3 October 2024, The Tablet
Bishops must cooperate with laity, Pope tells synod
Pope Francis said that the presence of non-bishop delegates at a Synod of Bishops did not diminish episcopal authority.
At the first meeting of the full assembly of the Synod on Synodality on Wednesday, Pope Francis said a bishop’s ministry should include cooperation with laypeople and that the synod will need to identify “differing forms” of the exercise of this ministry.
Speaking in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall on 2 October, the Pope said that it was an intentional choice that bishops, laymen and laywomen, priests, and religious were all synod delegates, as this “expresses a way of exercising the episcopal ministry consistent with the living tradition of the Church and with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council”.
“Never can a bishop, or any other Christian, think of himself ‘without others,’” he continued. “Just as no one is saved alone, the proclamation of salvation needs everyone and requires that everyone be heard.”
Francis said that different “forms of a ‘collegial’ and ‘synodal’ exercise of the episcopal ministry” in dioceses and in the universal Church “will need to be identified in due course, always respecting the deposit of faith and the living tradition, and always responding to what the Spirit asks of the Churches at this particular time and in the different contexts in which they live”.
The Synod on Synodality reflects this “inclusive understanding” of a bishop’s ministry, he said, adding that bishops and laypeople must learn how better to cooperate in the Church.
Pope Francis was addressing the more than 400 participants in the second session of the Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of Bishops on its first day on 2 October.
The 2024 meeting, which runs until 27 October, has 368 voting members (delegates), 272 of whom are bishops and 96 of whom are not bishops. Among the 96 non-bishops, around half are women.
The first general gathering or “congregation” was dedicated to opening greetings by Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Mexico City Cardinal Carlos Aguiar Retes, the president delegate of the Synod of Bishops. The synod leaders Cardinal Mario Grech and Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich SJ also gave introductory speeches.
During the three-and-a-half-hour meeting, delegates also watched information films about the synod including presentations on the 10 theological study groups and a canonical commission formed by Pope Francis.
In his remarks, the Pope said that the presence of non-bishop delegates at a Synod of Bishops did not diminish or limit the authority of individual bishops and the college of bishops.
“Rather, it points to the form that the exercise of episcopal authority is called to take in a Church that is conscious of being essentially relational and therefore synodal,” he said.
“Harmony is essential,” Francis emphasised, noting two dangers to avoid: the danger of becoming too abstract and the danger of “pitting the hierarchy against the lay faithful”.
Earlier in the day, Pope Francis became the first pope since 1974 to view a historic relic of the chair of St Peter, a symbol of papal primacy.
The wooden chair believed to have belonged to the first pope is usually encased inside the massive chair monument created in the seventeenth century by sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, located on the furthest back wall of the apse of St Peter’s over what is called the “Altar of the Chair.”
The relic was last removed from the Bernini monument for study from 1968–1974. It has been removed now during restoration work.
Pope Francis viewed the relic in the Ottoboni sacristy of the basilica after a Mass in St Peter’s Square inaugurating the second session of the Synod on Synodality.
In his address to delegates, the Pope recommended they read Dante Alighieri’s sonnet “Vita Nuova” to meditate on the virtue of humility.
“We cannot be humble apart from love,” he said. “Christians ought to be like those women described by Dante Alighieri in one of his sonnets. They are women who grieve the loss of their friend Beatrice’s father: ‘You who bear humble semblance, with eyes downcast, showing sorrow.’”
“I encourage you to meditate on this fine spiritual text and to realise that the Church – semper reformanda – cannot pursue her journey and let herself be renewed without the Holy Spirit and his surprises without letting herself be shaped by the hands of God the Creator, his son, Jesus Christ, and his Holy Spirit,” Francis continued.
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