Called to be We
Guest Commentary
By Meredith Gould
Words both reflect and shape faith; they have featured big during our synod process. Take, for example, our insistence that in all our communications the word “process” follow the word “synod.” Remove “process” as a modifier and it would seem as if the synod is a finite event. There is much more than a nice bit of wordsmithing going on here.
To participants, it becomes more obvious every day that our synod is anything but a finite event in the life of our diocese. Each phase of our synod process reveals that there’s more to know and learn about being church. There will be much to do in the years ahead.
Who will be doing all this future work? We will.
But now it looks like the word “we” needs to be more clearly defined. This became apparent when recently and not for the first time, a lay participant asked with all sincerity, “Will they do anything?”
I find this somewhat astonishing for any number of reasons. First, the we-ness of our faith is established through the foundational sacrament of Baptism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that, “The whole community of believers is . . . priestly. The faithful exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king.” (CCC 1546).
Our we-ness is manifest in The Nicene Creed which starts, of course, with the glorious assertion that, “We believe. . .” And, our understanding of what it means to be “one holy catholic and apostolic Church” must be understood as something we are called to be and do.
I would suggest that Christian faith demands that we abandon the notion of “they” and that the synod process is, among other things, revealing the radical difficulty of doing so. The real question is not whether they, presumably defined as clergy, diocesan officials and synod delegates, will respond to what the people of God have to say throughout the synod process, but whether we will. Will we?
Meredith Gould, Ph.D., who writes about Catholic culture and tradition, also coordinates synod communications for the Diocese of Metuchen and produces a quarterly newsletter for St. Charles Borromeo Parish, Skillman. She is currently working on a book about the Jewish roots of the sacraments of initiation.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law