Synod 2021-2023: Communion, Participation, and Mission
Testimony of Jim Thomas
February 21, 2022
Thank you, Pope Francis, for the great gift of inviting everyone to take part in this historic synodal listening process. I am grateful to the pope and all his collaborators who developed such a hope-filled Preparatory Document for this kairosmoment. My heart leapt for joy in reading the main objectives in paragraph 2 of the Preparatory Document. I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit.
In preparing my remarks, I have prayed for the same “courage and freedom of heart” that we need throughout this process, as stated in paragraph 9 of the Preparatory Document. I love God. I love the best of what the church offers to humanity, and I grieve the major failings of the church. The church must come to grips that in the US, the church is widely regarded as irrelevant. The church is dying but I do not want to live the rest of my life as a pallbearer.
I want to be one of the faithful who breathes new life into the church. I want to open wide the church to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Can we incarnate excitement in our church so that we attract new members the world over, perhaps even to the extent that our children will talk about the synodal process resurrecting the church? Can we dare to hope such a thing is within our grasp?
For the church to live out its mission to evangelize the culture, we need to take drastic action to make our message understandable to our fellow citizens in the 21st century. There are three actions I feel the church must take in the next few years if we want our evangelizing efforts to have any chance of succeeding. Each of these must be rooted in a rededication to seek the truth.
1. Open priestly ordination to women and married people. Recall that Saint Peter was married. By limiting ordination to only celibate males, the church diminishes the model of the family as the “domestic church” (Lumen Gentium, no. 11), and “a school of deeper humanity” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 52). By only ordaining celibate men, we diminish the God-given equality of women. We diminish the sacredness of the marriage vows. We diminish the spiritual vigor of the laity.
For the church hierarchy to insist that the priesthood is only open to men because Jesus only chose men as apostles begs several questions. Why is the priesthood not limited to circumcised men? Why is the priesthood not limited to men who did not eat pork? All of Jesus’s apostles were circumcised. None of them ate pork. Please reflect on paragraphs 21 to 24 of the Preparatory Document with these questions in mind.
To rebuild the status of the family in society, we need priests who are also mothers and fathers.
2. Welcome LGBTQ people as full and active participants in the church, in keeping with the truth that each human person is a unique and unrepeatable likeness of God. The church must seek to understand what God is revealing to us through their love. Whatever rationalizations some might offer to not welcome LGBTQ people into full communion, such arguments are discriminatory and unsupportable. Such discrimination is an affront to the freedom of God our Creator.
3. Jesus is the pure manifestation of the nonviolent love of God. As Pope Francis has written, “To be true followers of Jesus today includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.” Therefore, the church must disavow the just war tradition as incompatible with following Jesus who commands us to love our enemies. To do anything short of a complete embrace of nonviolence is to rob the Church of the most powerful witness we can give. It is in committing ourselves to a rejection of violence that we give the clearest witness that God is the only security we seek or need. By living and teaching nonviolence as essential to Jesus, we will revitalize our mission of evangelization. It will purify our faith, strengthen the church, and heal our world from the pandemic of violence.
Through these three actions we will open ourselves more fully to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We will re-engage with the dynamic faith that swept the world in the first three centuries following Christ’s victory over sin and death. Such bold actions will shock the world. May the Holy Spirit blow wherever it will. Do we dare to dream that we can collaborate in setting the world aflame in a New Pentecost?