What Pope Francis asks of the whole Catholic Church and of each Christifideles is to become aware and to re-read our being the Body and Heart of Christ for this historical time, with all our strengths and limitations.
This is not a small awareness, which will certainly provoke in us a healthy amazement and a sense of personal co-responsibility, as well as as a community and associations.
This “call to synodality” of all the baptized, in communion with the Pastors, is a gift and a duty that is offered and emphasized to us.
It is a question of feeling the need to listen with those who share the mission of witnesses of faith, hope and charity, in the common ecclesial or associative context in order to grasp what the Spirit has already given to our communities either with a diocesan Synod or with projects of ecclesial, spiritual and human promotion communion, giving thanks to God for this and glimpsing the human and ecclesial difficulties that we find in our journey among us, with the secularized reality and with a solidarity incapable of authentic attention towards the impoverished from situations that demean people who are “used and exploited” not only by smugglers, but also by those who should legally offer worthy attention and welcome for a human being such as brother and sister.
Faced with this, Catholic communities and associations must not only become a neighbor, but also, as the Preparatory Document for the Synod suggests, must give a voice to those who have no voice. It is appropriate to recall as an objective for the sharing of the Synod on Synodality what Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium, underlining the urgency of an “outgoing Church” with these words: “Let us go out to offer everyone the life of Jesus Christ. I repeat here for the whole Church what I have said many times to the priests and laity of Buenos Aires: I prefer a bumpy, wounded and dirty Church from being out on the streets, rather than a sick Church from closure and the convenience of clinging to one’s own. securities. I don’t want a Church that is worried about being the center and that ends up trapped in a tangle of obsessions and procedures. If something must holyly disturb us and worry our conscience, it is that many of our brothers live without the strength, the light and the consolation of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to welcome them, without a horizon of meaning and life. More than the fear of making mistakes, I hope that the fear of locking ourselves up in the structures that give us false protection, in the rules that transform us into implacable judges, in the habits in which we feel at ease, while outside there is a hungry multitude and Jesus is moving us. he repeats ceaselessly: “You give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37) “(EG n.49).
Hence, thanks also to this time of the Synod in the particular Churches, and therefore also in the various Councils of the Lay Aggregations and the many associations that compose them, the commitment of that reflection on the sine qua non of being Church cannot be lacking, which is the synodality thanks to which we listen to each other and deepen those themes and problems that make our being Church a “heart that sees”, as Benedict XVI would say, and that plans a presence capable of “listening”, “compassion” and “Con-hope” with those who have lost the value sense of life and the religious sense itself, thus becoming a “stumbling block” for the building up of an upright conscience and the necessary sensitivity towards that solidarity that makes the difference in living.
The evangelical proposal must be experienced first in the community or associative reality of the ecclesial reality. Here is the importance of synodal discernment and then it is good to “equip ourselves” to be a leaven in civil life, with a conversion to listening to God and neighbor.
Let us not take this experience of synodality addressed to the entire Catholic laity too superficially. It is precisely the laity that should be questioned and offered those proposals that give evangelical hope to our historical moment which seems far from the values of faith and solidarity, while precisely these, especially our Europe, needs to revitalize and thus give consistency. to its Christian roots which are at the basis of that dignity of the human person hoped for in the Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, after the tragedy of nationalisms and the Shoah, which must be a reminder for constant commitment, an authentic spirit of universal fraternity, starting from the last.
We cannot pretend not to see, as Pope Francis says, the drama of the Mediterranean sea which is “a cemetery without crosses”. It is necessary to concretely ensure that the Church is the voice of those who have no voice and helps to make shared choices so that women and children can be welcomed and inserted into the civil life of our cities by loved and respected brothers.
Reflecting and sharing this sensitivity, which is proper to the Gospel, is one of the key objectives of that sensitivity “of the flesh” and not “of paper”.
Not documents but sharing for a concretely fraternal humanity in every latitude and longitude of the planet Earth.
* Episcopal Vicar for the Laity and Culture – Diocese of Trieste