Home » The Pope’s surprise announcement: “The world synod of bishops extends until 2024”

The Pope’s surprise announcement: “The world synod of bishops extends until 2024”

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The Pope’s surprise announcement: “The world synod of bishops extends until 2024”

ROME – The global synod on synodality in progress is extended by one year: the great convocation of Catholic Churches from all over the world, which started with a basic consultation with patchy results, was in fact to culminate with a large assembly in October 2023 , but Pope Francis, surprisingly, announced that there will be a further session in October 2024. An apparently technical decision but full of implications for the life of the Church.

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The Pope’s concern to support the participation that produced the synod

“The fruits of the synodal process that have begun are many, but to reach full maturity it is necessary not to be in a hurry,” said Jorge Mario Bergoglio at the end of the Sunday Angelus. “Therefore, in order to have a more extended time of discernment, I have established that this Synodal Assembly will take place in two sessions. The first from 4 to 29 October 2023 and the second in October 2024. I trust – Francis concluded – that this decision can foster understanding of synodality as a constitutive dimension of the Church, and help everyone to live it in a journey of brothers and sisters. which testify to the joy of the Gospel “.

A triple concern emerges from the Pope’s words: not to interrupt prematurely an innovative process that has aroused enthusiasm and hopes in a part of the Church but has also met with resistance and skepticism (the fruits, therefore, must come “to full maturity”); to root this more participatory style (“favoring the understanding of synodality”); and, finally, metabolizing the polarizations that emerged within the Church, that is the “typhus” between, as the Argentine Pontiff himself said only a few days ago, opposing groups, “right” and “left”, “guardians of the truth” and ” novelty soloists “,” progressivism that accedes to the world “and” traditionalism or backwardness that regrets the past “.

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It was Francis himself who triggered these dynamics, revitalizing the instrument of the Synod from the beginning of his pontificate. Created by Paul VI immediately after the Second Vatican Council to involve the entire “people of God” in the life of the Church, it has been weakened over the years and reduced to a sort of conference on the great themes of Catholicism. Pope Francis wanted for the first time both the final document and the votes to be published, paragraph by paragraph, he reformed the statute of the synod, disseminating the new norms of clauses that can make his deliberations binding, he wanted to promote a “consultation of the People of God “with questionnaires disseminated in all the dioceses of the world and, since the first double synod on the family (2014-2015), he wanted to focus on controversial topics such as human sexuality, unmarried couples, communion for the divorced and remarried .

Finally, starting from 2021, it launched a great global synod (the XVI ordinary general assembly) entitled “For a synodal Church: communion, participation, mission”. Therefore, not a specific theme, but the synodality itself. The great initial consultation, which had very different results from country to country, both in terms of participation and in the merits of the responses, ended with the sending to Rome of 112 reports on 114 episcopal conferences. Reworked between September and October by a group of experts gathered in Frascati, they form the basis of the working document that will be published shortly and will form the basis for the continuation of the discussions.

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The need to involve the laity

The basic reconnaissance, however, revealed both a widespread request for greater involvement, especially on the part of the laity, and the difficulty, in some environments, in accepting the synodal style, and, finally, the recurrence of some themes, in reality not initially foreseen, from the fight against sexual abuse to discrimination against women, from sexual morality to the plurality of ministries. An effervescence that indicates the start of a debate that deserves, for the Pope, greater study and opens wide scenarios: it is no coincidence that in recent days, on the occasion of the anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the ‘Osservatore Romano has published the reflection of Don Francesco Cosentino, theologian heard in the Vatican, entitled: «A Vatican Council III? An open question ».

Now the announcement of the Pope, who in recent days has received in the Vatican both the group of “Frascatani” experts and the leaders of the Synod secretariat, led by the Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech, is following up on these requests. His decision, the Synodal Secretariat itself commented in a note, “stems from the desire that the theme of the Synodal Church, due to its breadth and importance, may be the subject of prolonged discernment not only by the members of the Synodal Assembly, but of the whole Church ». The date of 2024 allows us to deepen this “discernment”, to broaden it, to root it. And it lengthens the perspective of the questions posed by Pope Francis, to which he will have to answer himself or – as in the case of the Second Vatican Council, when Paul VI inherited the great construction site opened by John XXIII – a successor.

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