Synod retreat, day 1: ‘Stripping ourselves before the other and before God’
October 01, 2024
As the beginning of the final session of the Synod on synodality approached, participants began a two-day retreat on September 30 (video 1, video 2, video 3).
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During the retreat:
- Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, delivered a welcoming address
- Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini, OSB, delivered a reflection during Lauds: “‘How to be a Synodal Church in Mission?’ Thirst for God, hidden source of synodal dialogues“
- Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former Master of the Order of Preachers, preached a meditation: “The Locked Room“ (CWN coverage)
- Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, SDB, of Perth, Australia, preached the homily at Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica
“We strip ourselves of the ‘clothing’ of approaches and patterns that perhaps had meaning yesterday, but today have become a burden for the mission and jeopardize the credibility of the Church,” said Cardinal Grech. “We must be willing to strip ourselves, since listening is a radical action of stripping ourselves before the other and before God ... In these days we are ‘sitting together’ to preserve the Church’s goods through an undivided inheritance to be shared with everyone, no one excluded.”
Cardinal Grech also entrusted the Synod session, which begins on October 2 and concludes on October 27, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “the listening Virgin, who welcomes the Word of God with faith,” and encouraged Synod participants to pray the Rosary.
Amid reflections on the Psalms and the Gospel drawn from St. Jerome, the Desert Fathers, and St. John of the Cross, Mother Angelini said:
The art of dialogue re-founded here, in the synodal Church, is decisive, an alternative to all the dialogues we more or less consciously carry in our hearts. An art that is born —we understand it from this Gospel —from a level of reality, which God assumes: from the pain of a perceived deafness. This patience of Jesus in making himself understood by those who —though chosen to be with him —remain deaf, is revealing: it says God, Who never gives up in his thirst for the human You.
Father Radcliffe, who has emphasized homosexuality in recent writings (May, September), spoke of holiness as “being alive in God” as he advised listening and warned against “gazing at our ecclesiastical navels.”
“We all know the fear of being hurt,” he said. “Some of us come to this Assembly nervous that we shall not find recognition and acceptance. Our treasured hopes for the Church may be scorned. We may feel invisible. Do we dare to speak and risk rejection? If you are not used to this world of the Vatican, with its grandiose titles and strange clothes, it can be intimidating. We dare to take the risk of getting hurt, because the Risen Lord is wounded.”
Turning from emotional wounds to doctrine, he said:
In the poor suburbs of Paris, young Catholics are asking to be taught the doctrines of the Church so that they can talk to their Muslim friends about what the Church teaches ...The young are hungry for the rich meat of the Church’s teaching. ‘My Lord and my God’. They will not be satisfied if we just offer them, ‘Jesus who was a nice guy and wants us to be kind to each other.’ ...
When I was a young friar in the late sixties, and everything seemed to be falling apart, most of us remained in the Order because we glimpsed the radiant beauty of the Creed, the truth we do not possess but which possesses us. The young will be satisfied with nothing less.
Archbishop Costelloe, preaching on the memorial of St. Jerome, noted that the saint “would, perhaps, have been a difficult character to manage if he were a member of a Synod which calls us to deep and respectful listening to each other!”
“The journey we have taken so far has led us to a deeper understanding of the meaning of synodality,” he continued. “Now, at this stage of the journey, we are being asked to reflect not so much on what synodality is but rather on how we are to live it at every level of the life of the Church: as individual Christians, certainly, but always as people who are called together, in communities small and big, in order to be living signs and instruments —living sacraments —of communion with God and unity among all people.”
He concluded:
Let us continue, then, to pray that the Spirit of Christ will indeed guide us and be at home in our hearts; that in spite of our weakness and sinfulness the Spirit will enable us to promote not disorder but harmony; that in the Spirit of Christ we will find our unity and become together a living sacrament of communion with God and unity among all people. And may Mary, the Mother of the Church, accompany us with her prayers for us all.
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