'Come, Holy Spirit': Discernment and Synodality

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception hosted a local discernment session Feb. 23.

By Megan Marley

Synod — what does this word mean? In the history of the Catholic Church, it’s an assembly called by the Church to discuss matters of importance for the Church. The Greek root words syn and hodos--literally translated mean “together, journey.”

While recent synods have examined themes such as the New Evangelization, the family, young people and the Amazon, the synod currently being prepared focuses on “synodality” — how the people of God walk together in listening to the Holy Spirit. The world’s bishops will collectively meet in 2023 to discern what the Holy Spirit is speaking, but there are also gatherings at the continental, national and diocesan-wide levels to inform that synod.

Beginning in Advent, parishes, schools and other groups in our diocese hosted listening and discernment sessions focused on 10 themes proposed for the synod. The themes aim to encourage listening to the Holy Spirit and fostering discernment, participation and co-responsibility for the Church’s mission in the world at all levels of the Church.

“The Holy Father has challenged us to engage communities whose voices are not often heard, individuals we see on the margins of society … we also want to reach out those who have maybe fallen away from the practice of their faith,” Bishop Johnston said in a video introducing the synod.

Reports summarizing local sessions are being compiled by the diocese for creating a diocesan-wide report to go up to the national level. This local report will be made available on the diocesan website, kcsjcatholic.org.

Below are some experiences of the local synod process.

St. Patrick School, Kansas City

St. Patrick School in northern Kansas City held not one, but two synod sessions: one for teachers and staff, another for middle-schoolers.

First-grade teacher Hannah Duran was present at the teachers and staff meeting held Jan. 26. Principal Kaci Monaghan sent out the 10 topics several days in advance for them to think and pray about what was speaking to them and submit their top three. Duran appreciated the openness of the process.

“When she asked us to choose, it gave us ownership of the topics and made us be more involved and invest in the conversation,” she said.

“Listening,” “Sharing Responsibility for Our Common Mission” and “Ecumenism” were the three they discussed.

“The one that really stood out to me was one I voted for, which was ‘Listening.’ We talked a lot about how we can be better in our school, and as a parish, in listening to people that might have different views than our own … and how to cross that barrier.”

The process reminded her that “we need to talk in our school community about things other than school. We had a really useful conversation, it's not like it takes too much time out of anyone’s day for a meeting and we ended up learning a lot about what each other thought.”

“Listening” was also one of the three topics middle-schoolers picked at their Feb. 2 session.

“It was interesting because they had a similar perspective to the staff on the issue, noticing a lot of the same barriers to listening, bias, fear of conflict … they only have a small slice of life but they already see some of the same things we see as adults,” said Melanie Abel, sixth-grade teacher.

The students also talked about “Speaking Out” and “Celebration” — the latter sparked an idea that the parish might utilize: a prayer space in the back of church to sign up to pray for others, and to be prayed for.

“We don’t always see our ideas play out in the bigger picture,” Abel said.

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Kansas City

Collin Lavery was a participant in the in-person and virtual session held Feb. 23 at the Cathedral in Kansas City that focused on the topics of “Listening,” “Celebration” and “Dialogue in Church and Society.”

“A lot of what we talked about tonight surrounded the frustrations of both the position the Church is in today, and the infighting within the Church,” Lavery said.

“Everything about the Church is kind of local, that’s where we pull our most strength and our best outreach … having little get-togethers like this in a public forum would be immensely helpful for just communication of our faith and values.”

He also found the topic of “Dialogue in Church and Society” to be important to his millennial demographic.

“Something I deal with in marketing, my job is how do we remove barriers in getting the person we’re talking to to agree with the product we’re selling? In the Church it is: how do we remove barriers from truth? One barrier would be: I have to get out of bed to go to church. We can’t move the church to that person’s house, but maybe we can move dialogue into that person’s house via their phone … I got back into the Church because of videos about the Catholic Church and being reinvested.”

Mary Immaculate Parish, Gallatin

Tony Gronninger was among the 20-some people in attendance at the in-person session held at Mary Immaculate Parish Feb. 15. Topics that surfaced for the group were “Celebration,” “Listening” and “Speaking Out” — the first one stood out to him.

“We talked about Celebration: locally with this whole pandemic thing, we are past running from each other … When this thing hit, everybody shooed — that was the Church’s take on it, and appropriately so. But Celebration as a community, we’re looking forward to getting back to it,” said Gronninger.

He particularly enjoyed being able to speak to the top — coming from a rural perspective, “It’s hard to keep jumping up and down in the back of the classroom and never get called on.”

“I am proud of the pope’s initiative to see what the folks in the trenches, the Catholic laity, are thinking and their take on the Church and its goals for where it’s going,” Gronninger said.

However, he’s a little skeptical on the outcome of the synod process.

“My personal question was how much lay input is there above this pastoral, small church level? Do lay people have input at the diocese? What are the U.S. bishops going to do with the input? This is going to go back to the clergy to filter, in my view, the opinions that go out later on. So am I hopeful? Yes. But … they have a different perspective than you and I, as lay persons.”

Synod participants vote on the top three themes they would like to discuss during their Listening & Discernment session.

Synod 2021-2023: 10 Themes

• Companions on the Journey

• Listening

• Speaking Out

• Celebration

• Sharing Responsibility for Our Common Mission

• Dialogue in Church and Society

• Ecumenism

• Authority and Participation

• Discerning and Deciding

• Forming Ourselves in Synodality

TO LEARN MORE about these 10 themes, how the diocese is participating and to view the diocesan-wide compiled report (available June 2020), visit kcsjcatholic.org/synod2021-2023