Lenten Synodal Practice

At the conclusion of the Synod in October 2024, Pope Francis chose to make the Final Document part of the church’s magisterium. This presented a unique opportunity: a document “cowritten” by the people of God had taken on teaching authority. If we could collaborate from the ground up to produce a blueprint for the synodal church, could we do the same to further its implementation?

This was the question that guided the “Lenten Synodal Practice” convened and coordinated by Today’s American Catholic in March and April 2025. Over five separate sessions, each devoted to one part of the Final Document, participants gathered online to reflect on where the synodal process was leading them individually and as a church community. The international group included both laypeople and those in ordained ministry.

In the “Letter on the Accompaniment Process of the Implementation Phase of the Synod” issued in March 2025, Cardinal Mario Grech, General Secretariat of the Synod, states: “It is of fundamental importance to ensure that the implementation phase serves as an opportunity to re-engage the people who have contributed and to present the fruits gathered from listening to all the Churches and the discernment of the Pastors in the Synodal Assembly.” Grech’s letter also mentions the formation of “synodal teams composed of priests, deacons, consecrated men and women, laymen and laywomen, accompanied by their bishop.”

In outlining the stages of the accompaniment process for the Synod’s implementation phase, Grech announced a “Jubilee of Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies” to be held in Rome in October 2025. The Jubilee, he said, “takes on particular significance [by] placing the commitment to building a Church that is increasingly synodal within the horizon of the hope that does not disappoint.”

It is as a sign of such hope and an experiment in forming a “synodal team” that we offer here the fruits of our practice. Our exchanges followed the “Conversation in the Spirit” model utilized throughout the Synod. Following our third session, we compiled a public submission to one of the Synod’s working groups, per the invitation of the General Secretariat. The full text of our submission is available here.

Week I: Introduction and “The Heart of Synodality”

Emerging Themes

• The vital role of Small Christian Communities
• Synodality and the “status quo”
• The relationship of the law to the primacy of love
• Being evangelized by the poor and marginalized
• Gender equality, liturgy, and the “treasure of our faith”

Resources

• Kevin Clarke, “Should You Stand or Kneel to Receive Communion? Cardinal Cupich Stirs Debate after Weighing In,” America, December 19, 2024
• Catherine Mowry LaCunga, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1993)
• Tomas Halik, Touch the Wounds: On Suffering, Trust, and Transformation (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023)

  Week II: “On the Boat, Together”

  

  Opening meditation for Week II, a “visio divina” featuring Duccio’s depiction of Peter and Andrew

Emerging Themes

• Becoming a missionary disciple, or accepting the ministry of “being an Andrew”
• The urgency of the issue of gender equality
• The power of the document in “speaking to the world,” particularly “mother and sister earth” (#54)
• Acknowledging the links between current injustices within the church and historic patterns in Scripture
• Recognizing “contradictions” between teaching and practice that prevent younger seekers from relating to the church

Resources

• Susan Rakoczy, Great Mystics and Social Justice (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2006)
• FOCUS Seek meeting
• “The Creator’s Sacrifice”: A Holy Week Guide from BIC Canada

Week III: “Cast the Net”

Emerging Themes

• “Conversion of processes” around the selection of bishops
• Ensuring that accountability flows in both directions—”upward,” from laypeople to leaders, but also “downward,” from leaders to laypeople
• Revisions to canon law to foster accountability and transparency within dioceses
• “Listening to the Word of God” as the “starting point” for discernment, and the multiple places we are invited to begin listening in paragraph 83
• Re-imagining seminaries as “centers” or “institutes” for vocation, listening, and ministry

Resources

• Michael Centore, “Lifting the Lines of the Map: Synodality and a Sense of Place,” Today’s American Catholic, August 7, 2024
• myParish App for Catholic communities

Week IV: “An Abundant Catch”

Emerging Themes

• Dialogue as an “exchange of gifts,” including dialogue through “digital culture”
• Small Christian Communities as the “terrain where meaningful relationships of closeness and reciprocity can flourish”
• The importance of intercultural communion; how “one culture cannot exhaust the Incarnation”
• The “all/some/one” construction of paragraph 136 as a means of “consecrating our relational being”
• Opening the doors of the church to face “outward,” which includes outreach to the secular world

Resources

• Archbishop Charles Jason Gordon, “The Four Signs of a Truly Synodal Church,” America, March 13, 2025
• Daniel P. Horan, “We Need a Theology of Abundance,” National Catholic Reporter, April 3, 2025

Week V: “So I Send You” and Conclusion

Emerging Themes

• The relationship between formation and initiation, including the “gifts of baptism” and the Real Presence of the Eucharist
• Small Christian Community members becoming “subjects, not just objects of formation, agents and givers of formation, not just receivers” (cf. 144)
• The connection between religious formation and the formation of “global citizens,” with the church as a “global dialogue partner”
• Recognizing and atoning for the historical relationship between the church and imperial power as part of formation
• Developing a new theology of missiology for a postcolonial world

Resources

• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Beacon Press, 2023)
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and History of Erasure and Exclusion (New York: Beacon Press, 2021)
• Gary Gately, “Report: Over 10 Million U.S. Christians, Including 6 Million Catholics, At Risk of Deportation,” The Catholic Observer, April 3, 2025
• “28 Online E-Resource Materials on the On-going Formation and Training of Small Christian Community (SCC) Leaders and Members” (Appendix to Building the Church as Family of God: Evaluation of Small Christian Communities in Eastern Africa by Joseph G. Healey, MM; full text available here)