The following extracts are from an article by Sr. Nathalie Becquart, Xavière  (UISG) 

Religious Life Cannot Miss This Appointment!

This global pandemic and sanitary crisis act as a revelation of both our ills, dysfunctions and lights, good practices. It particularly highlights inequalities and injustices but also initiatives of solidarity and care for the weakest. This time is also a “Kairos”, an opportunity to stop and check in to choose a better future and build a better world. Trying to read together the signs of the times in the midst of this uncharted context, we hear even more loudly the cry of the poor, the cry of the oppressed, the cry of those who ask for breath.

To fulfill her mission in taking account of our contemporary contexts and cultures to serve the common good of our “common home”, the Church has to embody the path of synodality.

Synodality is a way of being and acting, promoting the participation of all the baptised and people of good will. It means to “walk together” in a pilgrim church, a church on the move, the church of the people of God, where everyone has a voice and takes an active part whatever their age, sex or state of life.

At the heart of synodality, Pope Francis places listening, the mutual listening through which listening to the Holy Spirit is made: “A synodal Church is a Church of listening, with the awareness that listening “is more than hearing”.

In this vision of synodality embodied by the image of the inverted pyramid  “this image offers us the most appropriate interpretive framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself.”  From it we can deduce a style of leadership and manner of exercising power.

 In conclusion, to follow up this perspective of an interconnection between the approach opened by Laudato Si and the ecclesiology of synodality, we have to envision how the ecological conversion, the cultural conversion, the pastoral conversion and the synodal conversion are interrelated. As long as human beings promote abusive relationships towards the earth to exploit it, they will have a tendency to develop abusive relationships among them and vice versa.

The path to implement Laudato Si’, Justice and Peace, equality and fraternity to shift the paradigm that destroys our planet and oppressed so many victims is the path of synodality. The method underlying synodality is the method of dialogue, listening and discernment in common.

Thus to find the best practices for synodality and to end all form of abuses in the Church and in the society, there is probably a source of inspiration to take away from those who are exploring new ways of being and doing together based on the notion of co-operation, collective intelligence, communal deliberation, shared governance, and circular leadership.

 Religious Life Cannot Miss This Appointment!

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