Center for Metanoia Studies (Centre d'Etudes Interdisciplinaires de la Métanoïa)

If the Catholic Church’s Sixteenth General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops can be said to have – in principle, at least – a defining virtue, then that virtue is listening. Bishop Nicholas Hudson, of the UK’s Archdiocese of Westminster, has described the Synod’s recently-promulgated Final Document as marked by a ‘spirituality of listening,’ while the Catholic News Agency reports that, in his homily for the Mass opening the 2024 session of the Synod, ‘Pope Francis used the word ‘listen’ or ‘listening’ nearly a dozen times,’ stressing its importance to the synodal process.

The Synod’s emphasis on listening invites an obvious comparison with another, equally important, area of contemporary ecclesial life: reparation for clerical sexual abuse. Aside from the synodal process, there is no other area of Church life where the faithful are so regularly and fervently exhorted to listen to others as in the context of the Church’s responsibility of reparation towards abuse survivors. As well as the various calls to listen and walk with survivors found in the addresses of Pope Benedict XVI, exhortations to listen to survivors (and praise for those who already undertake this practice of listening) can be found in, to give a small number of representative examples, Francis’ 2019 motu proprio Vos Estis Lux Mundi, his 2022 address to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, andhis 2023 address to the Italian Episcopal Conference for the Protection of Minors and Vulnerable Persons. Indeed, Pope Francis sees this work of reparative listening as so integral to the Church’s life and mission that he has twice called upon the faithful to develop a ‘spirituality of reparation.’

This virtue of listening, therefore, offers itself as a bridge connecting these two aspects of the life and mission of the Church: the spirituality of synodality and the spirituality of reparation. In the context of this conference, we can think of it as a bridge between two forms of spiritual transformation: a transformation of faith praxis taking place on the level of ecclesial community, and an interior transformation, a transformation of spiritual and psychological healing, taking place within the human person who has been abused.

Yet it is a bridge that receives remarkably little footfall. The connection between what we could call synodal listening on one hand and reparative listening on the other is scarcely made in the documents which define and direct the synodal process – and when it is made, it manifests in vague exhortation rather than clear explanation or specific directives for action.

For some, this points to a problem with the definition of synodality itself. Is it descriptive of the functioning of hierarchical structures, or prescriptive of the broader spiritual attitude which believers should take towards the practice of their faith, or somehow both at the same time? If we cannot define precisely what synodality is, or articulate how it is meant to be implemented in the life of the Church, it is perhaps inevitable that we will struggle to connect it with the Church’s responsibility of reparation to abuse survivors; a reparation which, as successive Popes have taught us, speaks to the very core of its mission to bring the healing and sanctifying power of Christ into the world.

In this paper I will argue that the most fruitful and effective way to make this elusive connection between the spirituality of synodality and the spirituality of reparation is through a third aspect of ecclesial life, one which has an equal prominence in the theology of Pope Francis: that of spiritual accompaniment.

In the first part of this paper, I will define the concepts of synodality and of accompaniment, situating them in the theology of Pope Francis and highlighting the areas of congruence between the two. In the second part, I will propose the Church’s ministry of catechesis, defined as a ministry of witnessing, teaching and accompanying in ecclesial faith, as a specific context where the principles of synodality can be fruitfully applied for the purposes of reparation: the transformation and healing of abuse survivors within the Church. I will finish by suggesting that using catechetical accompaniment in this way enables the Church to move beyond seeing reparation for abuse survivors as something perfunctory and legalistic, something of concern only to a small number of specialists within the Church, but instead something deeply and integrally spiritual: part of our shared Christian vocation to be healed and transformed in Christ and, through our witness, bring that healing and transformative power to others.