CV NEWS FEED // The faithful of the United States want the 2024 Synod to focus on building a welcoming and bold Church, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville told the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops during the first day of the bishops’ 2024 Plenary Assembly this week.
Bishop Flores said that the faithful’s hopes were reflected in the U.S. National Synthesis for the Interim Stage of the 2021-2024 Synod, which brought together diocesan and working group reports from across the country and submitted them to the Secretariat for the Synod.
“The interim report sent to the Secretariat for the Synod offers two principal images to express the hopes and tensions we live out in our local communities and institutions—the desire for the church to serve as a safe harbor and the desire to engage more robustly the prophetic mystery of the church as a kind of fiery communion that leads into the kingdom,” Bishop Flores said.
Bishop Flores said that the “safe harbor” idea not only signifies a welcoming Church that supports and sustains its faithful and others, but also demands a clearer communication of what it means to be Catholic.
“But we hear also a desire to be bolder in expressing what distinguishes the way of Christ from the standard patterns and whims of the world we live in,” he continued, later adding that any disagreements are rooted in “a more basic agreement about what we should be about.”
“That is to say, we should be about the embracing love of Christ and about the prophetic witness to what he announced and what he did, and what he does,” Bishop Flores clarified. “In this context I think evangelization can come into clearer focus for us.”
Archbishop Thomas Zinkula of Dubuque gave a brief insight into the language of the interim document, highlighting that the team responsible for creating the interim report chose to use the word “tension” instead of “division” whenever possible.
“We felt that the word tension honestly articulated the experience of the people of God,” he said, adding that the word “division” often has negative connotations.
“If tensions are managed appropriately they can contribute to the health and holiness of the church,” he added. “Tension doesn’t have to be viewed as an automatically bad word—in fact, tension is necessary for proper spiritual and human growth and development.”
“As we continue accompanying one another and our people on the synodal path, let’s neither shy away from the tensions necessary for the dynamism of our fiery communion nor perpetuate divisions that hinder our mission and destabilize our safe harbor,” he concluded.
Bishop Flores returned for a final update on the logistics of the October synodal assembly, saying that the Vatican has introduced “cross-dicasterial collaboration in working groups” to address more severe issues that have arisen during the global synodal process.
These topics, which include issues like poverty and relationships between the Latin and Eastern Church, will be presented to Pope Francis by June 2025, leaving the Synod in October to focus more on synodality than those issues.
Bishop Flores added that the Instrumentum Laboris, the Synod’s working document, is currently being developed in Rome in preparation for October’s assembly.
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