Vatican City, Oct 27, 2024 / 08:55 am (CNA).
Pope Francis closed the global Synod on Synodality’s final assembly on Sunday with a call for a Church that “hears the cry of the world” without being “blind” to the urgent issues facing our time.
At the synod’s closing Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis said that a synodal Church must be “on the move” following Christ in serving those in need.
“We do not need a sedentary and defeatist Church but a Church that hears the cry of the world … and gets its hands dirty in serving the Lord,” the pope said in his homily on Oct. 27.
Pope Francis underlined that the Church cannot remain inert before “the questions raised by the women and men of today, the challenges of our time, the urgency of evangelization, and the many wounds that afflict humanity.”
“Brothers and sisters, not a sedentary Church, but a Church on her feet. Not a silent Church, but a Church that embraces the cry of humanity. Not a blind Church, but a Church, enlightened by Christ, that brings the light of the Gospel to others. Not a static Church, but a missionary Church that walks with her Lord through the streets of the world,” he said.
The Mass marked the conclusion of the second assembly of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which began on Oct. 2 and focused on the theme “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission.”
The assembly represented a significant phase in the Church’s global synodal process, initiated three years ago. Over the last month, synod delegates produced a 52-page final document outlining recommendations for Church renewal, including proposals for expanded women’s leadership roles, greater lay participation in decision-making, and significant structural reforms.
In a notable departure from tradition, Pope Francis announced that he will forgo issuing a postsynodal apostolic exhortation. Instead, he opted to ratify the synod’s final document, directly implementing the assembly’s conclusions. While the synod assembly has ended, 10 synod study groups will continue to examine the question of women deacons and other key topics through June 2025.
In his homily, Pope Francis reflected on the Gospel of Mark’s account of Jesus healing a blind man named Bartimaeus. He said that “blind Bartimaeus … represents that inner blindness which restrains us, keeps us stuck in one place, holds us back from the dynamism of life, and destroys our hope.”
“So many things along the way can make us blind, incapable of perceiving the presence of the Lord, unprepared to face the challenges of reality, sometimes unable to offer adequate responses to the questions of so many who cry out to us,” the pope said.
“A sedentary Church, that inadvertently withdraws from life and confines itself to the margins of reality, is a Church that risks remaining blind and becoming comfortable with its own unease,” he said. “If we remain stuck in our blindness, we will continuously fail to grasp the urgency of giving a pastoral response to the many problems of our world.”
Pope Francis, dressed in green vestments for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, delivered his homily slowly, often pausing to speak off the cuff. He described an image of a “synodal Church” as one in which “the Lord is calling us, lifting us up when we are seated or fallen down, restoring our sight so that we can perceive the anxieties and sufferings of the world in the light of the Gospel.”
“Let us remember never to walk alone or according to worldly criteria,” he added, but instead to journey by “following Jesus along the road.”
At the altar, Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary-general of the General Secretariat of the Synod, served as the principal celebrant.
More than 300 priests and bishops, 70 cardinals, and nine patriarchs concelebrated the synod’s closing Mass under the canopy of the recently restored baldacchino over the central altar.
The 400-year-old intricate bronze canopy designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini was revealed at the Mass for the first time since restoration, its twisted columns gleaming with intricately decorated Baroque angels, cherubs, bees, and golden laurel branches.
“As we admire Bernini’s majestic baldacchino, more sublime than ever, we can rediscover that it frames the true focal point of the entire basilica, namely the glory of the Holy Spirit,” the pope said. “This is the synodal Church: a community whose primacy lies in the gift of the Spirit, who makes us all brothers and sisters in Christ and raises us up to him.”
As the Mass concluded, Pope Francis, from his wheelchair, led the faithful in the veneration of a relic of St. Peter’s chair — a wooden throne symbolizing the papal primacy. This relic is expected to remain on display in St. Peter’s Basilica for public veneration until Dec. 8.
“Today, as we give thanks to the Lord for the journey we have made together, we will be able to see and venerate the relic of the carefully restored ancient chair of St. Peter,” Pope Francis said. “As we contemplate it with the wonder of faith, let us remember that this is the chair of love, the chair of unity, and the chair of mercy.”
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What is the cry of the world? Perhaps we can have some sense of what His Holiness means by interpreting the facial expressions of three American cardinals that can be identified sitting in line below him as he speaks in the featured first image above.
Cdls Cupich and Gregory appear tired, almost dismayed as if thinking, Your Holiness, we know that you know that we know you’re floating the same old generalities that … Zzzzzz. Whereas Cdl O’Malley seems wide awake, pensively disgruntled. Perhaps thinking We’ve been through this long, time consuming process with little to show when you should know that becoming worldly to save the world doesn’t work. Please! Let’s get back to the basics and the Gospels of Christ. There are no new revelations in this journey to nowhere.
[O’Malley’s thoughts continue] Yes, you say “If we remain stuck in our blindness, we will continuously fail to grasp the urgency of giving a pastoral response to the many problems of our world. The Lord is calling us through the Synodal Church. A Church, enlightened by Christ, that brings the light of the Gospel to others”. [O’Malley] If we turn to Christ and the Gospels, calling for repentance for the forgiveness of sins you say we’re throwing stones at them. Please. Basta!
Apart from the gratuitous hyperbole or worse about a “blind, silent, sedentary, defeatist, and inert” Church, after the dust has settled in perhaps another half century, perhaps history will welcome a viable WORLDWIDE COMMUNITY on this planet…offering an alternative to the post-Christian statist fusion of flat-earth politics and flat-earth economics—in both its post-World War II Western alliance and a likely BRICS manifestation (BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa aligned against what’s left of Western non-autocratic liberalism). A worldwide community also alternative to globe-spanning and fideistic Islam.
And, which might actually retain some leavening role in (not of) the world, if the Church doesn’t continue to cave to infested centrifugal forces within itself. As the female (!) Catholic novelist FLANNERY O’CONNOR remarked of the sacramental Eucharist, “if it isn’t the Real Presence, then the hell with it.” Likewise, if the Eucharistic Church is desacralized and decentralized into a horizontal/polyhedral Synodal-ism, without an institutional center, then the hell with it.
How will the blank-check Final Report now be coherently conformed to the last-minute and inserted REALITY CHECK?
Namely, that in “a synodal Church, the authority of the Bishop, of the Episcopal College and of the Bishop of Rome in regard to decision-taking is inviolable”? “Decision-making” but also in regard to distinct “moral judgments” under the natural law and irreducible moral absolutes, about which, “the Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this norm” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 95).
Ideas, a concerned posture will not suffice. We are commissioned to apprehend beyond the cry of the world to the inner source of its travail and madness. Beaulieu correctly identifies the raw revelatory faith by which we seek the reality of Christ in the Eucharistic mystery.
A singular theme stands out amid the tumult of ideas, needless to say intelligent, faith endowed reason is always efficacious, although beyond our reasoning is the flame that Christ speaks of in the Gospel, “I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49). It’s this divine fire of love that motivates the saints and martyrs. Martyrs, the ultimate witnesses of the all consuming fire Moses spoke of, a fire that kindles deep love, the offer of oneself as a fragrant oblation for the sins of men, for the grace needed for conversion of souls.
John Paul II assumed that martyr sensibility after his attempted assassination. His life became one of heroic suffering as his body, handsome features changed dramatically. Now stricken and humbled he became more appealing to the human heart than before. Now quiet, contemplative in posture.
The young men presently entering the priesthood, men with convictions of the revealed truths handed to us by the Apostles, today we celebrate the Apostles Simon and Jude, Jude who asked Jesus at the Last Supper why he had not revealed himself to the entire world, a question Jude would himself answer by his martyrdom, are the lasting fruit of his, and that of John Paul’s timely legacy of what John of the Cross called the living flame of love.
Sentiment raises a long debated at times heated issue [highlighted in my thesis defense by philosophers at the Angelicum who were really logicians], whether apprehension of the good and beautiful is sentiment or rational. If we introspect deeply, we realize it’s both. It’s the realization of the intellect, an apprehension that has its basis in an overflow of appeal from the heart. A sentiment that is intellectual in nature.
That explains why apprehension of the good is not the result, or product of reason. Rather it’s an intuitive apprehension stemming from introspective knowledge of man’s natural law within, or from the gift of the grace of God that exceeds anything found in Man’s nature. As such it becomes the rule for reason, reason, the measure in scrutinizing its compliance with our universal knowledge of principles of the good.
Jesus Christ spent his life serving humanity. “He who thinks of the suffering humanity, will not think of himself. Where has he the time?” – Mahatma Gandhi