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Synod’s next steps? U.S. bishops look to Rome for guidance, say priests and poor need a voice

Father Iván Montelongo, a priest from the Diocese of El Paso, Texas; Bishop Daniel Flores of the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas; and Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne/South Bend, Indiana, discuss the Synod on Synodality at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' fall meeting in Baltimore on Nov. 14, 2023. / Credit: Joe Bukuras/CNA

Baltimore, Md., Nov 15, 2023 / 13:15 pm (CNA).

U.S. bishops are hoping for further guidance from the Vatican before they formulate concrete plans to prepare for the final stage of the Synod on Synodality next fall.

At the conclusion of the synod’s first assembly that took place at the Vatican between Oct. 4–29, delegates approved a 42-page synthesis document titled “A Synodal Church in Mission” containing more than 80 proposals, including recommendations aimed at giving lay Catholics a greater role in decision-making.

The preliminary document did not, however, specify the next steps that dioceses and episcopal conferences should take during the interim period before the synod reconvenes in October 2024.

On Tuesday during the fall assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in Baltimore, two of the synod delegates — Bishop Daniel Flores of the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, and Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana — emphasized the need for an “executive summary” of the synthesis document to help guide continuing engagement with U.S. Catholics.

“When you think about it being a 41-page document, how are we going to consult people? Are they going to read 41 pages?” Rhoades said during a Nov. 14 press conference with Flores.

“At this point, I think we do need to identify exactly or more clearly what are the big items that we really need to have the input of the faithful. And I think that’s a work in progress because maybe the Vatican is going to provide those for us,” he said.

“We don’t know yet. If not, I mean, we have to get moving, so we may have to do it ourselves,” he added.

Flores agreed that the USCCB might have to produce its own summary if the Vatican doesn’t provide one soon. Asked if there was a timeline for when additional steps need to be taken, he said it was premature to formulate a schedule.

“To be honest, I don’t think we’ve gotten to the timeline stage yet because it is still fairly recent,” Flores said.

The synod’s synthesis document was the fruit of the delegates’ small-group discussions of issues raised in these listening sessions. The document calls for greater “co-responsibility” among all members of the Church and recommends specific steps to take and proposals to consider to achieve that goal.

Bishops: Not enough voices were heard

Pope Francis initiated the Synod on Synodality in October 2021, kicking off a multiyear worldwide Church effort to engage in listening sessions with Catholics. The faithful were asked to submit feedback to their local dioceses on the question “What steps does the Spirit invite us to take in order to grow in our ‘journeying together?’”

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, had noted at last month’s synod that only 1% of Catholics participated in the listening sessions.

“One thing we have to do going forward is to encourage greater participation and invite people to partake and engage in this process of speaking, and listening and praying together,” Broglio said in October, adding: “That would be a source of growth for the Church.”

Flores echoed these sentiments Tuesday, calling for a greater variety of voices to be heard as the synodal process continues.

“The voice of the pastors and the priests was not heard as clearly as we need to hear it, “ Flores said. “I think we all, as bishops, will get an encouragement to kind of find the vehicle by which, with their priests, they can reflect on what this document says as we prepare for going forward.”

“But they’re not the only ones. We all admitted that because it was our first sort of effort that we could do a lot better in consulting with the peripheral materially poorer. It’s because it’s hard, because you’re not always going to get a welcome,” the bishop of Brownsville said.

In his remarks, Flores said he expects to send some “resources” out to bishops and dioceses before the U.S. bishops’ conference in June.


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17 Comments

  1. What steps does the Spirit invite us to take in order to grow in our ‘journeying together?

    Encourage the Traditional Latin Mass and more Pro Life/Pro Family support from the clergy especially Pope Francis and the Vatican.

  2. We read: “When you think about it being a 41-page document, how are we going to consult people? Are they going to read 41 pages?” Well, a good place to START might be Part I:5, Proposal “o” which reads in part:

    “From the work of the Assembly, there is the call for better knowledge of the teachings of Vatican II (…).”

    Indeed, this comes nearly forty years after the IDENTICAL CONCLUSION was achieved at the 20-years pulse-check following the Council, the Final Report of 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops: “[Part 1:6] It is suggested […] a new, more extensive and reception of the Council. This can be attained above all through a new diffusion of the documents themselves [….]”

    Perhaps, after almost sixty years, actually read the DOCUMENTS, as contrasted with the disembodied and decapitated “spirit of the Council” as marketed by Hans Kung and two generations of freelance theologians, including many lemming synodalizers.

    Two other FINDINGS in 1985 were:

    “[Part II:6]…from Vatican II has positively come a new style [not exactly a new idea!] of collaboration between the laity and clerics,” AND: “[Part II:3] We cannot replace a false unilateral vision of the Church as purely hierarchical with a new sociological conception which is also unilateral [!].”

    Less dense than the inventory compiled in the 2023 Synthesis Report, key themes of the 1985 Final Report might already frame the requested “EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.” Although much of the overlay of current grassroots concerns gives added and valuable definition to engagement in the world. Omitting, of course, Germania’s distracting moral, sacramental and ecclesial novelties.

  3. “Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, had noted at last month’s synod that only 1% of Catholics participated in the listening sessions.”

    Is that 1% of Catholics, or 1% of Catholics who attend weekly Sunday Mass?

    • ~ 17% of Catholics attend weekly Mass, so even if that’s 1% of Catholics, it’s still only about 5% of Catholics at Sunday Mass. And it’s not like there’s enough kids to make that an impressive number.

  4. I am not surprised that only 1% of Catholics listened/paid attention to the Synodal conference. In the U.S., most people are too busy. Yes, some of the busy stuff is “junk”–being on X (Twitter) and other social media sites, being online on sports sites and other “fun” sites, ordering stuff from Amazon and trying to find a place to put the stuff in our homes when it arrives, working (often working overtime or more than one job), driving (can take up a lot of time depending on where you live in the U.S.), taking care of children and keeping up with teens, etc. And frankly, I didn’t want to spend time listening to a conference that seemed basically to be a meeting to talk about stuff that seems to be of little importance to many of us in our daily lives. There are so many wonderful things to learn about Jesus, the Bible, the Church, etc., and so many tasks that need to be done in my home and my parish, and so many things to talk to God about in prayer–I personally think there are better ways to spend my time than listening in on a conference that I don’t really understand the purpose of. I’ll read the “summary” when it comes out, and let the “thinkers” in the Church act (or not act) on the Synodal Way.

    • Drinking a six pack and staring at a turned off tv screen is a more valuble way to spend time than participating in the evil enterprise of a synod. Christians are oblighed to resist evil.

  5. If the synod was held to hear the voices of Catholic lay people, then in my opinion, it has failed. Why even hold a synod if only one per cent of Catholics participated? Why is Francis insisting on having these synods, if the vast majority of Catholics express little to no interests? How does he know that the Holy Spirit will guide his synod in any way? To me, these synods are a waste of time, energy and money. I understand that the Vatican is not in good shape, financially. Is the Vatican able to afford these meetings?

  6. Synod’s next step. Cancel all future meetings, give those millions of dollars to the poor and all those involved spend one month in a retreat given by Bishop Strickland entitiled: “Caritas in ecclesia”.

  7. Yours truly humbly proposes that the needed EXECUTIVE SUMMARY of the Synthesis Report actually appears within the report itself! Not to diminish the contents of the report, but first an observation, then the very concise summary, and then a concluding question…

    OBSERVATION: Curiously, the table of contents for the Report appears at the end rather than the beginning. The first impression is that this is either a formatting error, or a cross-cultural touch toward Hebrew, or Chinese, or even Egyptian hieroglyphic ways of reading, but no…this is a right-brained effort to place the “concrete” process in front and above of any synoptic or disdained “abstract” perspective.

    THE SUMMARY QUOTE: Part III, n. 20—The Synod of Bishops and Ecclesial Assemblies: Convergences (a):

    “Even though the experience of ‘walking together’ has been tiring, the Assembly sensed the evangelical joy of being [?] the People of God. The new experiences involved in this stage [?] of the synodal journey were generally welcomed [two thirds?]. The most obvious one included the shift [paradigm shift?] of the celebration of the Synod from an event [!] to a process [!]…”

    CONCLUDING QUESTION: Event vs Process? As in “…being [?] the People of God?” Does this wording actually propose/impose, broadly and by subliminal suggestion, that experiences together displace being? That ontological being is subordinate to horizontal becoming? That what we are is reducible to what we do? That to do is the sum total of to be?

    So, the process IS the message, “aggregated, compiled, synthesized” by “facilitator” bishops, more or less. AND, this message can be summarized: “Do-be-do-be-do-be-do”! The conceptual ambiguity of convergent synodality! The enabled reduction of pluriformity to pluralism. On this “backwardist” journey, which is not so new, the lay theologian Etienne Gilson reminds us:

    “Philosophy always buries its undertakers.”

  8. What’s occurring at the Synod is a circumscribed process that is light years away from the comprehension, or practical relevance to the vast sea of Catholic Christians. Mrs Sharon Whitlock’s comment expresses it well. Nor does a summary inform the reader of the rationale for getting there. That alone speaks to an exercise in futility. Unless there is a rationale to further an agenda.
    Certainly this pontificate has an agenda to modernize the Gospel contextually, grounding it in cultural differences, scientific advances, anthropological, biological, philosophical, theological [recently proposed to that effect by pope Francis]. What will result is rote indoctrination of material that is otherwise unintelligible to the average Christian. Nor will the average Christian, or any Christian for that matter be able to identify continuity with the revealed Word of God.

    • The agenda was provided two millennia ago in the Great Commission.

      However, That’s hard work, especially in these times and I suspect few if any Bishops can provide any evidence from their particular diocese of increased Mass attendance; reduced pre/non-marital cohabitation, increased conversions; the end of church closures; increased marriages.

      Instead we get vainglorious soliloquys from our “Shepherds”.

  9. The Bishops have an obsession with material poverty, to the exclusion of the far more pervasive and destructive moral poverty. On well, another verbose document should help.

    • Good point, and I believe the reason is because the first is a product of the latter which they refuse to acknowledge since it would implicate their failures.

  10. Getting back, again, to the need to “formulate concrete plans to prepare for the final stage of the Synod on Synodality next fall”…The Synthesis is 41 pages, some 21,000 words, and was tweaked by 1,251 amendments (the devil is in the details). The term “LGBTQ+” is deleted. Deleted also is a permanent and content-free synod. The Magisterium is noted ten times rather than four in the draft report (but now whose magisterium?).

    One simplifying way of preparing for 2024 might be to focus on the trees rather than the forest. That is, where are the unblended drops of cyanide in the punch bowl?
    Two such possibilities:

    The proposed “[16 (p)]…ministry of listening and accompaniment,” as potentially eclipsing the guardianship of the Deposit of Faith? And, “[12 (h)] Further reflection is needed on the relationship between episcopal collegiality and diversity of theological and pastoral views,” as possibly contradicting the clarity supplied in Veritatis Splendor, including “The Church [as in ‘episcopal collegiality’] is no way the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (n. 95).

    Further, regarding the forced dichotomy (though much amended in the Synthesis) between progressive synodality and what is conservative, reflection reveals that there is no such thing as “conservatism” as a movement, per se, as if to counter the many historical movements of progressivism… Instead, a grounding in the fact of creation by a Creator. That is, the mystery and radical fact of “existence” (the is-ness of things) before “essence” (the thing-ness of things). With Leibniz, too, “why is there something rather than nothing”! Being above becoming, reality before ideas…
    Of this conservative VISION, which should pervade any activism and even synodality, yours truly blatantly inserts, here, the vision of an unapologetic and archconservative layman, Frederich D. Wilhelmson (“Citizen of Rome: Reflections from the Life of a Roman Catholic” 1980):

    “I repeat the thesis: we conservatives cannot cure the modern world: we do not hold the power, nor is it likely to pass into our hands. But if liberals–and they are in the saddle almost all over the West–will make the descent into the maelstrom of the modern soul, they will find in conservatism a diagnosis of the disease of our time. We conservatives have lost our kings and our chivalry; our craftsmen are gone, and our peasantry is fast disappearing. Our horses have been shot from under us. We have nothing to offer the world but our VISION.” Not a program at all, but a vision! The pre-modern and again awaited sacral nature of creation and of all of reality.

    Does our synodal response to the “signs of the times” discount or even reject—or embrace—this broader and deeper and conservative (so-called backwardist?) “vision” …Wilhelmsen’s “rhythm [!] of being and becoming” [both]?

  11. The exercise on discernment offers a constructive road map. “The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience” – Mahatma Gandhi

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