October 25, 2023 // National

As Synod Winds Down, Members Urged to Sow Patience

Cindy Wooden

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – As members of the assembly of the Synod of Bishops return home, share the results of their work, and prepare for the final synod assembly in 2024, they must be on guard against people who will want to make them take sides as if the synod were a political debate, said Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe.

“The global culture of our time is often polarized, aggressive, and dismissive of other people’s views,” Father Radcliffe, Spiritual Adviser to the synod, told members on Monday, October 23. “When we go home, people will ask, ‘Did you fight for our side? Did you oppose those unenlightened other people?’”

“We shall need to be profoundly prayerful to resist the temptation to succumb to this party-political way of thinking,” he said. “That would be to fall back into the sterile, barren language of much of our society. It is not the synodal way,” which is “organic and ecological rather than competitive.”

Having discussed synodality, communion, mission, and participation throughout the previous three weeks, members of the synodal assembly, including Bishop Rhoades, began the final segment of their work with talks from Father Radcliffe, Benedictine Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini, the other spiritual guide for the synod, and by Father Ormond Rush, a theologian from Australia.

After a day off to give time to the committee writing the synthesis of the assembly’s discussions, participants were scheduled to meet again on Wednesday, October 25, to examine, discuss, and amend the synthesis, and to propose “methods and steps” for continuing the synodal process in preparation for its next assembly in October of 2024.

“We have listened to hundreds of thousands of words during the last three weeks,” Father Radcliffe said. “Most of these have been positive words, words of hope and aspiration. These are the seeds that are sown in the soil of the Church. They will be at work in our lives, in our imagination, and our subconscious during
these months. When the moment is right, they will bear fruit.”

Father Rush told participants that as he listened to discussions throughout the previous three weeks, “I have had the impression that some of you are struggling with the notion of tradition, in the light of your love of truth.”

During the Second Vatican Council, when different approaches to the question of tradition were hotly debated, then-Father Joseph Ratzinger – later Pope Benedict XVI – explained the two approaches as being “a ‘static’ understanding of tradition and a ‘dynamic’ understanding,” Father Rush said.

The static version is “legalistic, propositional, and ahistorical – relevant for all times and places,” he said, while “the latter is personalist,
sacramental, and rooted in history, and therefore to be interpreted with an historical consciousness.”

Father Ratzinger wrote that “not everything that exists in the Church must for that reason be also a legitimate tradition,” but that a practice must be judged by whether it is “a true celebration and keeping present of the mystery of Christ,” Father Rush said.

The Second Vatican Council “urged the Church to be ever attentive to the movements of the revealing and saving God present and active in the flow of history, by attending to ‘the signs of the times’ in the light of the living Gospel,” he said.

As synod members continue their discernment, he said, they are urged “to determine what God is urging us to see – with the eyes of Jesus – in new times,” while also being “attentive to the traps – where we could be being drawn into ways of thinking that are not ‘of God.’”

“These traps,” Father Rush said, “could lie in being anchored exclusively in the past, or exclusively in the present, or not being open to the future fullness of divine truth to which the Spirit of Truth is leading the Church.”

To open the assembly’s final section of work, Father Radcliffe and Mother Angelini chose the parable of the sower and the parable of the mustard seed from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark.

The synodal process, Father Radcliffe told members, “is more like planting a tree than winning a battle.”

And the only way to ensure they continue the sowing rather than join the fighting is to “keep our minds and hearts open to the people whom we have met here” and treasure the hopes and fears they shared.

“Humanity’s first vocation in paradise was to be gardeners,” he said. “Adam tended creation, sharing in speaking God’s creative words, naming the animals. In these 11 months, will we speak fertile, hope-filled words, or words that are destructive and cynical? Will our words nurture the crop or be poisonous? Shall we be gardeners of the future or trapped in old sterile conflicts? We each choose.”