Rome, April 25, 2021 – The Italian Church will also have its first National Synod. It will not be a unique event, but a path of confrontation between clerics, lay people and religious on the reform of the Catholic presence in the country, like the one already underway in the turbulent Germany, even if it is unlikely that our local initiative will have the same intensity and dialectic. The green light comes after a push and pull between the ecclesial leaders and Pope francesco six years long. It was 2015, when the Pontiff, speaking at the V Ecclesial Conference, held in Florence, shook the Church in Italy, with the intuition of an unprecedented synodal path. Confirmed the rumors of recent months, now it is the president of the bishops, the cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, to officially announce, during his online greeting to the assembly of Catholic Action, “the authentic novelty” of the start of a choral journey (hence the origin of the word synod) which should have 2025 as the horizon, next year Jubilee.
It certainly took the existence of the Pope, primate of Italy as bishop of Rome, to win the resistors of a part of the episcopate with respect to the indictment of an indigestible process to the supporters of ‘it has always been done this way’. It is no coincidence that Francis, in response to the deafening silence of the upper floors of the bishops’ conference with respect to his proposal four years earlier, had to re-launch it during the 2019 Assembly of Bishops, thus supporting the urgency of a comparison “Bottom up” and “bottom up”. Therefore, persisting the ‘those who are silent disagree’, he had made himself heard again, this time with a disappointed and final look, last January during a meeting sponsored by the Catechetical Office of the CEI. On the other hand, that the Pope has chosen the Synod as main road of his ministry is well known. First of all to the bishops who in these eight years of pontificate have been able to follow and participate in meetings on the family, young people and the Amazon.
Themes will enter the Italian synodal path the inside; from liturgy to charity, passing through youth and family ministry, but the gaze will also be projected on society, touching the areas of culture, new poverty, citizenship and work. As anticipated, it will not be a single event, a conference. Rather, we are working on a widespread initiative, spread over time that will involve the 16 ecclesiastical regions, the 226 particular Churches, the over 25 thousand parishes, as well as ecclesial movements and associations. Starting point for a constructive dialogue, which in the intentions of the eve will serve the Church to get rid of certain superstructures, de-bureaucratizing and filing pastoral encrustations, will surely be thework tool. The document, expected in the coming months, will be distributed among the faithful and will serve to outline one road map at the moment still quite smoky.
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