No Synod news from bishops

Lay Catholics in England and Wales frequently complain they “never hear anything” about the Synod on Synodality from their priests or bishops, reported a Catholic historian.

Dr Austen Ivereigh who attended the Synod, said he had delivered many talks about it over the past two years in parishes and dioceses. “I get a lot of thanks for explaining in The Tablet what has been happening.”  People were “not just complaining about a lack of communication, ” he said. “They are looking for direction, for a narrative.”

While delivering the annual Tablet lecture last week, to mark its one-hundred-and-eighty-fifth anniversary, Dr Ivereigh said: “The synod’s Final Document was approved last October, becoming part of papal teaching. So far the bishops of England and Wales have said nothing as a body, not even when in March the synod secretariat announced a three-year synod implementation journey for the whole Church.” 

However, he added that the English bishops had synodality on their agenda for their plenary meeting this week in Leeds. Ivereigh urged the bishops to look to three Spanish dioceses – Pamplona, Bilbao, and San Sebastián in north Spain. “The demographic profile is very similar to ours,” he said, referring to a joint letter on renewal co-written by all three dioceses, “The Patient Contrast: Rethinking the Church’s relationship to the world.” 

“It discerns and responds with a call for renewal. And it urges three main resources for that rethink: the Word of God, the experience of the first Christians, and the magisterium of Francis — above all synodality,” said Ivereigh, a biographer of Pope Francis.

He described the document as “an Aparecida for Europe”, referring to the landmark meeting of the Latin American episcopate in Aparecida, Brazil in 2007 on the future direction of the Church. This shaped Francis’s vision of the Church and the Synod on Synodality. 

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