In second week, synod to discuss authority in the church

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Members of the Synod of Bishops have begun looking for ways to make relationships within the Catholic Church “more transparent and more harmonious, so that our witness may become more credible.”

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, relator general of the synod, told members that that was their task as the second week of the monthlong assembly began Oct. 7.

Opening discussions about the second module of the synod’s working document, the cardinal said it would be easy for the assembly to “remain on a general level and simply reiterate the importance of relationships for the development of people and communities.”

But, he said, “the people of God are waiting for guidance and suggestions from us on how to make that vision concretely livable.”

The question, the cardinal said, is: “What is the Holy Spirit inviting us to do to move from a pyramidal way of exercising authority to a synodal way?”

During the first week of synod proceedings, members discussed their understandings of the foundations of synodality in the church.

Cardinal Hollerich said that during the second week, members will “seek ways to make operative today the ecclesiological perspective outlined” by the Second Vatican Council.

The challenge, he said, will be to avoid the risk of falling “into an excess of abstraction on the one hand, and in an excess of pragmatism in the other.”

The cardinal asked members not to be afraid “to draw an outline of concrete proposals that individual churches will then be called upon to adapt to different circumstances.”

Offering a reflection on the morning’s Gospel reading in which Jesus recounts the parable of the good Samaritan, Benedictine Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini, a spiritual adviser to the synod, said that the story “reveals that the commandment of God is understood through an instinctive ‘seeing'” of the other and a call “to surrender to the relationship.”

Today, when “fratricidal wars divert one’s gaze from seeing, in a never-ending spiral which leaves humanity half-dead,” the Gospel calls for a “relational transformation,” she said.

“The Samaritan is the living symbol of relational transformation,” she said, because he forms a sense of relationship that testifies “to God, not himself.”

“We are called by the synodal way to see the other in weaving, complementary relationships, stemming from that moment in which we are both the Samaritan and the half-dead man,” she said, “saved, pitied and called to be merciful.”

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