The priests at the April 29-May 2 Rome-based meeting will reflect on the theme "How to Be a Synodal Local Church in Mission".

The invitation

The synod's General Secretariat has invited several parish priests to attend the second and last session of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.

The number of participants was determined according to a criterion similar to that which bishops' conferences used for electing members of the Synod Assembly (about 200).

In selecting participants, bishops' conferences and Eastern Catholic Churches were asked to take into account, as far as possible, those "who have significant experience with the perspective of a synodal Church".

They were also asked to "favour a certain variety of pastoral contexts of rural or urban origin or specific sociocultural contexts".

Listening, prayer and discernment

The Ordinary General Assembly's second and last session will be held at the Vatican next October.

Bishop Luis Marín de San Martín from the Sybod's General Secretariat says the meeting will involve "listening, prayer and discernment".

The meeting has strong Vatican support from the General Secretariat of the Synod and from the Dicasteries for the Clergy, for Evangelisation and for the Eastern Churches, Martin says.

The meeting will also respond "to the recommendations of the participants in the first session of the Synod of Synodality who suggested listening more to the voice of the parish priests".

The objectives

Marín says the objectives are to "listen to and enhance the synodal experience that they are having in their respective parishes and dioceses" and "enable dialogue ... experiences and ideas".

Another objective is for the meeting to "provide materials that will be used in the drafting of the Instrumentum Laboris (working document) for the Synod's second session.

These will add to the consultation summaries which the bishops' conferences coordinated and to the results of theological-canonical studies carried out under the auspices of the Synod's General Secretariat.

On the last day of the gathering, May 2, the parish priests will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican, finishing with a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

Source

• Catholic News Agency

Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary of the synod, and the office's two undersecretaries, Xaviere Missionary Sister Nathalie Becquart and Bishop Luis Marín de San Martín, held the meetings June 14-18 in sessions divided by language.

Revisions to the synod process were announced May 21. Pope Francis asked that it begin with consultations with lay people on the diocesan level. The discussion and discernment would then move to a national level and then the 2023 synod assembly itself.

"Without this consultation, there would be no synodal process, because the discernment of pastors, which constitutes the second phase, emerges from listening to the people of God," Grech had explained in May.

After the first couple of meetings with leaders of bishops' conferences, the cardinal said the reaction was "surprising, very positive, and there is a lot of enthusiasm among the bishops we have heard."

Grech told Vatican News, not much is set in stone. "We have some general ideas, but we are open, as this is not a fixed process. We are listening to our partners because the synod is not a project of the secretariat but of the church."

The expanded consultation, listening and discernment, he said, is the desire of Francis. But it is based on the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that the church is the people of God.

The Synod, which presents itself as a real "synodal time", will be opened by Pope Francis on 9-10 October 2021.

The synodal journey will then be marked by three phases:
- a diocesan phase (October 2021 - April 2022) during which each individual faithful can participate in the diocesan consultation. This phase will end locally with a pre-synodal assembly: the culminating moment of diocesan discernment;
- a national phase during which discernment will be entrusted mainly to the Episcopal Conferences;
- a continental phase (September 2022 - March 2023) which will discuss the text of the first Instrumentum Laboris.

Finally, the synodal journey will culminate with the celebration of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the theme "For a synodal Church: communion, participation and mission."

Sources

National Catholic Reporter

Vatican News