“Our Common Voice and Prayer before God”: Association of US Catholic Priests Hosts Conversation in the Spirit on Lay Participation by Michael Centore

The language of Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord, a pastoral document on lay ecclesial ministry published by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in 2005, is strikingly similar to that of the synodal documents issued between 2021 and 2024. The terms communion, participation, and mission—the key conceptual markers of the Synod—reappear dozens of times across its 70 pages, as does the language of baptism and the universal call to holiness.

Co-Workers in the Vineyard was preceded by the statement Called and Gifted: The American Catholic Laity in 1980, revised as Called and Gifted for the Third Millennium in 1995. Now, 20 years later, the USCCB is revisiting this important topic with an eye toward producing a new document. In true synodal fashion, the USCCB has invited national Catholic organizations to collaborate in this process by gathering their members, conducting listening sessions, and sharing their input with the bishops’ conference.

Among the groups the USCCB contacted was the Association of US Catholic Priests (AUSCP), an organization known for its fidelity to the vision of Vatican II. On September 17, over one hundred participants joined in a “Conversation in the Spirit” between clergy and laity hosted by the AUSCP’s Women in the Church Working Group and facilitated by Ignatian Encounter Ministry.

Dr. Sarah Probst Miller, a member of the Women in the Church Working Group, welcomed participants to the event and reminded them of their objective: “to assist the US bishops as they discover how the People of God understand the baptismal identity and co-responsible mission of the laity within church and society.” She characterized the Conversation in the Spirit as “an ancient practice of the church particularly helping all the voices to be heard when people are gathered” and a “tool to ground us and open us to new voices and possibilities.”

Probst Miller welcomed another member of the Working Group, Pilar Siman, who offered a special dedication of the Conversation of the Spirit to Saints Phoebe and Hildegard of Bingen. Both saints celebrate their feast days this month. In her prayerful commendation, Siman encouraged participants “to know our own charisms and to dream with our church, hope with our church, and love with our church.”

Following a moment of silence to invite the presence of the Holy Spirit, Probst Miller introduced the event’s featured speaker, Sr. Marie-Kolbe Zamora. Sr. Zamora served as an official for the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops during the Global Synod. She is a member of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity in the Diocese of Green Bay and holds a Doctorate of Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Sr. Zamora shared how she was recruited by Cardinal Mario Grech to work for the General Secretariat. During the Synod, she served as a theologian to redact and edit official documents and communications. Additionally, she facilitated the work of other theologians, contributed her own theological vision to the synodal process, and coordinated translations of synodal documents into five languages.

Sr. Zamora stressed that Conversations in the Spirit are important for the US church. She said that the term “Conversation in the Spirit” was deliberately included in the Instrumentum Laboris, the original working document for the Synod.

She continued by giving a precise overview of discernment, which she defined as “an ability that all the baptized have by gift of the Holy Spirit” to identify where the Spirit of God is and where it is not.

“We have divorced God from our understanding of discernment,” she said, with the result that discernment has been reduced to a process of “trading ideas.”

Human effort “will not become discernment” until we explicitly “seek the light of the Holy Spirit rather than simply seeking solutions,” she explained. This means moving beyond attachment to our own ideas that may not be “life-giving” and focusing instead on what the Spirit is saying to us collectively—“to silence my solutions and embrace the possibility of being surprised by what the Holy Spirit is inviting us to do,” in her summation.

By way of example, Sr. Zamora shared how her religious congregation composed a prayer service that modified the Liturgy of the Hours. Women religious have historically struggled with the language of the Liturgy of the Hours, she said, and the revised prayer service expressed “the desire of our sisters, of my sisters, to be able to express ourselves in prayer as ourselves.”

While she initially greeted this change with trepidation, Sr. Zamora said that the Synod helped her realize “that I needed to contemplate the reality” of her sisters’ wishes and the ways the new service reflected Pope Francis’s notion of “popular piety.” By thinking along synodal lines, she was able to see how the church’s liturgy and the congregation’s “popular piety” could be unified into “our common voice and prayer before God.”

Following Sr. Zamora’s remarks and a brief overview of the Conversation in the Spirit process from Lisa Feighery and Ignatian Encounter Ministry executive director Robert Choiniere, Ariell Simon led an Examen that invited participants “to enter a space of imagination” as she read the passage from the Gospel of Matthew that speaks of “sending laborers into the harvest” (9:35-38)—an appropriate image given the event’s focus on co-responsibility.

Participants entered into small breakout groups to discuss two framing questions for the Conversation in the Spirit: “Where do you see the Holy Spirit at work in your relationship/engagement with the Church?” and “What are your joys, hopes, and visions for the role of the laity within the Church and in society?” Facilitators assigned to each group captured thoughts, impressions, and remarks to be synthesized in the summary document for the USCCB. Participants were also provided with a follow-up survey with additional questions after the event.

After participants reconvened, Bishop John Stowe of the Diocese of Lexington gave a concluding message expressing hope that “we are really learning how to listen.”

“I have seen so much growth in this area of listening,” he said, adding that “we are open to surprises” when we attend to the Spirit and to the voices of those who are different from us.

At the same time, he said, “we are learning how to speak.” For co-responsibility to be effective, “we have to hear the voices of the laity,” even when the church has not always prioritized making those voices heard.

“No one of us is complete by ourselves,” he said. “We need one another.” ♦ 

Image: Workers harvest grapes at the Faith Vineyard, Lodi, California. Randy Caparoso / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0