Italian synodal assembly, day 1: Dialogue with the world is essential, says Cardinal Zuppi

April 02, 2025

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, the president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, delivered the opening address at the Church in Italy’s second synodal assembly, which is taking place at the Vatican, in Paul VI Audience Hall, from March 31 to April 3.

The synodal assembly, whose theme is “May our joy be full (1 John 1:4),” has more than 1,000 participants, including 442 laity, 229 of whom are women. The first synodal assembly took place in Rome last November, at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls; the second synodal assembly is expected to approve propositions that will be sent to the Italian bishops for their consideration.

St. John’s words (“may our joy be full”) “introduce us to that house where the Father throws his arms around our necks and kisses us, freeing us from my damnation because in that house everything that is mine is yours,” said Cardinal Zuppi. “Our thoughts immediately go to Pope Francis, who has made Gaudium [joy] the hallmark of his ministry, to free us from a sad Christianity, closed in on itself, reduced to reassuring, restless for the interior and not for the world, obsessed defender of its own fears that it mistakes for truth because it has lost the sense of history, becoming a purist judge, an active Pelagian who trusts his works or a Gnostic in love with his own reasoning or interpretations.”

After making these criticisms, Cardinal Zuppi said that “it is easy to end up being discontented, hypercritical (of others) and not very capable of rejoicing in so much holiness of the ‘next door,’ in search of a virtual community which does not exist,” instead of “humbling ourselves little ... to build relationships, concrete and true bonds.”

“The Synodal Journey has been and is a fundamentally spiritual journey, a propitious opportunity to renew the bond between the Church and her Risen Lord, a way to read the signs of the times, to expand the heart in faith, hope and charity, to build community and the Church of God,” he said at the conclusion of the first portion of his address, as he called on synodal participants to be “builders of communities, of relationships, of families where one is generated to life and rebuilds the ‘we’ of the Father’s house, otherwise armored by the wounded resentment of the elder brother who has no interest in fraternity.”

Turning to joy, Cardinal Zuppi said that “the Christian joy that the Synodal Path has concretely illustrated to us is communitarian, ecclesial, not for the elite of the Church, but finally in the plural and for everyone.” Citing Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965), Cardinal Zuppi said that “the Council illustrated a fundamental characteristic of the Catholic Church: the positive attitude to dialogue with the world, frank, serene, mature, proactive and, if necessary, critical, always bold in defending the Lord and the person. This dialogue is essential: in fact, there is no Christian joy without full insertion into history, without active involvement in people’s affairs, without reading the signs of the times, without love for all, especially for those who find themselves relegated, in spite of themselves, to the existential peripheries.”

“The passion to communicate the joy and hope of the Gospel is united with the awareness of no longer separating one’s own salvation from that of others,” he continued. “Compassion is not separating oneself from the history of the world, of women and men, small, of the poor, broader, but sharing it interiorly and in deeds ... Now our joy is truly full not because we have all the answers, but because we are walking after Jesus, perhaps poorer but closer to each other and to our fellow travelers.”

“Much will depend on us, on our serious and wise work these days, bold and full of hope,” he concluded. “We have a delicate task: that of helping the bishops, who will meet in their General Assembly in May.”

Archbishop Castellucci and Lucia Capuzzi

Following Cardinal Zuppi’s talk, participants heard a lengthier address from Archbishop Erio Castellucci of Modena-Nonantola, the president of the national committee of the synodal way. After tracing they steps taken over the previous five years, he concluded with a call to recognize that as pilgrims, “with the strength of the Spirit, we can offer to the sisters and brothers who travel the same paths the sharing of efforts and joys, the welcoming of each person starting from where they find themselves, the willingness to make a journey together, allowing ourselves to be provoked by others and provoking them, in our turn, to discover the common goal: the risen Christ, who inaugurated the Kingdom of God.”

Participants also heard from Lucia Capuzzi, a journalist at the Italian bishops’ newspaper and a member of the national committee of the synodal way. Amid declining sacramental practice in Italy, she said that

the decline, however, is not equivalent to the desert, the ground we walk on has not turned into sand. Hidden under thin layers, among the deviations of a changed daily life, the buds of the Kingdom continue to bloom along the road. The thirst for the infinite, the hunger for meaning, the need for glimpses of Heaven is boundless.

It is expressed, however, in ways that, as a Church, we struggle to intercept. Not because the Gospel is not adequate for today’s living. On the contrary. The Good News is perhaps more urgent than ever. We are convinced of this. We therefore want to announce it with the same passion and trust in the Lord that has nourished our millennia-old Tradition. For this reason, we refuse to give in to easy victimhood, to retreat so as not to have to deal with a world in which we seem to “not count” as before, to entrench ourselves in citadels of a select few in which to await a tomorrow that scares us without “getting our hands dirty”. To build new walls of intransigence to the already too many that are tearing the planet apart ...

Far from regretting a lost worldly power and prestige, the large numbers and the imposing scaffolding, the question that, with a sincere heart, we ask ourselves is how and what we must change in historical forms and style to continue, in this era, to give reason for our Hope.

Capuzzi said that the People of God has “forcefully” asked the synodal assembly for a certain kind of Church:

An evangelical Church, welcoming and hospitable, attentive more to relationships and testimony than to the preservation of structures, able to stand by even when it struggles to understand, ready to care for the wounded without any distinction, to shoulder those who are burdened by fatigue instead of burdening them with new burdens.

A Church that is a disciple as well as a Teacher, capable of passion and compassion, that knows how to listen to the voice of the Spirit in the cries of the last, the defenseless, the rejected, God’s favorites, because by defending them the entire human family is protected. A Church determined to have a preferential option for the poor, in the style of the Beatitudes and in the wake of the Council, at the service of God’s dream in action in history and for this reason committed against every violation of the dignity of human beings and of Creation. A Church capable of combating iniquity, of mending broken relationships and the broken threads of a shattered world.

To become an instrument of peace while war rages and fronts multiply. To weave good alliances with all women and men of good will, of different religious and cultural affiliations, to become a promoter of fraternity. To forge together human and humanizing alternatives for life while inhumanity advances.

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