Last week we announced that we are holding listening sessions as part of Pope Francis’ call to be a listening community of faith. It is part of “journeying together” the very meaning of the word “synod.” This Synod is a unique gift for our local Church. It is a gift of time – a chance to take a step back and reconnect with our parish communities. It is an opportunity to invite people not only back to Sunday Mass but also to parish life. This invitation to parish life starts with listening. Listening to each other’s joys, hopes, sorrows and anxieties. Listening to each other is the basis of dialogue, friendship and community life. This Synod is not about changing doctrine or church structures, but rather encountering each other as brothers and sisters in Christ in a post-pandemic world.
A Pew study released in December found that 29 percent of Americans are not affiliated with any religion, up from 16 percent when Pew first asked the question in 2007. But there is not merely a shift in how people express religion publicly. The outlook for personal spirituality is similarly bleak. According to Pew, almost a third of U.S. adults report that they pray rarely or not at all, up from 18 percent in 2007.
Young people in particular have distanced themselves from organized religion. It is not that they do not believe, but the denominations are not offering what they are seeking. This group is referred to as “nones.” Another survey, released last summer, found that among 18-to 29-year-olds, 36 percent, do not associate with a particular religion. Younger Catholics have also told one research team that they are now less willing to attend Mass than before the pandemic began. Each survey the “nones” grow larger.
But just as often as certain Catholics look to specific issues of the institutional church to account for increasing secularism, others tend to explain it away by blaming it on the morality of nonbelievers themselves. Some believe people do not go to church because they are lazy, while others believe it is because church teaching is antiquated. If it is laziness, there is no point in trying to welcome back wayward Catholics; there is no cure for sloth. If it is outdated church teaching, the temptation is to say the church simply needs to get with the times, and the lost shall be found. Neither way of thinking offers much inspiration for the church’s evangelical mission.
But what if there is a different way to look at all this? Have the “nones” consciously rejected religion, or have religious institutions failed to involve them and respond to their needs? Do they lack belief in God, or do they no longer see the church as representing the God they believe in? Has a mixture of all of these factors gotten us to where we are today, with both society and the church sharing some responsibility?
The only way to find out is by asking, and the Catholic Church is attempting to do precisely that. Pope Francis has made it clear that the diocesan phase of this synod should not be limited only to people who show up to Mass every Sunday. Instead, the synod’s preparatory document calls for listening not only within the visible structures of the church but also in encounters with “people who are distant from the faith.” Only by listening to those at the margins can the church truly be universal.
Sign up for one of the Parish Synod listening session here.