Australian Cardijn Institute
Cardijn Lecture 2025: Faith in Action/Life & Action in Faith/Life

Speech

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Thursday 13 November, 2025
Webinar

Download the full text in PDF

Good afternoon and thank you to everyone for giving me the opportunity to be with you today, especially in this Jubilee Year of Hope, which, as you all know is also the Centenary Year for the Young Christian Workers movement. It really is a privilege for me to be with you, and I was really pleased when I was invited to take part.

As Stefan said in his introduction, I have a connection with the Cardijn movement. As a young teenager growing up in Saint Peter's parish in East Bentley, I was originally a member of the YCS before I graduated, you might say to the YCW. I eventually became the President of the local YCW in East Bentley, and that was quite a formative experience for me. In a sense, this presentation is a return for me to the early influences of my understanding of the Christian faith which has grown and developed over the years of course, but which very much was grounded in the Cardijn method, the see, judge and act method.

When Stefan contacted me about the possibility of being a part of this event, of offering you some thoughts in this fifth annual Cardijn lecture, two suggestions were offered to me of topics that I might talk about.

One was the idea of action in faith, and the other was what it is like to live in a synodal church. Originally, I opted for the first one, but as I've thought about it I've really tried to weave the two together - the idea of action in faith and faith in action - but also what it means to do that from a synodal perspective in a church which is learning to be more and more synodal. So, I think that's where I'd like to go today, and I hope some of it will make sense to you, because I think the theme of faith in action, action in faith is very much tied to the theme of the recent Synod.

Many of you would be well aware of the work of the Synod and the three key words around which the whole synodal process operated - those of communion, participation and mission. So, I wanted to situate what I want to share with you today within that context but also within the context of our own experience of synodality which preceded the Synod on synodality. I'm speaking, of course, about the Plenary Council, which I was also quite heavily involved in.

Many of you, and perhaps most of you connected with the Church in Australia, have a lot of experience and had already had a lot of experience of synodality before Pope Francis really put it front and centre in the life of the Church. I think this is very important because while many people, and I imagine many of you who are part of this event, have been energised by the prospect of the Church becoming more synodal, I think we’d also all be aware that there are some in the Church who are a bit wary of synodality, and a smaller group, I think, who are rather opposed to the idea of synodality. Some people even see it even as a threat to the Church’s nature, to the Church’s identity. I think that is a mistaken and unfounded fear, but I think it is there and is something that we need to be conscious of.

I’d even go so far as to say, and many of you would be aware of this, that there are some people who have expressed the hope that with the death of Pope Francis, the whole synodal thing might die along with him, to put it bluntly, and that Pope Leo might take us in a different direction. The reality, of course, is exactly the opposite. In the past six months, since he was elected to the papacy, Pope Leo has made it very clear, I think, that he intends for the church to continue along this Synodal path. He might give it a slightly different flavour, or emphasise some things more than others, in comparison to the way Pope Francis went about things, but he has been very specific now on many occasions in insisting that this is the way forward for the church.

As Stefan mentioned, I am a member of the Synod Council. This is a group of bishops who were elected at the end of the Synod to work with the Secretariat for the Synod in Rome, partly to prepare for the next Synod, whenever that's going to be, but also to help oversee the implementation of the Synod around the Church around the world. Pope Leo decided he wanted to meet the Synod Council. There are about 12 or 15 of us on the Council. He wanted to meet us after his election, so we were all called to Rome towards the end of June to have a meeting with him. And during that meeting, just a few weeks after his installation, he shared this idea with us, and I've got a short quote that I wanted to read for you. This is what he said, “the legacy Pope Francis has left us, in my view, is above all, this - that synodality is a style, an attitude, that helps us to be a church by promoting authentic experiences of participation and communion.”

I think there are some very important words there, and he amplified them a little later when he gave that interview, which is now becoming a bit famous, to the journalist from the United States. Building on what he’d said to us in the Synod Council, this is what he said in that interview, “Synodality is an attitude, an openness, a willingness to understand. Speaking of the Church now, this means each and every member of the church has a voice and a role to play through prayer, reflection, through a process of dialogue and respect of one another. To bring people together and to understand that relationship, that interaction, that creating opportunities of encounter, is an important dimension of how we live our life as church.”

So, I want to reflect on what I think is the significance of what Pope Leo has said in these few months since he was elected. He talks about a style, an attitude, an openness, a willingness to understand, a recognition that each and every member of the Church has a voice and a role to play, and he’s identifying this as the essence of what a synodal church looks like, and what a synodal church gives life to.

These, of course, are principles, they are ideals, and they have to be brought alive in the local context of the church. Yes, we have had the Synod in Rome, the two assemblies in October last year, and in October the year before, but if the Synod only stays in Rome, it's only about a whole group of people meeting together in Rome. It's not going to make any difference in the life of the church. It has to be translated and brought alive in the local church, which means at the local level of diocese, of parishes of other church institutions and organisations.

Like those people connected to the Cardijn methodology, synodality must begin to inform everything about the way we live our lives together as a church. Now, if it's all about communion and participation, it seems to me that this kind of church cannot be, or at least should not be, divided into active members and passive members, into those who give and those who receive, into those who act and those who are acted upon. Rather, in a synodal church, every member of the church is meant to be both an actor in the lives of others and equally, someone who is willing to be acted upon by others. And this is very important. I must be ready to be an actor, to make my contribution, to get involved, but I also need to be prepared to receive from others. This is absolutely essential, I think, in the life of a synodal church. And another way of saying this might be to say that in the church there is a mutuality, a mutual interdependence, which is at the heart of our identity.

We depend on each other. We need each other. That is true for all of us in our life together as members of the Church. One important, and by no means the only, but nevertheless important way to be an actor in the Church is to be involved in something like the YCS, the YCW, other expressions of the Cardijn spirituality, as I like to call it, and other organisations and bodies and agencies in the life of the church. One of the ways to be involved in the life of the Church is to belong to something like this. Not everyone can be of course, and I think this is also very important. There are a whole raft of good reasons why not everybody can involve themselves in these different activities or organisations in the Church. We must be very careful to ensure that those who are not, and that’s probably the majority of people, are not regarded or made to feel as if they are mere spectators in the life of the Church.

During the course of the preparations for the Synod and during the Synod assemblies themselves, I was one of the people who tried to make this point - not everyone can join an organisation and be involved at that level. If you’re a young married family with three or four kids, and you’re living in one of the outer suburbs and you’ve got a massive mortgage, and both parents are working, the only spare time you have is probably taken up with the husband and wife trying to keep their relationship alive and making sure they are there for their kids. To then on top of that be expected to involve themselves in something else, may just be asking the impossible.

But that doesn’t make them any less members of the Church, valued members of the Church, and valued contributors to the life of the Church. I think this is really important. If we’re not aware of this, and if we don’t think about this and take it to heart, we run the risk of making a mistake we’ve made so often in the Church which is to create, this time, a new elite class in the Church. It may no longer be the clergy or the religious, but another elite class who are somehow regarded as the ‘real’ Christians, the committed ones, and everybody else is regarded as a second-class citizen. We’ve had too much of that in the Church in the past, and we don’t want to fall into the trap of repeating that same thing in a new way.

So yes, we want to focus on participation, communion and mission, but there are many ways in which this can happen, and I think that’s very important, particularly for people like most of us, who, in one way or another, are engaged in some particular, more specific role in the life of the Church.

One of the things this leads me to remind us of, and I think this is very important too, is that precisely because there are so many ways of being involved in the life of the Church, we can also speak about a whole variety of spiritualities, a whole variety of ways of giving expression to the fundamental values of the Gospel. Certainly, for all of you, one of those ways is the see, judge and act methodology of the Cardijn spirituality as I prefer to call it. It’s a very important methodology, a very important spirituality, and I want to speak about it in relationship to the work of the Synod. But even we need to recognise that it is one way, and a very powerful and effective way, and a very widespread and well accepted way, but it's not the only way. And again, we don't want to create elites where we send a message that we’ve got a corner on the real spirituality of the Church, and those who see things differently don’t quite get it in the way that we do.

So, these are just introductory remarks, but I think they are very important things to say. I’d also want to say in the light of all of that, that I can detect, and I think anybody who looks closely can detect, a profound harmony between what Pope Francis was doing during his time as the Bishop of Rome and now what Pope Leo it seems to be beginning to do in his time as the Bishop of Rome. I think there is a real continuity between these two men, which I think is going to prove to be a great blessing for the Church.

But one of the continuities here is what I would call the spirituality of synodality. I want to say a few words about this, because I think we are at a stage in the synodal journey where it would be easy to fall into another way of understanding synodality and forgetting about the spirituality that must lie at the heart of it.

Any of you who are familiar with the final document after the Synod at the end of the second assembly will know that there is a big section at the beginning of the document which tries to spell out in some detail the spirituality of synodality. In fact, the whole first part of the document is almost a sustained reflection on the theological and pastoral and spiritual principles which underpin the Church’s commitment to this synodal transformation. I think it is important to acknowledge this because the renewal and the reform of the Church that so many people are looking for is exactly that. It’s the renewal and the reform of the Church, the people of God, the body of Christ, the universal sacrament of Salvation. All these theological terms are important; they are not just jargon.

So, we’re talking about the renewal of this reality as it exists in the world of today. Not the restructuring of a profit driven corporation, not even the restructuring of a charitable NGO, but the renewal of the people of God, and that needs to have a solid grounding in spirituality, not just in business practices or models of efficiency, important though they are. We can certainly learn a lot from the wider world about this in relationship to the renewal that is going on in the life of the Church, but we always need to remember that we are talking about something quite different and something much deeper when we are talking about the Church. In the end, the renewal or reform of the Church that most of us are hoping for or looking for in one way or another, ultimately is going to have to be based on what I would call the logic of the Gospel.

There can be all sorts of other criteria that we might bring to bear as we think about the renewal of the Church but, in the end, it really must be based on, as I say, what I call the logic of the Gospel. And in my own thinking, as I have tried to reflect and develop this a little bit, I’ve even moved from talking about the logic of the Gospel to the culture of the Gospel. In recent years, there has been a lot of theological work done on enculturation. We talk about how we bring the values of the Gospel to bear in any particular culture. We find ways of expressing the Gospel within the local culture, but we haven’t often taken the further step of asking about whether or not there is, in fact, a gospel culture. I believe that there is, and I think that as we look to the renewal of the Church, we have to make sure that we are looking at the renewal of the culture of the Church so it is an expression of the culture of the Gospels, which is to say, an expression of the culture which is embodied in Jesus Christ.

This takes me back to something that some of you may remember during the experience, the very searing experience of the Royal Commission here in Australia. Right at the end of the Royal Commission, the five Archbishops of the big Diocese of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth were called to give evidence. It was one of the last sittings of the Royal Commission. And the Royal Commission, precisely because it was a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, tended to focus very, very strongly on institutional questions. And it was important that happened, and we also need to be continuing to ask those questions about the institutional nature of the Church and institutions that operate within the Church.

But Archbishop Coleridge, now retired, who was the Archbishop of Brisbane at the time, and also the President of the Bishops Conference I think, made a comment during the Royal Commission, which struck me very strongly and which I’ve thought a lot about. Many of you will remember it. In giving his evidence to the Royal Commission, he said “it is important to remember that culture eats structures for breakfast”, and what he was trying to get at was the idea that if all you do is focus on the structures and tinker around the edges or even make major changes to the structures without addressing the question of the underlying culture, nothing really is going to change. And we all know that things need to change.

Certainly, this is the case as we reflect on the horrors of the sexual abuse crisis that we are still living through and still trying to respond to with a gospel-centred approach. So things do need to change, but we mustn’t fall into the trap, and I would identify this as a real danger in the whole synodal journey if we’re not careful, that we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that we just have to focus on the structures, sort those out and everything will be okay. There’s something deeper than structures that we need to attend to if we are going to really experience any real change and lasting change in the life of the Church. That means, really, I think, that there is an invitation for all of us to think about the organisations to which we belong. In a case like mine, for example, it might be as the bishop in a diocese or a member of a religious congregation. For many of you, it might be involvement in the YCW or in other expressions of the Cardijn methodology.

Whatever it might be, the Church is an extraordinary manifestation of all sorts of different organisations and agencies. But I think the question that all of us need to ask ourselves is, how is the organisation, or the organisations of which I am a part, an expression of a synodal understanding of the Church, because it is not just the Church at the level of the Vatican or the Church at the level of the diocese, it is the Church at every level that has to be transformed into a synodal church which has this attitude, this style of openness, of inclusivity, of a deep and profound listening in order to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit.

Having said all that, I think it is also important not to lose the importance of structures. Pope Francis had something quite important to say about this. You’ll all be familiar with this quote, but I think it’s worth me reminding us of it again in the context of what we’re talking about. It’s from Evangelii Gaudium, in paragraph 27. Let me just read it for you.

“I dream of a missionary option, that is a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channelled for the evangelisation of today’s world rather than for self-preservation.” He goes on to say, “the renewal of structures demanded by pastoral conversion can only be understood in this light as part of an effort to make them more mission oriented; to make ordinary pastoral activity on every level more inclusive and open; to inspire in pastoral workers a constant desire to go forth and in this way, to elicit a positive response from all those whom Jesus summons to friendship with Himself.”

So yes, we need to look at structures. Yes, there needs to be a conversion of structures, but always with a view to the mission of the Church, which is to communicate the Good News of the salvation brought to us in Jesus Christ. This is what Pope Francis was so insistent on - that the Church needs to be outward looking, rather than inward looking. The Church that spends too much of its time navel gazing is not going to be a church which communicates much about the Gospel of Christ to anybody else. So, these are really important things for the church.

But of course, the Church is the people of God; the Church is the people gathered together in this webinar; the Church is people, people who are called by God to be signs and instruments of His love in the world. So, I think these are very fundamental things which are important for any renewal in the life of the Church, any renewal in the life of organisations within the Church, including all of those who are somehow connected with the Cardijn methodology, and any renewal in the lives of individual Christians. I hope I am not over stressing it, but I think this is really important.

So, a synodal spirituality is an outward looking spirituality. It’s a missionary spirituality. It’s a spirituality that is grounded in the recognition that by virtue of their Baptism, every Christian, both as an individual and as a member of the community of the Disciples of Christ, is commissioned to go and bear fruit - everyone, no one is exempt from that. What that looks like in any individual person’s case, or in any individual family’s case, or in any individual religious congregation’s case, or any other case, will depend on all sorts of factors, but the fundamental impulse to be a missionary, outward looking, outward reaching church is absolutely essential.

Pope John Paul II put his finger on this all those years ago when he had the Synod for Oceania, which I was lucky enough to be a part of. In the final document that he wrote afterwards, a very simple statement, he captured this very well. He said about the Church in Oceania, “we must avoid the danger of ecclesial introspection.” I would say that is true of every diocese, every religious congregation, every YCW organisation, and every reality in the life of the Church.

We’ve got to avoid the danger of ecclesial introspection, worrying only about ourselves, rather than looking out to what we can do and be for others. So there are some practical questions which arise from this, and I think each one of you could think about the particular communities of which you are a part in terms of the life of the Church and ask yourself this question: how is this group of which I am a part structured in such a way as to help while avoiding the danger of ecclesial introspection and enabling the possibility of an outward looking, outward reaching understanding of the faith? I think the Cardijn method is particularly useful here. This idea of seeing, and then judging, and then acting is a really important three step process which can help us to avoid ecclesial introspection - as long as the acting is about acting for the sake of others, rather than acting just for the sake of ourselves.

I said earlier that this whole journey that we are now engaged in, in the life of the Church, to become a more similar church, is something that we are already rather familiar with in Australia because of our Plenary Council. I was fortunate enough to be pretty heavily involved in the journey of the Plenary Council, and I thought that in the context of what we are talking about today, a synodal style, and what it is like to live in a synodal church, or dream of a synodal church, I could recall the experience of the Plenary Council.

There are three things I wanted to say about the Plenary Council. I remember very well the first meeting that we had all those years ago, after the bishops had decided that what the Church needed at the time was a Plenary Council. It took the bishops a long time to come to that conclusion, and I won't go into the whole history of that now, but we eventually came to that view. It was a small group of people; there was myself, Archbishop Coleridge, one or two other bishops, and a group of lay people led by someone who many of you would have encountered during the journey of the Plenary Council, Lana Turvey Collins.

We gathered in a retreat center outside of Brisbane for three days to try and begin the process of preparing for the Plenary Council. One of the primary issues that we had to decide was what is going to be the key question that we are going to ask people in the Church in Australia to reflect on. Now it might be a sign of what slow learners we are, because it actually took us three days to come up with the question. In the end, the question was very simple, but where we started and where we finished were very different from each other.

When we started, we broke into groups and started sharing with each other. The initial instinct was to say, we need to get people to say what they are hoping for in the life of the Church, what they would like to see in the life of the Church, maybe what they’d like to see changed in the life of the Church, and what they valued in the life of the Church. Those general questions are what emerged, but none of us really felt as if we’d nailed it at that stage so we spent a lot of time discussing, reflecting on our own and in small groups, and what eventually emerged over those three days was what I think turned out to be one of the most important moments in the journey of the Plenary Council.

We realised that the question as we were framing it had something rather important missing, and that was God. There was no reference to God at all in the question that we were beginning to frame for the Plenary Council. As we thought that through a bit more, and discussed it a bit more, we came to the question which you would all be familiar with - what do you think God is asking of the Church in Australia at this time? What do you think and the ‘you’ could have been you, Tim Costello, or you, Stefan, or you, Mary, or you, this group of parishioners at the local parish, or you, this group of religious in your community. The you could have many different manifestations. But the question was the same, what do you think God is asking of us in Australia at this time? And that just shifted the understanding of what we were trying to do, almost from an analysis of the situation of the Church to a discernment of what God might be asking of us moving into the future.

How successful we were in keeping ourselves focused on that question, I'm not sure. I think we’ve still got to reflect on the experience of the Plenary Council, and that will take us even more time than it has already. But I think the decision to put God at the centre of our discernment, of our reflection, of our discussion was really important. That’s the first thing I wanted to mention, because I think in any renewal or reform of the Church, if we don’t remember that, then we’ve lost our way.

The second thing is the methodology that we came up with. We called it spiritual conversations you might remember. I’m sure many of you were involved in the journey of the Plenary Council, so you’ll be very familiar with the process. But just to remind people how it works, you have an issue, if you like, that you’re trying to discern, and the first thing you do is spend time in prayer. Now that’s different from starting with a quick prayer, rattling it off, and then getting down to the real business. Any of you who were involved in the Plenary Council, the first assembly you might remember was online because of COVID and the second was in Sydney. Probably a good half hour at the start of each day was set aside for what I think we can rightly call creative, meditative, thought-provoking prayer. That’s the first thing. If we don’t do that, if we don’t create that atmosphere of an awareness of God and of awareness of ourselves as brothers and sisters, disciples of Christ from the very start, then we run the risk of not being able to hear the voice of the Spirit.

But then we would have the process, you remember it I'm sure, of the three rounds. You have the first round where everybody gets three minutes to speak and everybody else simply has to listen. You’re not supposed to jump in and say, Oh, that’s a great idea, I really like that idea, or that’s ridiculous, I can’t accept that for a minute, you’re just supposed to listen. And this is much easier to say than it is to do. At the end of that you stop and you reflect. Then in the second round you go around again, and each person says, in listening to all of you, this is what I heard. So, you reflect back what you have heard from the others. And in the third round it becomes more general, discernment together of what is emerging and, as Pope Francis would say, trying to determine whether a consensus of any kind is emerging, because if a consensus is emerging, it’s no absolute guarantee, but it’s a good sign of the work of the Holy Spirit.

So that methodology of listening, repeating back what we are hearing and then discerning together, seems to me to be very similar to the Cardijn method of seeing, not just with our eyes but with our ears if I could mix up my physical metaphors a bit, then judging, then acting. So, I’ve listened carefully, and now I need to judge, to discern, to evaluate, and come to a point where we decide together this is what we need to do. I think there’s a profound harmony between the Cardijn method of seeing, judging and acting and the synodal method of listening.

But one of the things we learned during the Plenary Council, and it became very important also in the Synod, was the nature of the listening. When I’ve spoken in other forums about this, I’ve spoken about what I would call non-defensive listening. Non-defensive listening is when I am listening to someone else and I’m not already working out, in my mind, whether that person is smart enough to be agreeing with me, because I’m the one who’s got all the right answers. That’s defensive listening, that’s already being convinced about the answer before we even start and just checking to see if everybody else is smart enough to realise it. How easy is it to slip into that kind of model when I’m hearing something, maybe that I don’t like, or hearing something that’s challenging me. My instinctive reaction is to begin to judge that, not in the Cardijn way, but in a kind of critical way. The ability to just listen, to set aside my own pre convictions, my own opinions, even my own closely held and passionate views, and just listen, is very difficult. It's probably the hardest discipline of the whole synodal method.

And behind it, of course, is the idea that even if I hear something that challenges me or that I feel affronted by, or which I don’t understand, it’s possible that there is something here that the Spirit is trying to say to me, but if I’m not open to it, I’m not going to hear it. So, we’re talking here about the whole notion of discernment. Being a synodal church is being a discerning church. Being a synodal church is being a church which is really focused on what we came up with as the question of our own Plenary Council; what do we think God might be asking of us moving forward? So that’s the second thing that I wanted to say.

And the third thing I wanted to remind people is, don’t forget the Plenary Council because the Plenary Council, in many ways, anticipated the Synod. I thought I would just remind you of the six thematic areas for discernment which emerged out of the very widespread consultation of the church in Australia that we did for the Plenary Council. Just listen again to these themes that emerged as the six key themes for the church in Australia to reflect on. They were that the church in Christ is being called to be missionary and evangelising. Remember, this is all before the Synod got underway, or before Pope Francis had written Evangelii Gaudium, or before all this emphasis on these things had begun to emerge in the life of the Church. In a sense, I’m saying we can pat ourselves on the back a little bit because we were ahead of the game in many of these things; it just simply means that we were trying to be open to the voice of the Spirit.

So, a church that is called to be missionary and evangelising. A church that is called to be inclusive, participatory and synodal - pretty well summed up by the notion of communion and participation, which are key parts of the Synod. A church that is called to be prayerful and Eucharistic - the spirituality of synodality. A church that is called to be humble, healing and merciful. A church that is called to be a joyful, hope filled servant community. A church that is called to be open to conversion, renewal and reform. These were the things that emerged out of our consultation of the people of God here in Australia, way back in 2019 and 2020. They are exactly the same things which emerged in the worldwide consultation for the Synod.

As part of the journey of the Synod, a document was produced, which was called the Frascati Document and had the title, Enlarge the space of your tent. That document was the fruit of the worldwide consultation, and all the themes that we had identified in our Plenary Council were also identified in the Synod. I think it’s worthwhile reflecting on the coherence between where the Church in Australia was and remains, and where the universal Church was and remains, one coming from the perspective of our experience, the other coming from the synodal journey.

So, I’d like to draw it all together by saying a few words about the whole idea of discernment because, in the end, we have to base all of our hopes and our plans for renewal and reform in the life of the Church in the Gospels, in the culture of the Gospels.

Now, the culture of the Gospels is really embodied in the person of Jesus. We must take very seriously the claim of Jesus in John's gospel, that He is the WAY and the TRUTH and the LIFE. I think it is really interesting to reflect on the last few Popes that we’ve had. I think if we look back to Pope Benedict and to John Paul II to a certain extent as well, we might say that we had two Popes who were very focused on Jesus as the truth, and we need to have that in the life of the Church. Jesus did speak about himself as the truth, the truth to which we're called to commit ourselves.

Pope Francis then reminded us that we also need to focus on Jesus as the way. Pope Benedict and John Paul II before him, in many ways, helped us to focus on what it is that we believe. Pope Francis helped us to focus on how we live out in the day to day reality of people’s lives and experience what we believe. I don’t think it is a pious hope; my expectation is that Pope Leo will now help us to deepen the synthesis between those two things, because they are often seen to be in opposition to each other when, really, they are not. So this is a question of a return to the Gospels and I think the Cardijn method in the seeing dimension of it, and to some extent in the judging of it, is a Gospel centered spirituality and a Gospel centered model of discernment.

But to see Jesus as the way is to say we are meant to reproduce in our very different context, in our very different period in history, the mind and heart of Jesus, in the way we live together as the Church, and the way we reach out beyond the confines of the Church to the wider community.

If I could give you one simple example as an insight into something that has been helpful for me, if Jesus is the way, then we can pick up any Gospel story and see the way in which he relates to people, reacts to people, deals with people, and try and get into the mind and heart of Jesus. We’re not going to wear the same outfits that Jesus wore. We’re not going to use the same language Jesus used. We’re not going to use the same examples from the rural life that he understood when we’re trying to communicate the truths of the Gospel today. So it’s not that that we are supposed to be following, it’s the mind and the heart of Jesus that we’re supposed to be following.

Remember, in the in the letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul says, you must have in you the same mind that was in Christ, Jesus. And we could all nod our heads and say, that’s very beautiful, of course that’s what we have to do as Christians, but what does that mean in practice?

Think of the story of Jesus and his encounter with Zacchaeus, the tax collector. As a tax collector he was not very popular in the town, because he was collecting the money from his fellow townspeople and handing it over to the hated Romans, so he was working for the occupying forces. He apparently wasn’t quite as honest and upright as he should have been, so he was a very isolated and ostracised person within his own community. Anyway, like everybody else, he hears that Jesus is coming to town. He’s only a little guy, so he decides in order to catch a glimpse of Jesus he better climb up in a tree. So he climbs the tree, and Jesus comes along and He spots Zacchaeus, and he calls him down. And He doesn’t say to Zacchaeus, you realise, don’t you, that you’ve been cheating all of these people, you realise that you’ve got to change your way of behaving, you realise that this justice isn’t acceptable, you need to get your act together and start living a decent life. He doesn’t say any of those things to Zacchaeus. What does he say to him? Zacchaeus, come down because I’m going to your place for dinner tonight. This is the mind and heart of Jesus. This is what we might call the pastoral methodology of Jesus, the first thing he does is encounter a person and greet him with respect and dignity and hospitality.

And then what happens? Without Jesus saying a word to Zacchaeus about the need for him to change his life, Zacchaeus immediately says, if I’ve defrauded anybody, I’m going to pay them back four times over. He changes his life completely, not because Jesus corrected him, not because Jesus pointed out what a terrible person he was, not because Jesus did any of that. Because Jesus welcomed him, accepted him, treated him with dignity and for a man who was being ostracised and rejected by everybody else, what a marvelous experience of being accepted that must have been.

Now we could repeat that kind of experience or encounter many times over, if we look through the pages of the Gospel. What I’m trying to get at, and this is what I mean when I talk about the culture of the Gospel, if we’re going to see a renewal in the life of the Church, we all need to begin to understand the mind and heart of Jesus better and begin to enflesh that in our own lives. Yes, it’s right for us to expect the church leader, whether it’s the bishop or whoever it is, to do it, but we shouldn’t expect someone else to do it if we’re not prepared to do it ourselves. This is a challenge for every Christian, every disciple.

So, what I’ve tried to capture is something of the energy and the excitement that a commitment to a synodal church can generate. We’ve already experienced it through our Plenary Council. We’re experiencing it again at the worldwide level of the Church. I’ve just come back from Rome where I attended the Jubilee for Synodal teams and participatory bodies. Around 800 people were expected, and that would have been a big gathering, but much to the horror of the organisers more than 2300 people attended because there’s an energy and an enthusiasm being generated in the Church right across the world because of this synodal approach.

If we want to talk about faith in action, faith in our lives, I think the synodal church offers us so much if we are prepared to commit ourselves to it, but it is challenging. It does require great humility. It does require us to set our own agendas aside for a while and be open to others.

And maybe if I finish with this story, which in some ways is kind of amusing, but in another way is not all that amusing. During one of the sessions of the Synod, I think it was in the first assembly, there was a topic for discernment. So, we’re all sitting in the group getting ready to enter into the spiritual conversations and go through the methodology. And one member of the group said, just before we start, I just want to let you know that I feel very passionate about this, and I’m not going to be changing my mind. And I thought to myself, I’m not sure that this person has quite yet got the synodal style, the synodal attitude. We must be prepared to have our minds changed. We must be prepared to have our view altered, to have our understanding deepened. If we’re not prepared for that, if all we’re prepared is to say, if I don't get what I want out of this, then the whole thing has been a failure, then we’ll never get anywhere.

So synodality requires humility, it requires generosity, it requires great patience, and it requires great trust in each other and in the Holy Spirit. But we’ve had 2000 years of being able to rely on the Holy Spirit, so I guess that's not going to change anytime soon.