Below is a reflection that Carly Reidy wrote for The Boston College Clough School of Ministry. Several students from the theology program were chosen to go to Rome to engage with the Synod on Synodality through the CENTERS group (detailed in our October 5th bulletin -14 Catholic Colleges from Across the US.) The link to the encounters blog is:

https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/schools/stm/news-notes/2024-encounter-archive/synod-immersion-updates.html

A different student posts each day about their experience.

Sunday began with Mass at the Caravita, the English-speaking Jesuit community in Rome. In the afternoon some of us attended a guided meditation and conversation surrounding pivotal women in the history of the Church who are memorialized in statues around the crown of St Peter’s Square. In the evening our group had the privilege of dining with Sr. Nathalie Becquart. Sr. Becquart (or Sr. Nathalie as we called her), is an Undersecretary to the Synod of Bishops of the Catholic Church, a position that engages her experience with the youth and her study and witness of the practice of synodality. Sr. Nathalie’s appointment by Pope Francis on February 6, 2021, made her the first woman in history to have the right to vote in the Catholic Synod of Bishops.

Synodality, as a concept, has been a difficult to grasp. Personally, I feel that even though I was tasked with discerning and introducing the initial process to my parish, and even though I poured over the instruction documents to find “the right way” to run our first listening sessions, my first pass fell short of understanding the heart of the reasons for the listening sessions. I understood the phrase “listening Church” to mean that Pope Francis and the governing body of the Church were interested and ready to hear our stories. And that is true! However, more importantly, or perhaps most importantly, the Synod on Synodality is asking us, the hands and feet of Christ, to BECOME a listening Church. This is something Sr. Nathalie emphasized when talking about the transformation that comes from engaging in synodal conversation, and as she reminded us, synodality starts with a cup of coffee!

The parishes and congregations around the world are being asked to engage in this very deliberate, and honestly very foreign, way of relating to one another in order for us to reach a deeper transformation. Sr. Nathalie stressed that what has become clear in the Synod on Synodality is that the needs of the faithful and those on the margins in the global Church are as diverse and varied as the places She inhabits. In order to best serve one another we must listen deliberately to those in our own communities and animated by the Holy Spirit find a way to respond as the hands and feet of Christ. It is in the in-between that the Spirit lives and the best way of learning it is to participate in it ourselves.

We have met with people occupying all facets of the Synodal conference here in Rome. Through prayer services, meals, presentations and even "conversations in the Spirit" (like the listening sessions we hosted in 2021), we are unearthing what it means to be a Synodal Church and what it might look like for us at the parish level in the future. We have met and dined with delegates (see photo with Cardinal O'Malley and Sr. Nathlaie Becquart), visited the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and met with Secretary Sr. Alessandra Smerilli F.M.A. (the first woman to occupy such a high position at the Vatican). I am looking forward to returning home and continuing the conversation with our parish.

On the final day of our trip, our network has been invited into the Paul VI Hall (where the synod delegates meet) for a one-hour Q&A with synod leadership:

· Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Secretary of the Synod

· Cardinal Mario Grech, Relator General of the Synod

· Sr. Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ (and CSTM STL student!), Undersecretary of the Synod

· Bishop Daniel Flores, Bishop of Brownsville, TX and synod leader for the USCCB

This Q&A will be broadcast live to the world. We'd be delighted if you tuned in on Friday, October 18 at 11:00am ET.