Cardinal Mario Grech, the Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, met with the Gozitan diocesan community at a meeting held on Tuesday at the Rotunda of St. John the Baptist, Xewkija, where he shared his reflections on the Synodal Way currently underway throughout the Church.

The meeting, which was attended by a large number of members of the clergy, religious and laity engaged in the pastoral care of the Church in Gozo, was also addressed by the Bishop of Gozo Anton Teuma who described how the Pastoral Plan currently being carried out in the Diocese of Gozo is a concrete response to the Pope’s call “for a Synodal Church: communion, participation, mission.”

Cardinal Mario insisted that the synodal proposal, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, which began meeting 60 years ago, is not limited to a few years, but is the whole lifestyle of the Church, which by its nature it is “synodal.”

He invited God’s people to enter into this mentality, no longer of a division between hierarchy and the rest of the baptised, but of one holy people of God who is “infallible in the faith,” as the Pope likes to repeat when quoting the ‘Lumen Gentium.’ He urged us to return to the proposal of the Apostolic Exhortation ‘Evangelii gaudium,’ which Francis gave us at the beginning of his pontificate.

The meeting was also held in a celebratory context, where the congregation asked for the light of the Holy Spirit at the request of the Synod – the Adsumus – and was illuminated by the passage from Cornelius in the Acts of the Apostles ( 10: 9-35,44-48) which was chosen by Cardinal Mario as an ‘icon’ of the synodal process.

A copy in Maltese of the Preparatory Document prepared by the Synod Secretariat was also distributed to those present and to the parishes.

Photo by Anthony Grech

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