‘Polarisations’ have no place in the Church, Leo tells Synod Jubilee

‘Being a synodal Church means recognising that truth is not possessed but sought together, allowing ourselves to be guided by a restless heart in love with Love,’ the Pope said.

Nobody in the Church “should impose his or her own ideas” on others, Pope Leo said on Sunday, asking that tensions between tradition and novelty not become “ideological contrapositions and harmful polarisations”.

“The supreme rule in the Church is love. No one is called to dominate, all are called to serve,” Leo said in St Peter’s on 26 October.

“Noone should impose his or her own ideas – we must all listen to one another,” he continued. “No one is excluded – we are all called to participate. No one possesses the whole truth – we must all humbly seek it and seek it together.”

The Pope celebrated Mass on the thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time for the closing of the Jubilee of Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies, part of the 2025 Jubilee of Hope.

In a call for communion, Pope Leo addressed all the participants in the synodality meeting and asked for their help to expand “the ecclesial space” and make it “collegial and welcoming”.

“Being a synodal Church means recognising that truth is not possessed but sought together, allowing ourselves to be guided by a restless heart in love with Love,” he emphasised.

The Pope called on Christians to live “with confidence and a new spirit amid the tensions that run through the life of the Church: between unity and diversity, tradition and novelty, authority and participation. We must allow the Spirit to transform them, so that they do not become ideological contrapositions and harmful polarisations.”

It is not a question of resolving these tensions “by reducing one to the other, but of allowing them to be purified by the Spirit, so that they may be harmonised and oriented toward a common discernment”, he said.

He insisted that “prior to any difference, we are called in the Church to walk together in the pursuit of God, clothing ourselves with the sentiments of Christ”.

In his homily on the day’s gospel passage, the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector, Leo warned of the danger of spiritual pride displayed by the pharisee: “The pharisee is obsessed with his own ego, and in this way, ends up focused on himself without having a relationship with either God or others.”

He also criticized “the claim to be better than others, as the pharisee does with the tax collector, [because it] creates division and turns the community into a judgmental and exclusionary place; and when one leverages one’s role to exert power rather than to serve”.

The Pope said the tax collector’s humility was an example for the entire Christian community: “We too must recognise within the Church that we are all in need of God and of one another, which leads us to practice reciprocal love, listen to each other, and enjoy walking together.”

Leo urged Catholics to dream of and build a humbler Church, capable of reflecting the Gospel in its way of living and relating.

“A Church that does not stand upright like the pharisee, triumphant and inflated with pride, but bends down to wash the feet of humanity. A Church that does not judge like the pharisee does the tax collector but becomes a welcoming place for all,” he said.

He also invited the entire ecclesial community to commit itself to building a Church that is “entirely synodal, ministerial, and attracted to Christ”, dedicated to serving the world and open to listening to God and to all the men and women of our time.

After the Mass on 26 October, Pope Leo led the Angelus from a window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St Peter’s Square.

In his accompanying message, he expressed his closeness to the people of eastern Mexico, who were hit earlier this month by devastating floods and landslides, leaving 72 dead and dozens still missing.

“I pray for the families and for all those who are suffering as a result of this calamity, and I entrust the souls of the deceased to the Lord, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin,” the Pope said.

Leo also renewed his call to “unceasingly” pray for peace, especially through the communal recitation of the rosary.

“Contemplating the mysteries of Christ together with the Virgin Mary, we make our own the suffering and hope of children, mothers, fathers, and elderly people who are victims of war,” he said.

“And from this intercession of the heart arise many gestures of evangelical charity, of concrete closeness, of solidarity. To all those who, every day, with confident perseverance carry on this commitment, I repeat: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers!’”

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