The entire community is charged with handing on the faith

Cardinal Lorenzo Baldissari recently announced Pope Francis’s chosen theme for the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops — “Toward a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission.” This global event is scheduled to take place in October 2022.

The discussions will touch on the very heart of the church’s existence, for as Saint John Chrysostym once said: “Church means both gathering [systema] and synod [synodos].” This could also be translated as “council,” for the Greek “synod” often is translated into Latin as “concilium.” It literally means “on the road together” and is usually interpreted as referring to the active participation of all the faithful in the life of the church, whereas collegiality more commonly refers to the fraternal bonds that exist between bishops and the pope — at least in Catholic understanding.

Two crucial elements that will undoubtedly arise in these discussions are dialogue and communal discernment. An excellent text exploring these ecclesial practices in the American context has been written by Brad Hinze, a colleague, mentor and friend.  “Prophetic Obedience: Ecclesiology for a Dialogical Church” was published in 2016. The book is dedicated to Brad’s wife Christine Firer Hinze, who is also a theologian and the incoming president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. They are the first husband and wife to have both held the peer-elected post.

Hinze claims that “to be prophetic requires above all cultivating certain practices of personal and collective discernment and decision making, and allowing these to inform one’s sense of self, one’s involvement in various forms of communal life, and one’s engagement with the social and environmental world, as well as the way core convictions, religious or not, influence and are weighed in everyday judgments and decisions of life. … Prophetic obedience is a crucial category, in my judgment, because it captures a summons to all the faithful to cultivate and exercise personal conscience, based on discernment of the apostolic faith of the church and attentiveness and responsiveness to the signs of the times.”

Vatican II repeatedly called for all believers to have a stake in the evangelization of the world. The Great Commission to share the Good News with all of creation was not addressed only to celibate male clergy, who in fact did not exist in the way we currently understand them when the Gospels were written. Rather, the entire community is charged with handing on the faith of the apostles, without handing it over to corrosive distortions of it, often brought about by the dulling of the senses of those in positions of privilege or power. 

In this way, being synodal as a co-traveling church means that all of us are called to be both disciples (pupils) and apostles (ambassadors).

Hinze makes clear that such a charge can in some quarters seem “eccentric, pretentious, or outdated; it can also seem difficult or frightening.” And yet, it is only in the tireless work of prophetic discipleship, obedience and missionary impulse that we can live up to the vocation to which we are called as those accompanying Christ on the via crucis, the road to the cross. 

Hinze’s methodology for cultivating this reality involves heeding the Spirit’s call in both laments and aspirations, in evoking (not only responding to) crises of conscience, and in offering life-giving hope that defies death, sin and destruction.

We ought to pray that the future synod will enable dialogue around exactly such perspectives and bring about the constant juridical renovation and spiritual renewal that have marked the community’s graced ability to survive the centuries into our day.

Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.