Synod members say listening has emerged as a central element in overcoming the structural and cultural barriers to unity and participation in the Church. Source: OSV News.
Recent synods convened at the Vatican as well as the worldwide Synod on Synodality have “shown us the value of listening as a common thread in any process of humanisation”, said Sr Liliana Franco Echeverri, a member of the Company of Mary and president of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious.
Sr Franco highlighted the 2019 Synod on the Amazon as an example of how “listening leads to conversion”.
The creation of the Amazonian Ecclesial Conference was proposed at that synod, and it was formally erected by Pope Francis in 2021.
Members of the conference include bishops, consecrated religious, priests and deacons, Indigenous people and lay Catholic leaders, each nominated by their bishops’ conferences.
“Truly the power to create transformation, to modify attitudes or structures, lies in listening to God and to the grassroots, to reality,” Sr Franco said, noting that the various synods convened so far have acted as “laboratories” that experiment with the Church’s capacity to listen.
“Listening is positioning itself as the way of understanding what the narrative is that God wants to tell us human beings,” she said.
“Listening gives us the possibility of drawing close to one another and to God’s love more serenely, sincerely and reverently. Listening truly transforms us and converts us, and I believe we are still in the process of learning that.”
The challenge for the Church, she said, is to understand that listening is “the path to our conversion and even the path to credibility in moments that we experience as a Church and as a society”.
Latvian Archbishop Zbignevs Stankevics of Riga said that ultimately the task of the Synod is to “unlock the gifts and charisms of every baptised person,” promoting co-responsibility and the “decentralisation” of the Church “but not in a secular or democratic way, in a way of ecclesial and spiritual communion.”
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The role of listening in the Church, according to the Synod (By Justin McLellan, OSV News)
