“Talking about synodality is good, but not enough,” Sr Nathalie Becquart, under-secretary of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, has warned.
Addressing a webinar hosted by Family Solidarity in Ireland on the theme, “Family and Synodality: a call for participation”, Sr Nathalie said synodality is learned by doing it. “You need to have an experience of synodality to really understand it. It is about an experience of discernment in common.”
The French Xavières Sister is the first woman given the right to vote in a synod of bishops, which has traditionally been reserved to men only.
She stressed that the challenge is to put synodality into practice at all levels of the Church from the family to the parish, and not only to talk about it. The experience of common discernment within families was, she said, important to understanding and experiencing the essence of synodality, of listening to each other as well as discerning and journeying together.
In her address, Sr Becquart suggested that networks such as the European Federation of Catholic Families Organisations, which Family Solidarity is part of, should discuss how communion is experienced within families, as domestic churches, and how families contribute to the building up of the communion of the Church.
“I hope that you and your network will have an experience of synodality that is alive, an experience the life of the Spirit when we gather together, pray together, and listen to the Word of God. It is not just about filling out a survey.”
Rather, she said, synodality expresses the nature of the Church rooted in the mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of communion. The first place this mystery of the Trinity as communion is lived is in the family.
Sr Becquart, who played an important role in the synod on young people, said the synod was a call to listen all the faithful and to look at the Church through the lens of Pope Francis’ image of a reversing of the pyramidal model.
This journeying together tends to be “more horizontal than vertical. It does not suppress the differences” but instead of putting everybody into a hierarchical model they are called to journey and participate together as brothers and sisters in Christ, she explained.
Separately, Bishop Donal McKeown of Derry has said there is no synodal way forward without a rediscovery of a community journey which does not pit clergy against laity or highlight good insiders and bad outsiders.
“If we start with the assumption that this will be a battle of the good us against bad others, we risk prioritising our partisan issues rather than God's mysterious way forward,” he said.
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