Learning by Doing by Learning
Newsletter for July 18, 2025
Earlier this month, the General Secretariat of the Synod released Pathways for the Implementation Phase of the Synod 2025–2028, a document outlining the participants, roles, responsibilities, and suggested methodologies for this next stage of nurturing the synodal church. While the document gives us several helpful reference points, including the timeline for the implementation phase that will culminate in an ecclesial assembly in Rome in 2028, there is still a tendency to fall into the abstract, circular language that characterized some of the texts from the synod’s earlier phases.
Pathways identifies three main agents of the implementation phase: diocesan or eparchial bishops, “synodal teams” (alongside “participatory bodies” such as parish councils), and groupings of local churches such as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The document defines synodal teams as including “Laymen and Laywomen, Priests and Deacons, Consecrated men and women of different ages and from different cultures and formation background [sic], representing the diverse ministries and charisms of the Church.” Their role is “to promote and facilitate the growth of synodal dynamism within the concrete contexts in which each local Church lives” and thus become “laboratories of synodality.”
The guiding text for the implementation phase is the synod’s Final Document (FD), which is part of the Magisterium of the church and thus “commits the entire People of God” to carrying out its vision. Pathways elaborates:
The implementation phase is an ecclesial process in the full sense. It involves all the Churches in their role as recipients of the FD, and therefore the entire People of God, women and men, in the wide range of charisms, vocations and ministries by which it is enriched and in the various forms in which its life is concretely lived (small Christian communities or basic ecclesial communities, parishes, associations and movements, communities of consecrated men and women, etc.).
Elsewhere, the document spells out the end goal of this churchwide reception: “With attentive listening to the Holy Spirit, and within the ecclesiological vision that the FD receives from the Second Vatican Council, the specific objective of the implementation phase is to discern the steps of conversion of culture, relationships and ecclesial practices, and consequently of reform of structures and institutions” [emphasis mine].
Pathways leaves open the question of how the “various forms” in which synodality “is concretely lived” will be in dialogue with the synodal teams. Small Christian communities, lay associations and movements, and other self-selecting groups have much to offer the church in terms of the “missionary creativity” suggested by the document, but they need to be offered avenues to share their gifts. If the synodal teams take seriously their charge to listen “to the wide variety of contexts in which the Christian community lives and works,” they will want to reach out to these groups—as well as to retreat centers, contemplative prayer groups, and any number of the informal synodal discussion groups that have sprung up in the wake of the 2024 General Assembly—to learn how synodality is self-animating beyond the parish. The document itself endorses this view: “Often, the most effective formation methodology is sharing and reflection in an atmosphere of prayer on the experiences lived as synodal Church, allowing their strengths and weaknesses to emerge.”
This brings us to the paradox of synodality: it is a process of structural reform in the church that cannot be easily structured. Its circularity can be frustrating at times, but it is the circularity of repeating a practice, like meditation or plant propagation, until something takes root—an insight that can be shaped into a new initiative, a spiritual need discovered in conversation that can redirect our approach. Pathways summarizes this learning-by-doing-by-learning, always together and always from each other:
Indeed, to build a synodal Church, content and method very often coincide: meeting and dialoguing as brothers and sisters in Christ on how to better live the synodal dimension of the Church is an experience of synodal Church that opens up a better understanding of the theme.
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic