MIAMI | Along with every other Catholic diocese on the planet, the Archdiocese of Miami marked the opening of the worldwide Synod on Synodality with a solemn Mass Oct. 17, 2021.

In the coming weeks, the work of listening and discernment will begin in every parish. And Archbishop Thomas Wenski urged South Florida’s Catholics to put aside divisions and do as Pope Francis has asked: “listen, one to the other and all to the Holy Spirit.”

“We must not barricade ourselves in our certainties or ‘soundproof’ our hearts so as not to hear the voice of the other, or the voice of the Spirit,” the archbishop told more than 300 Synod members gathered for the opening Mass at St. Mary Cathedral.

The synod members were selected by their pastors — three from each parish — to facilitate the listening and discernment sessions. After the Mass, they got to practice what they will be helping others to do: reflecting on three questions, including whether they feel “heard” in the Church and how the Church can help them grow in their personal relationship with Jesus.

They were the first people in the archdiocese to go through that process, said Rosemarie Banich, synod coordinator.

The listening sessions will be held in every South Florida parish between now and November, with participants breaking up into groups of three to answer the three questions. Parishes probably will host more than one session to give everyone a chance to be heard. Separate sessions can be held for different language groups, ministry groups, or parishioners in general. Some may even share their views through online questionnaires.

After facilitating those sessions, synod members will consolidate the results into a single report for each parish. Banich will in turn consolidate those reports into one diocesan report for the U.S. bishops, who in turn will share their consolidated report on U.S. dioceses with bishops from North America and eventually the Vatican.

Those consolidated reports will form the gist of the discussion when the world’s bishops gather in Rome in October 2023. Pope Francis set in motion this process when he celebrated a synod opening Mass the weekend of Oct. 9, 2021.

The official title of this Synod on Synodality is “Towards a synodal Church: communion, participation and mission,” which Archbishop Wenski explained this way: “Pope Francis is inviting all of God’s people — and not just the elites of parishes and chanceries — to listen, one to the other, and all to the Holy Spirit, to discern a path forward for the Church, to imagine a different future for the Church and her institutions in keeping with the mission she has received.”

The pope does not want the Church to become “a ‘museum,’ beautiful but mute, with much past but little future,” Archbishop Wenski said.

But he noted that the information gathered at the listening sessions will help the archdiocese with its own “strategic planning” — the non “churchy” word for synod. That planning was last done eight years ago, when Archbishop Wenski convoked only the second general synod in the archdiocese’s 63 years of history.

“Faced with the loss of credibility due to scandals that have wounded the Body of Christ, given the growing secularism of our society, a secularism that wants to exile God from our consciousness and marginalize those who persist in believing, and taking into account the challenges of an ongoing pandemic, and for many other reasons, some strategic planning won’t hurt,” the archbishop said in his homily.

“This is also valuable for the parish,” said Banich. “The parish is going to have a gold mine of information” about the particular needs of its faithful.

She said from her experience directing the archdiocese’s second general synod, common concerns will quickly become evident and not be difficult to consolidate. More specific concerns might not rise to the archdiocesan level “but they are super important for the parish and have to be tended to within the parish.”

“I sense a different excitement” this time, Banich added, because instead of the large, regional listening sessions of that second archdiocesan synod, this time “every parish is involved. I think this has a different feel to it.”

“The last one was good and this one is good too,” said Susan Cordell, a synod member from St. John the Apostle Parish in Hialeah. “You get different ideas. You hear what people have to say. And you discern, what is the Spirit saying through all of this?”

• Watch the synod opening Mass here.
• Read Archbishop Wenski’s homily here.
• Read Archbishop Wenski's reflection on Exodus 6 here.