by Mary Cullen

Taking the pulse

A ‘Festival of Synodality’, sponsored by the bishops’ conference of Scotland and attended by six of Scotland’s eight bishops, was held on Saturday 6 June at Glasgow Caledonian University.  In his words of welcome, Bishop McGee of Argyll and the Isles, who was the Scottish delegate to the Synod on Synodality in Rome between 2021 and 2024, announced that the festival was the launchpad for a three year project aimed at encouraging Conversation in the Spirit at all levels of the church in Scotland. The project will be led by Dr Catriona Fletcher of the Ignatian Spirituality Centre in Glasgow.  A website, resources and training for parishes are being planned

Conversation in the Spirit, as Open House readers will know, is a form of prayerful listening in small groups which lies at the heart of the synodal process.  Its purpose is to help the church discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to it today.  All the baptised, lay and ordained, are invited to be part of the synodal process by virtue of their baptism. Pope Francis described this as ‘the path God expects of the church of the third Millennium’.  (Address on the 50^th anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, 2015).

Nine years later he signed off the final report of the Synod on Synodality which met over three years in Rome between 2021 and 2024.  The report  urges local churches to embed the synodal way of consultation and discernment in all their affairs in order to strengthen the church in its mission of service to the world.  The report makes clear that synodality has profound implications for the church’s culture, its self understanding and its ways of working, including the relationship between ordained and lay, women and men.

The festival, Bishop McGee said, reflected the bishops’ desire to discern and respond to the Spirit’s direction for the church in Scotland.  He introduced the first two guest speakers.  Bishop Alan McGuckian SJ, of Down and Connor, who attended the synod assemblies in Rome and is the man behind the development of Sacred Space, the website designed to help people pray at their computers.  He and his co-worker, Jim Deeds, shared their experience of working together to develop a synodal church in their part of Ireland.

Dr Mary Cullen is a former editor of Open House.

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Image: From the Facebook page of the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles