Pope Francis closes Synod saying Church needs to ‘get its hands dirty to serve the Lord’

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Pope Francis closes Synod saying Church needs to ‘get its hands dirty to serve the Lord’
Closing the Synod, Pope Francis rebuked the Church for being ‘seated in blindness’ and urged the Church to ‘take up the cry of the world’ and be ‘a Church that gets its hands dirty to serve the Lord.’



Pope Francis at the Synod closing Mass
Credit: Michael Haynes

Oct 27, 2024
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis formally closed the Synod on Synodality with a Mass at the Vatican today, stating that the Church “cannot remain seated” but must be a “standing Church” which “gets its hands dirty to serve the Lord.”

Joined by all the participants of the Synod on Synodality in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis presided from the throne over the Mass which marked the formal closure of the Synod which began in 2021.

READ: Synod final text calls for continued ‘process’ with synodal ‘listening’ and dialogue

His homily was highly anticipated, being seen as the Pope’s last charge to the Synod over which he has presided and which has dominated the Church’s life in recent years.  Indeed, the Synod final document states that though the official event is over, the process is only beginning: “The synodal process does not conclude with the end of the current Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, but it also includes the implementation phase.”

Not failing to deliver on such homiletic expectations, Francis issued a condemnation of Church’s practices and proposed a new style, by drawing from the Gospel passage of Christ meeting Bartimaeus, the blind beggar sitting by the road whom Christ healed.

Francis decried a Church that is blind and sitting, saying that “before the questions of today’s women and men, the challenges of our time, the urgencies of evangelization and the many wounds that afflict humanity, sisters and brothers, we cannot remain seated.”

“A sitting Church,” he continued, “which almost without realizing it withdraws from life and confines itself to the margins of reality, is a Church that risks remaining in blindness and settling into its own malaise.”

Francis at the Synod 2024 closing Mass. Credit: Michael Haynes

Accusing the Church of already being unable to recognize global issues, Francis said that “if we remain seated in our blindness, we will continue to fail to see our pastoral urgencies and the many problems of the world in which we live.”

He attested that the Synod on Synodality calls the Church to “cry out” to Christ like Bartimaeus. This is done, said Francis, by the Church “taking up the cry of all women and men on earth: the cry of those who long to discover the joy of the Gospel and those who have turned away instead; the silent cry of those who are indifferent; the cry of those who suffer, the poor, the marginalized, the child labor slaves enslaved in so many parts of the world to labor; the broken voice, hearing that broken voice of those who no longer even have the strength to cry out to God, because they have no voice or because they have resigned themselves.”

“We do not,” he said, “need a sitting and resigned Church, but we need a Church that takes up the cry of the world and – I want to say this, maybe some people are shocked – a Church that gets its hands dirty to serve the Lord.”

A “synodal Church” is one that follows Christ “along the road” and is a “standing Church.”

Echoing the recurring talking point of the Synod, Francis closed by describing the newly synodal Church as “a community whose primacy is in the gift of the Spirit, who makes us all brothers in Christ and lifts us up to Him.”

The final document of the multi-year Synod was issued on October 26. Francis will not write an Apostolic Exhortation, but instead approved the text, meaning that under his own 2018 Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis communio, once the final document of a synod “is expressly approved by the Roman Pontiff, the Final Document participates in the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter.”

The text contains numerous talking points, and some mandatory elements, for changing the Church’s daily life and governance in line with “synodality.” This word, the text posits as being heavily focussed on “listening” to all – meaning seeking ways to make those the text identifies as “marginalized” feel welcome – and ecumenism.

Opening the Synod in 2021, Francis quoted Vatican II theologian Father Yves Congar and called for “a different Church” courtesy of the Synod. The intimate link between the Synod and Vatican II has been consistently highlighted throughout the process, and the Synod’s final text re-iterates this.

“Rooted in the Tradition of the Church, the entire synodal journey took place in the light of the conciliar magisterium,” the document notes.

The key words from the very beginning, in the earliest documents, have been “listening, dialogue,” whilst those such as “sharing… conversion… being inclusive…journeying together…  inter-religious dialogue…” also featured heavily. Given this, the Synod has from the start been described by some Catholic theologians as containing a “fundamental error” due to the listening to non-Catholics about how the Church should live.

Notably, the Synod’s final text echoes the recent words of Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández in saying that “the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open,” despite Catholic teaching infallibly stating that the matter is closed.

READ: Cardinal Fernández says question of female deacons is not closed, citing Pope Francis

It also highlights desires for increased ecumenism, and synodal style of governance at every level of the Church, including for the papacy. Some further limits would be placed on papal power, with the text arguing a pope cannot “ignore a direction which emerges through proper discernment within a consultative process, especially if this is done by participatory bodies.”

Such changes on Church life would be seen also at the local, provincial and national level, as the implementation of various styles of councils “must be made mandatory,” the document states.

This will be done in order to effect “decentralization,” and implement “synodality.”

READ: Synod final text calls for continued ‘process’ with synodal ‘listening’ and dialogue

However such moves, while warmly welcomed by the Synod, are not without criticism. In 2018 Cardinal Raymond Burke remarked that “synodality” has “become like a slogan, meant to suggest some kind of new church which is democratic and in which the authority of the Roman Pontiff is relativized and diminished — if not destroyed.”

He warned that some, “not understanding the notion of a synod correctly[,] could think, for instance, that the Catholic Church has now become some kind of democratic body with some kind of new constitution.”