Launch of Catholic Youth Assembly

Speech

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Friday 7 March, 2025
St Mary's Cathedral, Perth
 

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Well, good evening, everybody. I must say, standing up here, it is great to look out and see so many of you here on a Friday night, when probably there were lots of other options for you to take, but you decided to come here and be together with all of us, as we really launch a new project for young people here in the Archdiocese of Perth.

Someone just said to me outside, what is this all about? And I said it is really captured on the front cover of the little leaflet that you have got. We are trying to open a space for the voice of young people to be heard in our Archdiocese, and really that is what tonight is all about. But my job tonight, as Penny has just said, is to talk a little bit about synodality, the recent Synod of Bishops, and what that is all about. I have only been given 10 minutes, and I have probably already used up a couple of them, so I am going to have to move quickly.

Many of you would have some idea about synodality. Others, perhaps not very much, and maybe some of you have not even heard yet that we have had what is called a synod on synodality.

So just very briefly, a synod, of Roman Synod, is a gathering of representatives of the world's bishops who are all called together in Rome to discuss, over quite a long period of time a particular topic. So, Pope Francis called this Synod on synodality, and I will talk about what synodality is in a moment. One of the new initiatives of the Pope was not just have one meeting, but to have two. So, we had one in October of 2024, and we had one in October of 2023, and both lasted for the full month of October, they were long, and they were challenging, but also very energizing.

The other thing that Pope Francis decided to do was to have not just bishops present. It is called a Synod of Bishops, and normally it is just bishops who go. The idea behind the Synod is that it is a chance for the bishops to share their understanding of the church and to advise the pope in his governance of the church. That is still the case, but Pope Francis has been very strong on saying the bishops need to remember where they come from; they come from local churches and from local communities. To have some people from the local churches also there with the bishops is a good reminder to the bishops, not to think that they are somebody or they are a group of people so special that nobody else is allowed to be there.

At the Synod, the majority of people were bishops, probably over two thirds of them, but the other third was made up of priests, religious, and lots of lay men and women.  It was quite different to what we were used to. What we were asked to do was to pray together and talk together, to try and work out how the church could be what Pope Francis would call a more synodal church.

I will not give you a definition or sort of an intellectual explanation of what the word Synod means and where it comes from in the Greek, someone else might want to do that later. I will just use two quotes that Penny picked out for me as a kind of an introduction to what they were hoping I would talk about tonight. They both come from Pope Francis, and I think I will just read them, listen carefully, try and work out if you understand what they are saying, and then I will try and fill them out just a little bit. So, the first one comes from an address that the pope gave when they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Synod of Bishops in 2015, so 65 I think it was the Synod was created by the pope of those days, 50 years later, they had a gathering of bishops to celebrate that. And this is where the pope launched the idea of becoming a synodal church.

This is what he said, “A synodal church, we could say the Catholic Church here in Perth, if it is going to be what the Pope thinks, God is asking us to be, is a church which listens, a listening church. When we say church, remember, I am not just talking about the bishops or the bishops together with the Pope or the bishops and the Pope together with the priest. When the pope talks about the church, and when we, in our Catholic way, talk about the church, we mean everybody, everybody who is a part of the life of the church, that is the church. That kind of church is a church which listens, which realises that listening is more than just hearing. You can hear something that goes in one ear and out the other. Listening means you are really paying attention to what you are hearing.

The Pope went on to say, it is a mutual listening in which everybody has something to learn. We all have something to learn from each other. And then he spelled it out, the faithful people of God, that is everybody the College of bishops, that is all the bishops together, and the Bishop of Rome, that is the Pope, all listening to each other. In the past, it seemed to be that only the bishops and the Pope got to speak, and everybody else had to just listen. Now we are reminded that we are all supposed to listen to each other, and why? Because that is one of the main ways in which we can listen to the Holy Spirit. At the heart of the whole thing, the whole idea of being a listening church is, in the end, making sure that we are listening to the Holy Spirit. The Pope is very strong on reminding us that the spirit does not just speak through the Pope, not just through the bishops, not just through the priests, the Holy Spirit speaks to every single one of us within our own life story and within our own hearts and in our own experience.

So that is really what it is all about. At the end of the meeting in October of last year, I was part of these meetings, we come up with a final document, which the pope then authorized as his final document. Normally, at the end of a synod, we would give the results to the Pope, he would take them away, read them, and maybe six months later, he would write a letter to the church spelling out what he thought about it all. He was so impressed by the document that we prepared for the Synod that he said, “I do not need to write anything else. I accept this as my teaching to the church.”

In this document, this is what it said in one of the paragraphs, ‘’synodality is the walking together, of Christians with Christ, very important, not just a group of us walking together with each other, walking together with Christ towards God’s kingdom in union with all humanity.  The Church is meant to be a kind of a presence in the midst of the whole world, inviting everybody to walk together into the future that God has in mind for us. He says this community that is walking along together with Christ is oriented towards mission. In other words, we are not supposed to be just looking in on ourselves and wondering whether there is something else we can do to improve our rate of people going to mass or something like that. That is very important, but we are supposed to be looking out towards the mission, looking to the ways in which we can be the sign of Christ present in the world, so oriented towards mission, synodality involves gathering at all levels of the church for mutual listening, dialog and discernment. When he says, gathering together at all levels of the church, one of those levels of the church is young people. The call to be a synodal church is also a call for young people to gather, not isolated from the rest of the church, but to gather together as young people within the church, giving the whole church the benefit of your faith and your experience and your dreams and your hopes. So that is the theory of synodality. That is what we are trying to work towards.

I think, as Father Vincent and Adam will explain later, this is the beginning of a process whereby we are trying to set up ways of engaging young people in being an important voice in the church. So really another word for synodality is mutual listening. I just wanted to say a couple of words, because my time is probably nearly up already. I just want to say a couple of words about this, what I would call the quality of this listening. When you say we are all going to listen to each other to try and work out what God wants for the church, the temptation is to think, well, what God wants will be found by taking a vote, and whatever the majority wants, that must be what God wants. That is the way politics works. That is why we are having an election tomorrow. It is not the way the church works. We are not trying to work out what the majority think, we are trying to work out through everything that we hear, how do we catch the voice of the Holy Spirit? How do we work out from everything we hear from each other, from all the different organizations, people and bodies in the church? How do we work out what God is actually saying? So that is a very different kind of experience.

To give you an example of what Synod or listening is not, I will just give you one very quick example from the recent Synod. I will not give you any names, because that would not be fair, but you would not know this person. Anyway, I was in a group; the Synod operated in small groups, we discussed together and discern together. I cannot even remember what the topic was, but there was a religious sister. Are there any religious sisters here tonight? I do not want to embarrass any of them. She was either from the United States or Canada. Again, I cannot quite remember, but anyway, whatever the topic was, and we are all going to share with each other and listen to each other, to try and hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. She started by saying, I just need you all to understand that I am firmly committed to what I believe, and I am not going to be changing. That is not Synod or listening. The whole idea of Synod or listening is, yes, I might be convinced about where I stand, but I am open to listening to other people who might stand in a very different place, just in case there is something in what they are saying that God wants me to hear. So synodal listening is about having an open heart.

The way I have often described it when I have talked to people is to talk about what I would call non-defensive listening. You will see on the back of your little leaflets, there is a little flow chart which talks about conversations in the spirit, I am not going to talk about that now. In the synodal way of listening, you start by listening to each other, and you must have a lot of discipline, because you are going to hear things that you might agree with, and you want to really say, that is fantastic, I agree with that. But instead of listening, you just must shut up and listen. Or you might hear something that you violently disagree with, and you want to jump in to correct that person, but you have got to shut up and just listen, then everybody else must shut up and listen to you when it is your turn to speak. So, we listen, and when we listen in synodal listening, we are not listening to see whether the other person is smart enough to agree with my point of view. That is often the temptation we fall into. As I listen to others, I am already judging whether or not as I say, they are smart enough to realize that I am right and they are wrong, that is not synodal listening. Synodal listening is stepping back, in a sense, from where I stand, not because I am going to abandon it, but because I need to have an open heart to hear what God might be saying through the other person.  Then once we have done all of that, we share again. And that person starts by saying, well, as I was listening, this is what I heard other people saying. Again, everybody else just keeps their mouths shut and listens to all of that. Then at the end of that, having listened deeply and prayed quietly together, then it opens up for a discussion to see where we are and whether we can move forward.

Behind it all is the most fundamental question of all, a synodal church is not a church which asks people, what do you want for the church? What will keep you in the church, or what, if it does not happen, will drive you away from the church? That is not synodal listening. It is not about really, what I church as Tim Costello, or what Penny wants for the church, or what Father Joe wants for the church, what Adam wants for the church, they are important things, but we must never presume that what I want for the church, no matter how convinced I am of it, fully expresses what God wants for the church. So, in the end, a synodal church is a church which is focused on discovering what God is asking of us at this moment in our history.

Now we are gathered here tonight because we believe very strongly that if we do not hear the voices of young people, then we may be missing out on things that the Lord wants to say to his church through you, that is why this is so important. We need to listen to you. You need to listen to us. We all need to listen to each other and together we can discover what God is asking of us. It is much more complex than that. There are hundreds of other things to be said, but I am going to stop now, because Father Vincent is getting very anxious in the front he is coming next.

So, I hope that at least has opened it up for you. I just want to finish by saying we are here because we need to hear the voice of young people in the church if we are going to be able to be faithful to what the church is asking us to be.

Transcribed by the Office of Communications