Synod Presentations of Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich and Sr. Maria Grazia Angelini "before the simple openness of a heart opens new vistas for mission." FULL TEXT + Video

General Congregation 8, 13 October 2023

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the Synod’s Relator General, presents the Module B2 of the Instrumentum Laboris, which invites participants to reflect on the topic: “Co-responsibility in Mission: How can we better share gifts and tasks in the service of the Gospel.” Directly below is the talk on Women and mission (I.L., B.2.3; Lk 11:15-28; Acts 16:13-15) by Sr. Maria Grazia Angelini O.S.B

Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to our Hall, ready to start walking together again. Our journey is a strange one because it keeps us seated all day. Yet, if we look back, thinking back to the day we met at the Ecumenical Vigil – not even two weeks have passed! – I think we would all agree that we have walked together and that we have come a long way.

Physically, we walked together yesterday on our pilgrimage, which allowed us to come into closer contact with the Christians of the early community and especially with the martyrs, who gave their lives so that we might have faith. This faith in the one Lord unites us with them; we are part of the same Church, and we share the same mission: to announce to the world the Good News of the Gospel, the love and mercy of God towards all humanity and indeed all creation. The martyrs and believers who have gone before us are with us when we celebrate the Eucharist, as we have done in the Basilica. Their prayer sustains us, and we can feel them walking with us: the Synod involves the whole Church, which includes believers in Christ from every place and time. As the Church is the pilgrim People of God throughout the ages, it needs manna in the desert, like the people of Israel. But we have better than manna: we are taken into communion with our Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

In union with the whole Church, we enter now into the work set for the next few days, our third Module, dedicated to Section B2 of the Instrumentum laboris. As we have already learned, each Section and therefore each Module has a title, accompanied by a question, which shows us where to focus our attention in order to avoid getting lost. The title and the question that will guide us over the next few days are: “Co-responsibility in Mission: How can we better share gifts and tasks in the service of the Gospel?”.

Our theme is, therefore, mission. It has been said very clearly at all levels of the synodal process that “a synodal Church is a Church sent out in mission” The Lord’s command given to the Apostles extends to all members of our apostolic Church.

This is not the first time we have encountered the theme of mission during our journey. On the contrary, it continually emerged in the work of the second module: communion is not closed in on itself but is impelled towards mission; at the same time, the purpose of mission is precisely to extend the scope of communion, enabling more and more people to meet the Lord and accept his call to be part of his People.

From the work of the past few days, we can take an example to highlight the perspective from which we will reflect on mission. Several speakers have spoken about the “digital continent”. Many of us see the internet as simply a tool for evangelisation. It is more than that. It transforms our ways of living, of perceiving reality, and of living relations. Thus, it becomes a new mission territory.

Just as Francis Xavier left for new lands, are we willing and prepared to sail towards this new continent? Most of us cannot be guides in these new mission contexts ... we have to be guided by the people who inhabit the digital continent. Mostly we bishops are not the pioneers of this mission, but those who are learning along a path opened up by the younger members of the People of God. We will hear more about this later. In any case, this example helps us to understand why our title speaks of co-responsibility in mission: all the baptised are called and have the right to participate in the mission of the Church, all have an irreplaceable contribution to make. What is true for the digital continent is also true for other aspects of the mission of the Church.

This is the horizon within which the five worksheets for Section B2 are placed. Each group will address only one of them, trusting the work of other Circuli Minores on the other worksheets, the fruits of which we will share in plenary. The first Worksheet deals with the need to deepen the meaning and content of the mission, which in our Church is conveyed through a plurality of languages and images. It is further diversity that we are called to receive as a gift that makes us richer. The mission of the Church is to proclaim the Gospel, starting with the kerygma. This mission is not just confined to our lips, but it has to appear in the manifold dimensions of our everyday lives. To the mission of the Church belongs the commitment to integral ecology, the struggle for justice and peace, the preferential option for the poor and the peripheries, and the willingness to be open to encounter with all.

The second Worksheet focuses on ministeriality in the Church. Once again, we will hear some testimonies. I want to dwell a little more on the other three Worksheets, because an Assembly like our needs to be very careful when dealing with them. As members of the People of God, all the themes of the Instrumentum laboris concern us closely and touch us. But these three do so in a particular way. In fact, with respect to these three themes, each of us is the bearer of a point of view that is essential, but to address the themes effectively, we are also called to realise our own partiality. The best way to understand what I mean by this is to review the three Worksheets.

Most of us are men. But men and women receive the same baptism and the same Spirit. The baptism of women is not inferior to the baptism of men. How can we ensure that women feel they are an integral part of this missionary Church? Do we, the men, perceive the diversity and the richness of the charisms the Holy Spirit has given to women? Or the way that how we act often depends on our past education, our family upbringing and experience, or the prejudices and stereotypes of our culture? Do we feel enriched or threatened when we share our common mission and when women are co-responsible in the mission of the Church, on the basis of the grace of our common Baptism?

Besides being men, most of us are also ordained ministers. In the People of God there are also other components, other charisms, other vocations, and other ministries. What is the relation between ordained ministry and other baptismal ministries? We all know the image of the body Saint Paul uses. Are we ready to accept that all parts of the body are important? Are we ready to accept that Christ is the head of the body, and that the body can only function if each part relates to the head and to the other parts? Can the body of our Church act in harmony or are the parts twisting in all directions?

The last Worksheet concerns Bishops, whose ministry by the Lord’s will structures the communion of the Church. How should it be renewed and promoted in order to be exercised in a manner appropriate to a synodal Church? Most of us here are bishops. This question cannot but challenge us in a particular way, because the answer will have a direct impact on our everyday lives, on the way we manage our time, on the priorities of our agenda, on the expectations of the People of God towards us, and on the way we conceive our mission.

We must be well aware of the degree and intensity of our involvement. And when we are so involved in a particular question or reality, we need even more the courage to take a step back to authentically listen to others, make room within ourselves for their word and ask what the Spirit is suggesting to us through them. This applies to the way we listen to those who are not bishops and who are therefore bearers of a different point of view, but also to other bishops because, in the end, each of us has his own way of being a bishop. Sharing our own experience of episcopacy and how this has changed over time, can be of great help.

Making space for each other's words is a focus that we must continue to cultivate in these days, as the method of conversation in the Spirit becomes more familiar to us. Facilitators report that on average Circuli Minores have a harder time during the second round. This is precisely the moment when each person is called upon for a moment to put aside their point of view, their own thinking, in order to pay attention to the resonances that listening to others arouses within them. It is not a prolongation of the first round, but an opportunity to open to something new, something we may never have thought of in that way. This is the gift the Spirit has in store for each of us. The same attention to listening must then continue during the General Congregations: as we have often been reminded in the past few days, free interventions should express the resonances with the insights shared by the groups immediately before. For this reason, it will be important that more and more the reports of the Circuli Minores and the interventions of the rapporteurs present the points of convergence and divergence, but above all the questions to be explored and the proposals for concrete steps to be taken during the coming year.

As you have seen, in this Module we touch on some of the key points of our Synod. Let us not give hasty answers that do not consider all the aspects of these difficult questions. We have theologians we can consult, and we have time to pray and deepen the questions we identify now in order to come to a conclusion in the second session of October 2024.

I thank the Lord for each one of us, for our personal experience, for living our ministry, for walking with Christ in the times which are ours. I also thank those who help us carry on this reflection: Mother Ignazia Angelini with her biblical insights, Prof. Carlos Galli with theological insights, and those who will offer their testimonies after them. They help us to go deeper into the themes and questions and, above all, to frame them. In light of what we hear in this introductory session, everyone can revise the speech they had prepared for the first round of Circuli Minores this afternoon.

I wish each of us and all of us as an Assembly a time of fruitful listening to the Spirit.

Source: https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/info/2023/10/13/synod23---ottava-congregazione-generale---introduzione-al-modulo.html



General Congregations 8 - 13 October 2023 - Spiritual points

“And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest.” Lk 24:8

Women and mission (I.L., B.2.3; Lk 11:15-28; Acts 16:13-15)

sr. Maria Grazia Angelini O.S.B

Co-responsibility in Mission: towards a shared awareness of the meaning and content. How can we better share gifts and tasks in the service of the Gospel. B 2.3 How can the Church of our time better fulfil its mission through greater recognition and promotion of the baptismal dignity of women? It is not a question of promotion and recognition in the worldly sense, of rights and desires, but of the well-being of the Church. In fidelity to the Origin, who is Jesus, his style, his words, his silences, his choices.

The Gospel is inspiring: in these days of the Synod too, beginning first and foremost with the Eucharist. Celebrating in faith is the generative womb of every reform in the Church. And so, today’s reading (inseparable from tomorrow’s), at a critical point in Jesus’ communication with the crowd, in the midst of the conflict of interpretations, introduces - interwoven with Jesus’ words - (“as Jesus said these things, ...”), the cry of a woman. The cry of a woman from the crowd who is touched by Jesus’ revelation is disruptive and inspired - because she does not know, perhaps using a popular saying, that she is proclaiming the “beatitude of the womb.” It corresponds admirably to the blessing proclaimed at the beginning of the Gospel by another woman, also in response to the sign picked up from the womb (Lk 1:45: “Blessed is the fruit of your womb...!”), “Blessed is the womb...!” she says. The anonymous woman in the crowd senses that in that man, the Rabbi of Nazareth who makes the one who was possessed by a mute demon speak, that the generation of all life is at stake. She intuits the original mystery of generation that is revealed in him. She perceives, she cries out, but she does not know what to say, and so implicitly invokes what prompted her intuition.

And, picking up on her visceral intuition, Jesus develops it by transforming it and decoding its irruption, thus resolving the conflict of interpretations that were besieging him. He develops what is only a cry, questioning astonishment: in the humanity of Jesus, God speaks, and that human person generated from the womb is involved in his mystery.

“It is not flesh or blood” (cf. Mt 16:17; cf. Lk 8:21), he had already told Simon – to another cry of faith. Without refuting the woman of the people, he corrects her, deriving the truth and thus silencing the insinuation of his adversaries: to him, beatitude is found in listening, welcoming, and creativity. To listen, to understand, to give flesh to the Word: the Word that was generated in the beginning.

Thus, the lightning-quick dialogue between Jesus and the anonymous woman in the crowd is full of symbolic, inspiring power. And, from there, from this humble prophetic voice – welcomed and deconstructed, or rather re-expressed – Jesus can resume his painful journey to Jerusalem, amidst insidious suspicions and the wonder of the little ones.

It is somewhat similar to what happened at Cana, with the cry of the mother which Jesus questions and transforms: “They have no wine” (or with the Samaritan woman, or with the Canaanite woman, or with Mary of Magdala).

This Gospel, from its luminous margins, powerfully evangelises the questioning gathering of this Synod on the theme of mission and how to recognise different expressions of ministries. That anonymous woman’s cry, in its humility, exorcises verbalism and proceduralism. It raises fruitful questions and clears the way: “Those who hears the Word and keep it.”

And light, in a convergent sense, seems to me to come if we compare this Gospel reading with the account of that critical passage of the apostolic church (Acts 16) in which, in the disorientation of the missionaries’ plans, traversed by the irruption of the Spirit, the Gospel enters Europe. And it opens the mission to unprecedented fruitfulness, thanks to the humble, generative contribution of women. Are they merely extras? No, simply “grasped by the Word,” they open unseen spaces to the Gospel.

The Council of Jerusalem had just taken place (Acts 15), the ways of the Gospel began to radiate beyond the land of Israel, not without encountering obstacles on the path. Immediately, following the first missionary journey, bitter disagreements arose between Paul and Barnabas, though they were close friends. A controversial discernment over the presence of young Mark led to a parting of their ways (Acts 15:36-40). We must imagine a process of struggling to understand. Difference - even to the point of conflict – however necessary and fruitful in the Church, nevertheless differs from quarrelsome and poisoned contention, because it never demonises the opponent, but makes room for him. Having separated paths, Paul and his co-workers[1] later face unforeseen obstacles or rather, as the book of Acts expresses it, “the Holy Spirit forbade them to proclaim the word in Asia” (Acts 16:6). Pope Francis reminded us in the opening homily of this Synodal Assembly, “So many missionary plans that end up in what appear to be blind alleys are in reality the crisis that opens new visions of Church.”

At Troas, a port, the point of departure to reach Europe, Paul has a vision: a Macedonian who pleads with him, saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” The pagan’s cry hijacks and converts Paul's plans. This is not the first time this change of itinerary is caused by a Breath from above. The dream, the passivity and restlessness of the dream, of the startling vision, opens totally new vistas. It leads to conflicts, it opens horizons. Thus begins the second missionary journey - starting from disorienting premises.

And so, the Church arrives in Europe, and it does so in a surprising, new form: starting from the margins, from the banks of the river, just outside a wealthy Roman city. “Women had gathered there for prayer.” Strangely, Paul was welcomed by a liturgy outside the ritual, among women, in the open air. The apostle did not start here, as was his custom, in the synagogue (one probably did not exist in Philippi, a Roman colony). He inserted himself into a “non ritual” female liturgy, breaking into it with the word of the Gospel.

As on Easter morning, so too this beginning/threshold is without men. The apostle is preceded, and welcomed, by the unusual koinonia of women praying, under the open sky. Here Paul approaches, with his passion for the Gospel.

Thus began the course of the Gospel in Europe. In Philippi, mission emerged from a well-defined territory, and found new spaces. New languages inaugurated by women, whom Paul does not disdain, whom he rather gathered as a kairos: he preached to them, entered into dialogue. Lydia, humble worshipper of God and a seller of purple cloth, would become the first believer in the land of Europe.

Lydia is identified by her essence as a “hearer” of the Word, in dialogical, free and creative docility. she keeps the Word by seeking recognition from the apostle, offering hospitality: “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come”: a splendid inclusiveness of gifts that generates the Church. The apostle’s power of discernment before the simple openness of a heart opens new vistas for mission.

And so, Lydia offers her home to the apostles, “prevailing on” them to accept (16:15). On this threshold, the Church in Europe is born, through a gesture that emerges as a way of putting into practice the faith (“if you have judged me to be a believer”), and offers the space of her domus (“come to my house and stay”).

Lydia's house is thus redefined by the irruption of the Gospel. As Jesus had done and commanded: whatever city you enter, find a home (cf. Mt 10:11). Space constructed by bonds rather than walls. The basic ecclesial space, the “domus” that today powerfully begs to be rediscovered and articulated in new languages, according to its original wisdom.

The birth of a church in Europe evokes the original story. It recalls the novelty – how much is this grasped and understood today? – inaugurated by Jesus with those women who followed him, supporting his ministry out of their means (it is Luke again who tells us this: Lk 8:1-3): all the way to the cross, to the open tomb, and to the garden. On the third day...

The movement originated by the Gospel, and the soul of every true synodal journey, generates new, generative relationships. And the contribution of women, who are extremely diverse among themselves, (the woman of the people, the businesswoman of Cyrene...), unceasingly fuels the spiritual dynamism of reform, when the pattern becomes inadequate to the mystery it conveys. Vatican II inaugurated a reform movement that has been interrupted.

In the light of the Beginnings, Jesus’ style – that seems to comprehend that women are dynamic elements of mission, like a presence that in critical, disruptive, unsettling passages - senses the movement of life, weaves new, improbable relationships, patiently brings and dissolves conflicts. It is not a question of rights but of gifts received.

For mission, therefore, there are different diakonias. In each case, an “outgoing” synodal Church, in the beginning as today, immediately encounters the presence of women, various and diverse women, not to be homologated - to be discerned (“if you have judged me to be...”), certainly, and to be integrated based on the particularity of each one. This is the evidence of the Word. The element inscribed in generative roots, as a constitutive trait of evangelical newness, disregarded for centuries. Jesus was innovative, he created a daring and revelatory style, in his way of relating to women, but this peculiarity finds provocative validation in the current climate. Today we find ourselves in the concrete situation of realising that this relates to us – it relates to the Church that seeks reform.

To go forth and proclaim the coming of the Kingdom, Jesus says “the home” is indispensable in his discourses on the mission (Lk 10:5-8; Mt 10:11-14). It is understood as a place of reliable, nurturing bonds. A place of prayer, on the margins.

Thus, when the Council in outlining the missionary Church states, “...the contemplative life belongs to the fullness of the Church's presence” (Ad Gentes, 18), does this not echo this same trait, does it not outline unprecedented ministries?

Let us ask ourselves where this constitutive trait in Gospel novelty related to Jesus’ style has ended up today, given the first proclamation of the resurrection to the apostles was entrusted to a woman. And the first Christian community, with the company of the Apostles has Mary, his Mother, at its center.

This question begs to be asked: how does Jesus’ style – certainly in a radically changed cultural, anthropological, and social context – connote mission, in a global culture that seems to be losing its contours, roots, and differences? In particular, how does it ferment, with the generative power of inclusive relationships, and its places, its language of celebration, and of the outbound Church?

The beginning of the evangelising mission in Europe offers food for thought.

And to those whose hearts are sensitive to his visitation, the Spirit unveils ways and languages to give him flesh.

[1] Here, among other things, the Acts narrative (16:10) begins to be offered in the first-person plural, to the “we,” with which Luke enters on tiptoe as the lead narrator (already in Acts 11:27). This change of narrative point of view, with which Luke enters Europe alongside the Apostle, gives greater emphasis on the "synodal" character of the second missionary journey – “never without the other.”

https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/info/2023/10/13/231013b.html