Synodality progressing slowly in Canada

The contrast between Latin American-Caribbean and Canadian progress toward creating a synodal — or “listening” — Church could not have been starker than in two presentations Canada’s bishops heard this week.

Bishop Lizardo Estrada Herrera, secretary general of the Consejo Episcopal Latinamericano y Caribeño (CELAM) spent 55 minutes tracing the roots of the region’s synodal development back 70 years to the organization’s founding in 1955.

Quebec’s Bishop Alain Faubert needed only 17 minutes for his “small update” during the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops annual plenary meeting on activities of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Implementation of Synodality in the Church in Canada since 2021.

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“After the presentation of Msgr. Lizardo, the work of synodality in Canada will appear modest, but it’s the reality that has been given us. There are important phases coming in the next few months,” Faubert told his fellow prelates in Montreal on Tuesday.

Among the “must do” steps Faubert identified is another meeting of the ad hoc committee on Oct. 15 of this year, five years almost to the day after the global synodality process was officially begun by Pope Francis.

In fairness, as both he and Regina Archbishop Donald Bolen noted in thanking the CELAM secretary general for his work, the whole concept of synodality came from the Vatican to Canada while in Latin America and the Caribbean it was an outgrowth of existing Church culture.

Or as Bolen expressed it to Herrera: “It feels like (CELAM bishops) were following instructions from the Holy See that really originated in your churches. It’s a little different experience than for us (where) it feels a little more like something that's come from the outside. We're experiencing something that's grown organically for you.”

Speed of adaptation aside, the Canadian and Latin American-Caribbean messaging about synodality was identical in stressing the necessity of transforming the Church by turning the concept into lived experience. 

“We can continue to talk about synodality, but the most important thing is to live, to experiment and to understand the Catholic dimension of this synodality,” Faubert said. “As Msgr. Lizardo said, the purpose of is not to be synodal for (the sake of) synodality. It's for… realisation of evangelization.”

It was purpose Lizardo emphasized in two videos he showed tracing the historical development of CELAM from a conference of the Latin American episcopate in 1955 to a means of grappling with the question of how to deal with the region’s concrete realities post-Vatican II.

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A 1979 episcopal conference inaugurated by St. John Paul II on evangelization on the future of Latin America “reminded us that to evangelize means to look at the concrete faces of our peoples and recognize the presence of Christ in them,” Herrera said.

That paved the way for a dedication to increasing networks and “episcopal, ecclesial and pastoral relations across borders” and led to a 2007 conference under Benedict XVI, whose final document was presided over by then Cardinal Jorge Mario Burgoglio, the late Pope Francis.

“When we presented a proposal for a future conference to (then) Pope Francis, his response was provocative: ‘Imagine something new.’ We dare to do so,” Herrera said.

By November 2021, a month after global synodality took shape at a meeting in Rome, CELAM had already wrapped up a “listening stage and synthesis” assembly that was in-person but also had about 70,000 people participating through digital media.

“The experience anticipated, in some way, the path that was subsequently taken regarding the Synod process and synodality,” he said.

But the newness of the Church represented by synodality, Herrara stressed, was not just a re-naming of old governance and operational structures.

“The true novelty lay in the way of walking together. The ecclesial assembly sought to begin by listening to the people of God. It was a broad listening process that sought to reach the peripheries, and also beyond the Church’s own borders: different forms of participation, thematic forums, personal and community contributions, various modes of encounter.”

Herrera called the process “a true laboratory for synodality” which meant that by October 2021 and the formal start of the Synod on Synodality, “the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean was not starting from scratch. It has already travelled a long and winding path (and) truly learned to listen deeply.”

The change activated, he said, went to the heart of the question underlying synodal listening itself. Time, he concluded, will tell how deeply the Church transforms in concrete ways through application of synodal approaches. But the first steps have been taken by learning the need to listen.

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“Here we find one of the great transformations the synodal journey produced. The question was no longer just, ‘What does each person think?’ It began to be, “What is the Spirit saying to the Church when we begin listening together?' ”