Mons. Faustino Burgos Brisman, CM
GLCC ecclesiastical advisor
Pope Francis teaches us how to conceive and live synodality as an attitude of listening. A synodal Church is a Church that is aware that listening is more than hearing. We hear noises, alarums, you hear, but listening means more: it is a two-way street. It is a reciprocal listening in which each one has something to learn and to contribute. It is the People of the Faithful: Episcopal College, Bishop of Rome: one listening to the others and all listening to the Holy Spirit.
Synodality consists in recreating and energizing new spaces that foster the encounter of communion and participation among all those who make up the Church: communities and apostolic movements. All as brothers, who have had the experience of Christ, alive and close, who walks in the midst of his people. This goes beyond the realization of synodal events proper to the bishops.
Synodality is a way of being and expressing oneself in the Church, a way of living and a way of acting in the Church. Thus, synodality is like the sap that, extracted from the earth by the roots, nourishes all the arts of the tree. Synodality entails the implementation of four actions: Communion, participation, co-responsibility and mission.
When we speak of communion, we are not only saying that we are together, but that we are brothers, children of the same Father, with one mind and one heart, one soul. We participate in the same life of Christ. Where what is yours is mine and what is mine is yours. Participation is to be present in a full, conscious and active way. This goes hand in hand with co-responsibility: we all have to empower ourselves, to contribute our grain of sand, like that young man who gave as much as he could give: “five loaves and two fish”. Stewardship is opposed to indifference, passivity, hoarding, centralism, marginalization, imposition. Stewardship means: shared responsibility and this in turn to respond to the tasks entrusted to us. To evangelize is the task of all, yesterday, today and always. We accept Jesus Christ, we become his disciples to be sent by him, two by two.
Therefore, when we speak of Synodality, of a synodal Church, we are speaking of a model of Church that overcomes all types of individualism and highlights the communitarian dimension of the Church as the People of God, the Body of Christ. Communion demands openness to the participation of all the members of the Church. St. Paul reminds us that the Church is a Body and Christ is the head.
Synodality is to walk in communion, participation and co-responsibility to assume the Mission that Christ entrusts to us. We are called to walk in synodality, developing attitudes of communion, participation and co-responsibility for the mission.
From its origins the CCM, by that intuition of the initiators, we have walked in Synodality, although it has not been called that way. It would be enough to look back and we will see how and in what way the CCM has been assimilating, assuming the diverse pastoral approaches of the Holy See, of our bishops and collaborating in the evangelizing actions of the Church in the different environments of the world.
One of the characteristics of the Cursillo charism is that it “helps to discover and realize the personal vocation” of those who live the Cursillo experience. That is to say, the Cursillo Movement does not do “cursillismo” but rather it does church. For this reason, those who discover in the Cursillo their evangelizing responsibility are accompanied and encouraged to commit themselves to Christ, not only from the fundamentals of our Movement, but from the specific vocation of service of their preference through the different evangelizing realities that exist in our church.
All this should lead us to thank our Elder Brother for this dynamism, this participation and to continue strengthening it. If we have walked in synodality without calling it that way, because our work has been like that, now with more knowledge we must continue working with a synodal spirit and attitude. It is what the Spirit suggests and it is the step that marks the present Church. Let’s go ahead, let’s continue walking in Synodality! Together beyond, always beyond”.
