Synod in practice

The Synod process is being played out now, live, in a parish near you. I’m sure different parishes are doing it differently, but here is what has been happening in this parish, which I hope will remain unidentifiable though I suspect typical.

Our parish has just had the meetings which will be digested, written up and submitted to the archdiocese. As the chairman of the meetings was at pains to stress, everyone is also able to send a personal response to the Synod questions, as extensively as they might wish, so this is only part of the parish’s feedback. Obviously I don’t know anything about those personal submissions, and I haven’t even decided whether to write one myself; but I thought it would be interesting to describe the process thus far: the view from the pew, as you might say.

It was very slow-starting. I described in a previous blog how I found out about the Synod only via The Tablet. The parish had cards with the Synod prayer, from some time in December, which it didn’t start using until January (and then unaccountably dropped for a couple of weeks). We also had the Synod Prayer printed in the weekly newsletter; there was a one-line appeal for volunteers, with no explanation as to what for, but that was basically it, until nearly the end of January. 

Then suddenly the Synod itself appeared as a topic in the newsletter, and was mentioned in the notices. We were going to have some meetings, in the last week of January, at which we would discuss the Synod Questions, and then our delegates (we still did not know who these were) would report back to the Archdiocese, the whole process to last until 18 February. It sounded like a very tight timeframe to me, but presumably those in charge reckoned there was no point in doing anything before Christmas was over. Certainly that was what Father said, when we asked if he’d had enough volunteers.

I was extremely interested in how the process would be organised. I had not volunteered to be a parish delegate, because we had been living abroad for several years before coming home and going almost straight into lockdown. Covid changed parish life anyway, and I did not feel that I had enough grasp of how the parish operated in normal years to be able to speak for it. Our experience as readers and a catechist dated too far back (we’ve been part of this parish for twenty-six years, but we’d been living away for the last fifteen of them). 

I thought we were going to have a series of meetings where we could develop a discussion, but I was wrong. Instead, there were four meetings planned, plus a Zoom, but all happening in the same week (except the Zoom), two in the mornings after Mass and two in the evenings. The plan was to give everyone in the parish a chance to come to a meeting and give their views (and Father said in the notices that of course people were welcome at more than one if they wished). My husband and I checked our diaries and discovered that we could manage one of the evening ones more easily than any of the others.

But I am nosy, and very interested in the subject, so I was delighted to find that the parish was also planning to livestream the meetings. Something went wrong with the recording of one of them, and there is no footage of it on the parish website, but I managed to listen to two of the face-to-face ones that I did not attend, as well as the Zoom, and of course the one where we turned up and had a chance to speak. So I watched two of the five meetings, and took part in one face-to-face meeting, and the Zoom. Quite a few people went to or participated in more than one meeting, just from the overlap between who was at my face-to-face and who was at the Zoom.

It has been a fascinating process to watch and take part in. This is partly due to the sterling efforts of the chairman of the meetings, who will also be one of the delegates. He radiated calm, consideration and a genuine desire to get everyone to say what they desired. He used the suggested questions to steer the discussion, but without a slavish following of their rather diffuse terminology. I thought the questions were too many and too vague, so I approved. Lay Catholics aren’t used to being asked in church what they think about anything. Most people had one or two things they wanted to say or to hear said, so taking the general areas of discussion from the Synod papers worked efficiently enough.

The first meeting (one which I watched as a recording after the live stream) filled in a lot of the information which I felt had been lacking up to this point. We were introduced to the delegates; I had heard on the grapevine that there were to be two, and they were both men, but I was delighted to see that a female friend of mine had managed to join the group. I would like to commend her as well as the chairman, because she too was at every meeting. I was so glad to see her there; I would have felt unsurprised but full of regret if there had not been a female presence. Not because she said or did anything extraordinary, but for too long the public face of the Church has been exclusively male (and consequently unbalanced).

The meetings were live-streamed in the church itself, where the cameras cover only the raised area around the altar and lectern. This meant that it was possible to see the people at the table on the dais (just in front of the altar), but not the congregation or audience, and we had a roving microphone for contributions, which meant that the pace of dialogue was quite stately, but always courteous. The limited sight lines meant that I don’t know how many people were there at any meeting I watched online, but from the level of noise and participation, I believe that the one I attended was typical. There were probably slightly more people at the two daytime meetings, because the daytime Mass has more people who come to it than the evening Mass, especially at this time of year, but I can’t be sure. I think the usual attendance was up to twenty people in the pews, but not more than that.

The meetings lasted for about an hour and three quarters, and everyone who wanted to speak had a chance to do so. (This was the chairman’s stated aim, and he was quietly very assiduous and successful in this.) He also made sure that the discussion didn’t get bogged down, that no one rode a hobbyhorse for too long, and that we kept moving through the three main topics (Communion, Participation, and Mission).

I was interested to see that some people really did not want to speak, only to listen to everyone else. To my surprise, there were more men than women (even not counting the table people) at our evening meeting; I think from the voices there might have been more women at one of the day meetings (the other one was the meeting I can’t find a recording of).

There were almost no younger (say under twentyfive) people at any meeting as far as I could tell, and I was really surprised to see that there was only one married couple as well as us at the meeting we attended, and two at the Zoom (though I know some of the participants are married).

Several voices were familiar, and obviously at the meeting we attended, several faces too, but our parish, like many others, has different congregations for each Mass on a Sunday (we are a big parish, with four Sunday Masses), and we tend to know only the ones who go to ‘our’ Mass. This was specifically mentioned as a negative by one of the participants, and we all nodded sagely; it made us think that possibly this was something that we might usefully try to mitigate, by having more ‘whole parish’ initiatives. I couldn’t persuade any of the children to come with us, but they were interested enough for me to get them to read this.

This is supposed to be a listening project, as much as one where we give our views, and it was striking how carefully and politely people listened. Our delegates will do a good job of sifting what they heard, but I’m sorry to read in this week’s newsletter that they will be doing it in a slightly wider group which has six men and only one woman. There were, of course, those who wanted to use the opportunity to tell everyone else that they were doing it wrong, but the main contributions, more usefully, were about what ‘it’ might be.

We had converts and cradle Catholics, those who had lapsed and come back again, but sadly we didn’t have any currently lapsed people, because they are the ones we can’t reach, although we need to. Nearly all of us have family members who have lapsed, though, and perhaps this is an opportunity to make careful and sensitive requests for information. Sexual abuse was raised, but the real wound seems to be the way the Church has handled it, which is not surprising and goes to the root of clericalism.

What was impressive was how thoughtful the process was. We could immediately draw some conclusions from it on a single-parish basis: many of us felt that such a forum for discussion was something we could usefully have more often. The atmosphere was completely different from Parish Council meetings, much more open and engaging. Because it was a new initiative, it did not have to fit the usual pattern for parish consultation. This was important: there was room for a new approach, and it was not simply handed over to one of the tight group which usually organises things in the parish (and makes sure nothing gets shaken up unnecessarily). And there was a real desire to keep people informed about the process and its results, which is actually quite unusual in our parish, where an awful lot just happens behind the scenes, because that is the way it always has.

We found it interesting, and something that we would be more than open to doing again. We put names to some of the faces we have known for years (hurrah!), and as far as I can tell, those who attended felt that it was a useful exercise in itself. Of course, there is nothing stopping us from doing something similar just within the parish, but it helps to have an outside stimulus, especially to avoid triggering clerical defensiveness, which can be a problem. But if it is our Church, if we are the Church, as we claim to be, we need to have this sort of discussion, both at parish level and further up. I hope and pray that the ‘further up’ discussions will be as heartfelt as ours were; I hope the authorities in the Church will allow them to bear fruit. 

The process continues, and our delegates are drawing up their submission. That is why so far I have not talked about what people actually said, because the delegates have had access to, and a written record of, all the meetings. They are planning to publish it to the parish as soon as it is finished, and I shall be very interested to read it. So far I have not felt that the authorities are especially engaged with the synodal process, but I have been very impressed by the way my fellow parishioners are working on it and through it. There is a real sense that we have been asked to do this, and we are doing it as well as we can.