While the Archdiocesan survey offers a chance to grab a snapshot of the Church in San Francisco, our Jesuit spiritual heritage makes us want to go deeper by listening to the experiences, reflections, and desires of our community. Therefore, St. Ignatius Parish will offer more than the Archdiocesan survey. Using Ignatian methodology and the Preparatory Document of the Synod (https://www.synod.va/en/news/preparatory-document.html), St. Ignatius will offer a series of gatherings (two for each session, so that more people may participate). In these gatherings, parishioners, former parishioners, and all people of good will and desire will be invited to discuss and respond to the call of Francis. 

Keeping in mind the Ignatian process of Experience, Reflection, and Action, our first session will ask participants to share positive and negative experiences of “walking together” in the Church. What experiences do you recall that fostered in you a sense of communion, or participation, or mission? What experiences had the opposite effect? Thus beginning with our particular stories, in the second session, we will seek to explore the feelings that are evoked by hearing one another’s experiences, as a way of identifying the movements of the spirit. What joys or sorrows, what strengths or hurts arise from reflecting on what you have heard? Where do you sense the good spirit at work, and where the “enemy of our human nature”? Finally, in session three, we will take our reflections to the next step, completing our discernment by a call to action. What would we ask of the leadership of the Church going forward? What needs to be strengthened, and what reformed? These conclusions, formed into a single document, will then be passed on to become part of the preparatory material for the Synod that will assemble in Rome next year.

In the call to Synod, Pope Francis is seeking to do nothing less than transform the way the Church deliberates and listens to the Holy Spirit. Furthering the work of Vatican II, he asks us to be the voice of the People of God, as is our shared mission, and to go beyond an outmoded model of “pay, pray, and obey.” Opening the doors to the Spirit, Francis calls on us to respond—but we cannot succeed unless all of us take up our roles and participate. The Church is ours, and we are the Church, but only if we let our voices be heard.

Learn more below in a special introduction by Fr. John Whitney, S.J.

The Synod on Synodality: An Introduction