Synod leaders share lessons learned in listening with U.S. students

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The listening that has been part of the Synod of Bishops changes people, can change the Catholic Church and can change the world for the better, four synod members told U.S. university students in Rome.

“The person with a different opinion is not an enemy,” Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the relator general of the synod, told about 140 students gathered Oct. 18 in the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall at the tables used by synod members.

The students, from 16 Catholic universities in the United States — along with a small group of young adults from Germany, Austria and Switzerland — had spent a week in Rome studying synodality and had questions for synod leaders.

The questions included: whether the listening sessions held at the beginning of the synod process reached enough people; why young people who are not involved in the church should care; how they could guarantee that the synod’s outcomes would be faithful to the teaching and tradition of the Catholic Church; and would the synod really change anything.

Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech, general secretary of the synod, told the students that “it aches me” when people say the listening sessions reached only a small percentage of Catholics when the outreach for the 2021-2024 synod was much broader than anything achieved before and will keep growing.

Cardinal Hollerich, noting that most of the students were from the United States, told them, “When I see on television about the elections in the States, there are two worlds which seem to be opposed, and you have to be enemy of the other — that thinking is very far from synodal thinking.”

The synodal listening, he said, helps people experience that “together we are part of humanity, we live in the same world, and we have to find common solutions.”

Company of Mary Sister Leticia Salazar, a U.S. synod delegate and chancellor of the Diocese of San Bernardino, California, told the students that learning to really listen changes a person.

“We come together, we get to know each other, we pray. We listen to one another,” she said. Members hear from people with similar ideas and experiences, but also hear “our differences, our cultures, our way of seeing things, our ways of experiencing God. And at the end, we realize that we are in communion, that we are the church and that we are one church, and we are transformed by that.”

“Once you are touched with that experience, you take it with you,” she said, “and you prolong it in time, and you share it with the people that you encounter.”

Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas, one of synod’s presidents delegate, said he was asked in his own diocese about the purpose of the listening sessions and whether there were plans to change church teaching.

“The aim of synodality is for the sake of the mission,” he said. “And the mission is to announce the Gospel and to invite (people) to a richer, fuller life that comes through Christ, crucified and risen from the dead.”

But, he said, “we really do have to be real.”

“That is to say, you can’t keep announcing the Gospel if you don’t have a sense of the reality people are living,” the bishop told the students.

The listening is not just about hearing someone’s words, he said. It is trying to hear “the realities under the words — the experiences, the pains, the hopes and the longings, because underneath a lot of the words there is a longing. And one of the church’s convictions is that the longing is for a sense of belonging and a sense of communion.”

“It is a gift when somebody tells you something about their life,” Bishop Flores said. “It’s a gift that you should appreciate as something rather sacred.”

But the synod also is listening “to the voice of those who have gone before us” — Catholic tradition — and, especially, to the Scriptures and to the voice of the Holy Spirit in prayer.

“I trust the Holy Spirit,” the bishop said. “I really do. I mean, the church has been messy for 2,000 years, and the Holy Spirit still manages to keep us together. It’s bumpy, it’s messy, but I have faith that we will be faithful to the teaching of the church.”

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