October 27: The Shelter After Words
“At the end of all these works was rest,” Mary Gordon writes in The Company of Women, a novel steeped in the Catholic culture of the post–Vatican II era, “the truth that made a place of perfect quiet. God was the silence made by poetry; the shelter after words but made by words.”
After three years of words—preparatory, local, and continental documents; Instrumentum Labori and interventions from the Synod floor—the 16th Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops officially concluded this morning with a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica.
In his homily, Pope Francis reflected on the gospel reading from Mark 10:46-52, the healing of the blind Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus was initially sitting by the roadside, Francis said, “caught up in his own grief.” He “represents that inner blindness which restrains us, keeps us stuck in one place, holds us back from the dynamism of life, and destroys our hope.”
Francis used the figure of Bartimaeus, who calls out to Jesus for the restoration of his sight and ends by following him “on the way,” as an image for the church.
“If we are truly to live, we cannot remain seated,” he said. “A sedentary church that inadvertently withdraws from life and confines itself to the margins of reality is a church that risks remaining blind.”
“It’s good if the Synod is urging us as a church to be like Bartimaeus, a community of disciples who, hearing that the Lord is passing by, feel the joy of salvation,” he continued.
Francis likened the moment where Bartimaeus rises to follow the Lord to the mission of the synodal church: “The Lord is calling us, lifting us up when we are seated or falling down, restoring our sight so we can perceive anew in the way of the gospel the anxieties and sufferings of the world,” he said.
“We cannot remain inert before the questions raised by the women and men of today,” he added.
Calling for “a church that gets its hands dirty in serving,” not a “seated church” but “a church on its feet,” he recognized “the urgency of giving a pastoral response” to the many problems of the world.
“This is the synodal church,” he concluded, “a community whose primacy lies in the gift of the Spirit and makes us all brothers and sisters in Christ.”
The Mass was preceded yesterday by the concluding assembly of the Synod and the official release of the final document.
In a brief address to the assembly, His Beatitude Ibrahim Isaac Sedrak, Patriarch of Alexandria of the Copts and Head of the Synod of the Coptic Catholic Church, described the “synodal event” as “a prophetic word for us, for the church, and for the world.”
The patriarch offered a prayer which included petitions for “each person [to] discover his or her place in communion and fraternal love” and the courage to take “concrete steps to build together the church of the Risen Christ.”
Francis presented the final document as “a gift to all the people of God by the variety of its expressions.” He confirmed that he does not intend to publish an apostolic exhortation, a papal document that typically follows a Synod to collate, evaluate, and deepen the fruits of its proceedings, explaining, “There are already highly concrete indications in the document that can be a guide for the mission of the churches.”
His decision to make the document immediately available worldwide drew a round of applause from the Synod hall. “I hand [the document] over to the people of God,” he said.
Francis also alluded to the 10 study groups convened to examine issues pertinent to the synodal church. The decision to remove some of these issues from discussion at the Synod and relegate them to the study groups has caused some contention, particularly around the issue of women’s ministry.
Francis said that more time is needed to arrive at decisions with the study groups and affirmed, “I will continue to listen to the bishops and to the churches entrusted to them.” This process is not to postpone decisions, he said, but because it is the “way that corresponds to the synodal style with which even the Petrine ministry is to be exercised.”
He urged those gathered to go forth and disseminate the tenets of the synodal church, which “now needs its shared words to be accompanied by actions.”
“We should not only dream of peace, but also commit ourselves with all our strength so that perhaps without talking so much about synodality, peace will be realized through the processes of listening, dialogue, and reconciliation,” he said.
On Thursday, Francis issued Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us”), an encyclical on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ. The release of the encyclical so close to that of the Synod’s final document prompts a reading of the two in dialogue. We’ll take this up in the days to come—in the meantime, readers are referred to Christopher White’s summary of the final document in the National Catholic Reporter and V. J. Tarantino’s theologically rich reflection on Dilexit Nos at Questions, Disputed and Otherwise. ♦
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic
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