By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service • Posted October 28, 2024

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — After members of the Synod of Bishops approved their final document, Pope Francis announced that he would not write the customary post-synodal apostolic exhortation but would offer the final document to the entire church to implement.

“There are already highly concrete indications in the document that can be a guide for the mission of the churches in the different continents and contexts,” he told synod members late Oct. 26.

“For that reason, I do not intend to publish an apostolic exhortation. What we have approved is enough,” he said. Instead, he ordered the publication of the synod’s final document.

With the exceptions of the first synods convoked by St. Paul VI in 1967 and 1971, all ordinary assemblies of the Synod of Bishops have been followed by an exhortation on the synod’s themes and discussions by the pope.

Members of the synod on synodality, after meeting for a month in 2023 and again from Oct. 2-26, approved their final document by voting on each of the 155 paragraphs. All paragraphs passed with the approval of more than two-thirds of the members present and voting.

The document presented synodality as a style of Christian life and ministry based on the “equal dignity of all the baptized” and a recognition that they all have something to offer to the mission of proclaiming salvation in Christ.

The practical suggestions included making pastoral councils mandatory for every parish and ensuring the bodies are truly representative of the parish members, recognizing the contributions of women to the life and ministry of the church and hiring more women and laymen to teach in seminaries.

The 10 study groups the pope set up in the spring to research some of the more complicated issues raised by the synod — women’s ministry, seminary education, relations between bishops and religious communities, the role of nuncios — will continue to work before offering him proposals, the pope said. “Time is needed, to arrive at choices that involve the whole church.”

However, he promised that “this is not the classical way of postponing decisions indefinitely.”

Instead, he told synod members, it “corresponds to the synodal style with which even the Petrine ministry is to be exercised: listening, convening, discerning, deciding and evaluating. And in these steps, pauses, silences, prayer are necessary. It is a style that we are learning together, little by little.”

Much of the 2021-2023 process for the synod on synodality, the pope said, involved listening sessions on a parish, diocesan, national and continental level and included helping synod members themselves learn to listen to each other respectfully and listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit in those conversations.

The final document “is a triple gift,” he said, one given to him first of all. “The bishop of Rome, I often remind myself, needs to practice listening and wants to practice listening so as to respond each day to the words of the Lord, ‘Confirm your brothers and sisters in the faith. Feed my sheep.'”

The task of the pope, he said, “is to safeguard and promote — as St. Basil teaches us — the harmony that the Spirit continues to spread in God’s church, in relations among the churches, despite all the struggles, tensions and divisions that mark its journey toward the full manifestation of the Kingdom of God, which the vision of the Prophet Isaiah invites us to imagine as a banquet prepared by God for all peoples — all, with the hope that no one is missing.”

Pope Francis repeated the phrase that has become a refrain since he first said it at World Youth Day in Portugal in 2023: “Everyone, everyone, everyone! No one excluded, everyone.”

Harmony is the goal, he said, not uniformity. It is a sign of the Holy Spirit, just as it was on Pentecost when people of different nations heard the disciples proclaiming the wondrous works of God in their own languages.

The church, the pope said, “a sign and instrument of how God has already set the table and is waiting. His grace, through the Spirit, whispers words of love into the heart of each person. It is given to us to amplify the voice of this whisper, without hindering it; to open doors, without erecting walls.”

“How bad it is when women and men of the church erect walls,” he said. The Gospel is for “everyone, everyone, everyone! We must not behave as if we were dispensers of grace who appropriate the treasure and tie the hands of the merciful God.”