VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Three years after he asked the world’s Catholics to walk together in faith on a synodal journey, Pope Francis said that the church cannot risk becoming “static” but must continue as a “missionary church that walks with her Lord through the streets of the world.”
“We cannot remain inert before the questions raised by the women and men of today, before the challenges of our time, the urgency of evangelization and the many wounds that afflict humanity,” the pope said in his homily during the closing Mass for the Synod of Bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica Oct. 27.
“A sedentary church, that inadvertently withdraws from life and confines itself to the margins of reality, is a church that risks remaining blind and becoming comfortable with its own unease,” he said.
Pope Francis delivered his homily seated in front of the basilica’s newly restored 17th-century baldachin — the gilded bronze canopy that had been shrouded in scaffolding for restoration work since February.
Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary-general of the Synod of Bishops, was the main celebrant at the altar under the baldachin.
The previous day, the pope received the final document approved by the more than 350 members of the synod. The document called for the increased participation of lay men and women in all levels of church life, including in parishes, dioceses and in seminaries.
Pope Francis told the synod assembly Oct. 26 that he did not plan to publish an apostolic exhortation after the synod due to the “already highly concrete indications” in the final synod document, which he ordered published.
In his homily, the pope called on the church not to remain in a state of “blindness” to the issues in the church and the world, a blindness that can take the form of embracing worldliness, placing a premium on comfort or having a closed heart.
The church must listen to men and women “who wish to discover the joy of the Gospel,” he said, but it also must listen to “those who have turned away” from faith and to “the silent cry of those who are indifferent,” as well as the poor, marginalized and desperate.
“We do not need a sedentary and defeatist church,” he said, “but a church that hears the cry of the world and — I want to say it, maybe someone will be scandalized — a church that gets its hands dirty to serve the Lord.”
Reflecting on the day’s Gospel reading from St. Mark in which a blind man hears Jesus pass by, asks for healing, regains his sight and then follows him, the pope stressed that following God on the synodal path entails cultivating the capacity to hear the Lord pass by and the confidence to follow in his footsteps.
“We follow the Lord along the way, we do not follow him closed in our communities, we do not follow him in the labyrinths of our ideas,” he said. “Let us remember never to walk alone or according to worldly criteria, but instead to journey together, behind him and alongside him.”
At the end of Mass, four Vatican workers carried the Chair of St. Peter into the basilica and placed it before the main altar. The chair — temporarily removed for restoration from its encasement in a sculpture behind the basilica’s back altar — is traditionally believed to have belonged to St. Peter, the first pope.
In his wheelchair, the pope sat in front of the chair in prayer at the end of Mass.
In his homily he had said, “This is the chair of love, unity and mercy, according to Jesus’ command to the Apostle Peter not to lord it over others, but to serve them in charity.”
After Mass, the pope prayed the Angelus with visitors in St. Peter’s Square. Speaking about the end of the Synod of Bishops, the pope asked people to “pray so that all that we have done in this month may continue forward for the good of the church.”
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