Next to every diocese in the world, next to every believer and next to every other dicastery of the Roman Curia, we too, as the Dicastery for Communication, have asked ourselves how we can take up the invitation to participate in the synodal process. How can we ensure that our contribution is not simply limited to ‘amplifying the voice of the Pope’, but rather becomes an opportunity for a synodal conversion, which concerns us all? How can we rediscover ourselves as ‘members of one another’ even in a body of the Roman Curia? How can we adhere to Pope Francis’ invitation to listen and hear one another?
This has led to the creation of a calendar of weekly appointments which aims to offer the people who work in our dicastery an opportunity to meet and reflect together. Being an ‘extra-large’ dicastery, we meet in groups of 20-25 people, invited by the various sectors, so that this also becomes an opportunity to get to know each other better. We find ourselves in the Palazzina Leone XIII, in the heart of the Vatican Gardens, the highest (and also the most beautiful) of the sites of our dicastery.
We begin by invoking the Holy Spirit, the only protagonist who can bring fruit to our little endeavour. This is followed by the reading of a passage from the Word of God with a brief commentary, in the knowledge that the Word of God itself can give rise to the right questions with which to listen to what the Lord wants to tell us, starting with our work, our being together and the personal stories of each of us. After a brief personal reflection in silence and a moment of conviviality, the assembly divides into small subgroups (4-5 people) to make the experience of dialogue and mutual listening as concrete and effective as possible. At the end, we return to the initial assembly, and each person reports what struck him or her most about what they had heard.
In the meetings that have already taken place, we have seen at work a growing desire to rediscover a human quality, and a sense of belonging to a community that is not only a working community, which sometimes in everyday life is buried by fatigue, worries and problems to be solved. This experience, albeit brief, of listening and discussion has implicitly reawakened the vocation to communion that must also be expressed in our work commitment, with our gaze increasingly turned towards those for whom we have been called to this service in the Holy See. Together with our gratitude to the Lord who blesses our ‘synodal endeavours’, we are left with the desire to treasure what we gather during this journey, so that we can be more and more a community and respond more and more to what Pope Francis asked for in his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia: “The Curia is not only a logistical and bureaucratic instrument for the needs of the universal Church, but it is the first organism called to witness, and precisely for this reason it acquires ever more authority and effectiveness when it takes on in the first person the challenges of synodal conversion to which it too is called. The organisation we need to put in place is not corporate, but evangelical”.
Synodal team of the Dicastery for Communication