A First Look at the Synod's Synthesis Report

Synodality and Parish Life

The first session of the Synod on Synodality, being held in the Vatican, has come to a close. On Saturday, the Synod Assembly gathered for a marathon session of voting on the contents of a Synthesis Report which had been prepared by the experts present at the Synod and guided by a commission appointed during the second week of the gathering. Later that evening, the report was finally published, although so far only in Italian; for this first look at the document, all quotations will be rough, unofficial translations.

The document is wide-ranging, so I didn’t think it would be wise to try to summarize the whole thing. Instead, I thought it would be helpful to discuss how the Synthesis Report’s recommendations would impact the everyday faith lives of Catholics, particularly life in the parish. Pope Francis himself admitted that “synodality” “may seem something abstruse, self-referential, excessively technical, and of little interest to the general public,” and the confidentiality of the Synod Assembly’s discussions may have made it hard for everyday Catholics to understand the relevance of the proceedings. The Synthesis Report, however, presents a very concrete vision of what parish life could look like in a more synodal church, and so it is worthwhile to summarize that vision in terms of an ideal parish.

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The first thing worth noting is that the Synthesis Report provides a workable, easy to understand and communicate definition of synodality. Since the synodal process began in 2021, many people have expressed confusion over what exactly “synodality” is, a reality the Synthesis Report recognizes (1f). The report defines it in this way:

Synodality can be understood as the journey of Christians with Christ and towards the Kingdom, together with all humanity; mission-oriented, it involves coming together in assembly at the different levels of ecclesial life, mutual listening, dialogue, community discernment, consensus-building as an expression of the presence of Christ alive in the Spirit and decision-making in differentiated co-responsibility. (1h)

This definition is helpful because it accentuates that synodality is linked to the image of the Church as the Body of Christ, united yet made of distinct parts, but also emphasizes that the Church is in the service of mission. It likewise makes clear that within the Body of Christ, there needs to be a shared process of communicating and decision-making; as I noted in my commentary on the Instrumentum Laboris, the working document used as a guide for the Synodal Assembly, if the Church is the body of Christ, then the Church needs a nervous system, a process through which the various parts can communicate with one another and coordinate with one another. Even if the exact words of the Synthesis Report aren’t used, this definition is a good starting point for communicating to parishioners what synodality is all about.

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Parish life centers around the sacraments, and the Synthesis Report explains how the sacraments, particularly the three sacraments of initiation, can be understood in terms of synodality. “In one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:13), and through baptism we each take on a common responsibility for the mission of the Church. Each lives out this mission according to their own vocation, but all the baptized are equal in dignity (3c). Men and women share the same baptismal dignity and are called to co-responsibility in the life of the Church (9b). This understanding of baptism ought to be incorporated into the initiation process for adults and the baptismal preparation offered to parents prior to the baptism of a child, if not already present.