Synodality - without discernment?

 In Autumn 2021 I gave some considerable thought to the practical meaning of the term "synodality". I was trying to understand the term, not as a theological or ecclesial concept, but as something that would determine how I might live my life as a lay Catholic (or how a priest/Bishop/religious might live their Catholic lives). The three key words of the synodal process - communion, participation and mission - did not lead me to anything particularly novel.

I ended up thinking that what a synodal ecclesial life demands is that each individual, in their particular office and circumstances in the Church, should live their vocation more fully according to its own principles. The lay person needs to live more fully as a lay person, the parish priest more fully as a parish priest, the bishop more fully as a bishop. And each has its own responsibility that is not derived from the responsibility of other vocations in the Church. It should not be a surprise, I suspect, that an exercise in renewal of Catholic life should attempt to make new what is in a sense "old" and already there to be lived.

Given this sense of the autonomy of the lay life, the thought that, in order to live a synodal life, I should take part in discussions at parish level that would then be fed into deanery or diocesan syntheses appeared contradictory. A choice to volunteer in visiting patients in my local hospital, for example, did not depend on that process at all. I should just get on with it.

So, rightly or wrongly, and perhaps wrongly, I decided that I would not invest any emotional, intellectual or temporal capital in the synodal process.

Now that parish, diocesan and national synthesis documents are available to be read, the common sense of my decision seems to have been borne out. As far as my own diocese is concerned, I cannot fault the way in which the Bishop presented the process and encouraged parishes to undertake their gatherings. I think he perfectly captured Pope Francis' intention in this regard. But reading the synthesis documents I have gained a sense of a "listening" that is being "reported upwards" in a kind of organisational way, without the exercise of discernment that parish priest and bishop, by virtue of their offices in the Church, might have exercised.

It strikes me, for example, that there already exists a discernment that can be offered in response to concerns about the welcome of divorced and LGBT people in the Church. During the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis promoted a very high valuing of participation in the Church's mission of charity and, in the case of those in difficult marriage circumstances, encouraged this as a way of fully engaging in the life of the Church when it may not be possible to be more fully involved in sacramental life (cf Amoris Laetitia Chapter 8).

And it is not synodal to simply pass upwards a discernment that your own office in the Church enables you to make.