Dei Verbum, and of Lumen Gentium which clarifies the “hierarchical communion” of the Church (with subtle ambiguities clarified further in the Prefatory/Explanatory Note integrated into Chapter 3). Even the more controversial Gaudium et Spes begin with both “The joys and hopes [and!] the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age…” Today, more so than in the upbeat early 1960s, very much on the mark. And, as for the disrespected Sacrosanctum Concilium (the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), yours truly has a possibly “synodal” intuition…
THIRD, what if the Latin Church elevated the overly-domesticated rite/form of the Mass by incorporating more from the Byzantine and eastern rites? As with the Tridentine extraordinary form, the Mass surely as a continuation of the one and singular Sacrifice on Calvary (more than a memorial Last Supper), but also more of an accent on the Transfiguration and the Resurrection? What a bridge this could be toward the culturally akin and recently alienated Orthodox Churches! Pope John Paul II’s Church “breathing with both lungs”! But, recently upended by Fiducia Supplicans…
FOURTH, at the World Meeting with Parish Priests, in addition to ecclesiology, how much sober discussion will there be on ground-level moral clarity–attentive to the “special case” of all Africa, and Hungary, Poland, Kazakhstan, and Peru, and parts of France, Spain and Argentina and other national bishops’ conferences–and of course considering all of the dissenting (that is, morally affirming) Orthodox Churches themselves?
FIFTH, so YES!, a clear recognition of foot-soldier parish priests as respected extensions of the bishops within the Apostolic Succession. But also—and with Vatican II as an enduring dimension even deeper than any broadened “fraternal collegiality.” The remarks from Cardinal Grech do give cause for optimism for priests–and possibly for bishops synodally recast too much as “facilitators” for an inverted-pyramid Church.
Alluringly picture painting a God dissimilar from the Church. Enticing bishops and priests to the wonder of walking together, God leading the way out of the new land of Ham. Where to?
Lost in translation [to use Sofia Coppola’s movie title not quite beaten to death yet] is walking away from, clever these modernists, but the Church is Christ. Cardinal Grech wasn’t chosen because he’s from Gozo. Nor that he’s the subject of a popular pun that rhymes with Gozo. Rather that His Holiness knows a good pitchman when he sees one.