In this space two weeks ago I addressed our opportunity to participate in the synodal process that will lead to a Synod of the Universal Church in 2023. By the time you are reading this we will have engaged parishioners serving on parish committees and ministries in this process and more are schedule to do so in fairly short order.
There is an appropriately strong desire to engage many of us in this conversation for the sake of the strength of the Church in our own time and to deepen the faith witness of the Holy Spirit through the Church for generations to come. Unlike the shadowland into which many leaders seem to be falling in many facets of society, we are not trying to fgure out who is right and who is wrong, but to fgure out how we all bring our experience and our aspirations to the table in order to discover what is True.
Although Covid precautions cause us to tread carefully, true "conversation” is best captured when actually gathered for this purpose. The space of our parish center will afford us the opportunity to do so. If, however, you would like to participate from the safety of home, directions regarding how to do so are being made available in the parish bulletin. All material developed in response to and provided by participants here at St. Peter’s will be received and collated here in order to be made available to our Bishop who then, in turn, will forward the resulting questions, suggestions, and wisdom to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, DC. They will discern the contribution to be made to this universal action of the Church from our American perspective.
God has promised in Christ to meet our poverty with the richness of the Kingdom, our hunger with that which truly satisfes, our weeping with full-throated laughter, our being excluded for His sake … our joy in the Kingdom will be great!