VATICAN: Congregation for Consecrated Life Calls for Active Participate in Preparations for 2023 Synod of Bishops
Sr. Jecinter Antoinette Okoth, FSSA
Following Pope Francis’ announcement in May of the upcoming XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops scheduled for October 2023, Vatican through the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL) has called on all consecrated persons to actively participate in its preparations adding that “no one should feel excluded from this ecclesial journey.”
In a message shared with AMECEA online Friday, June 25, the CICLSAL leadership has asked the Religious men and women to dream, work and pray together so that the “synodal church is not a mirage, but a dream to be realized.”
Themed, “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation and Mission,” the upcoming Synod of Bishops calls for mutual listening to the Holy Spirit at every level of the Church’s life oriented towards evangelization.
A synodal Church is one “which listens, and realizes that listening is more than simply hearing,” reads in part the message co-signed by the CICSAL Prefect João Cardinal Brãz de Aviz and the Secretary Archbishop José Rodríguez Carballo and continues, “It is mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn.”
The CICLSAL leadership urges all Religious men and women to “pray, reflect, discuss and share their experiences, insights and desires” and at the same time “to be open to the challenge offered by the three significant words of the theme of the Synod of Bishops on the Synodal Church: communion, participation and mission.”
Urging the Consecrated persons to ensure active participation during the synodal preparations which will be opened officially at the Vatican from 9-10 October 2021, and which will commence with the first phase characterized by consultation and feedback from the local churches and other ecclesial groups, the CICLSAL leadership says, “Do it (the preparations) with the freedom of those who place their trust in God and are thus able to overcome timidity, a sense of inferiority or worse still reproaches and complaints.”
“Let it be done in all simplicity, moved by the Holy Spirit, avoiding arrogance without presumption but always having a sense of co-responsibility because all the baptized whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith are agents of evangelization and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients,” reads an excerpt of the message.
Vatican has clarified that various methods of participation will be possible “both on personal and community level: the potential participation of individual consecrated men and women in the existing local church structures, the drafting of a proposal formulated by the individual communities within a specific diocese, national or international input.”
The first phase of consultation with the local Church will include synthesis on the part of the synods of oriental Churches and Episcopal Conferences and is anticipated to end in April 2022 after which the Vatican will issue an instrumentum laboris (working document) in September 2022 for a period of “pre-synodal discernment in continental assemblies.” This will further influence the release of the second draft of the working document.
Celebration of the Synod of Bishops will then take place October 2023, in Rome according to the norms established in the Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis Communio.
