Pope Francis addressed a message to participants at the ecclesial assembly that opened on Sunday in Mexico City bringing together representatives of the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Pope encouraged them to start by listening to the “voice of the people” in their discernment and to be courageous in their openness to “new horizons”.
They should be “abundantly creative” in their renewed missionary outreach, he said.
The week-long meeting was a response to the synodal path recently initiated by the Pope and gathered together more than 1,000 participants in Mexico City and online.
Francis referred to the three key words in preparation for the 2023 Synod – “communion”, “participation” and “mission” – while offering two others: “listening” and “overflow”.
In 2007 in Aparecida, Brazil, where the future pope was also present, the protagonists were the Latin American bishops.
The Pope recalled that back then they were called “to be missionary disciples” and to “encourage hope”, leading “to the horizon of the Guadalupe Jubilee in 2031 and the Jubilee of the Redemption in 2033”. He noted that before those still distant celebrations, the synod will take place with the aim of changing certain structures, giving new space and importance to the voice of all the baptised, unlike the 2007 meeting that involved only bishops.
The ecclesial assembly in Mexico City marked a first reflection of this new process, and Pope Francis invited participants to focus their work especially on the dynamic of “listening”, a process that also included “dialogue and discernment”.
Facilitating “mutual exchange”, the process involved “listening to the voice of God to the point of hearing the cry of the people” and “listening to the people to the point of sharing with them where God is calling us”, especially “when the cry comes from the forgotten”.
The second word the Pope highlighted was “overflow” or abundance. He prayed that “your assembly be an expression of the ‘overflow’ of the creative love of the spirit, who urges us to encounter others without fear, and who encourages the Church to become ever more evangelising and missionary through a process of pastoral conversion”.
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