In the Fall of 2021, Pope Francis has posed a set of questions to every parish in the world, in preparation for a meeting (Synod) he plans to have with Bishops from around the world in the Fall of 2023. He was curious as to how we listen to each other and the Holy Spirit, how we make decisions, and how we reach out to those on the margins.
In January and February 2022, SPX Church hosted 10 listening sessions to discuss these questions. About 100 people (both parishioners and non-parishioners) participated. We also received 19 written responses from those who could not attend.
In the Archdiocese of Washington, each parish was asked to create a summary document of the responses we heard. Because the Archdiocese was anticipating responses from over 100 parishes, they asked us to limit our response to each question to 1500 characters, or about 300 words. We prepared and submitted our parish summary document (which can be found in the 'Documents' section of this page) in February 2022, which reflected as best we could the variety of responses given the word count limitation. We then discussed this summary report with our Parish Pastoral Council in terms of any issues that could be addressed in both the short and the longer term. Although some of the minor issues raised have already been addressed, discussions on the longer term issues will continue.
In May 2022, we sent a parish representative to one of the regional listening sessions, hosted by Auxiliary Bishop Campbell. This Regional listening session sought to reflect on the responses each parish had heard in their listening sessions. At that time, we learned that the Archdiocese was tasked with summarizing all of the information submitted from the various parishes and Regional listening sessions into a 10-page document that would be sent to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in June 2022. That summary report from the Archdiocese was recently published (which can be found in the 'Documents' section of this page).
Over the summer the USCCB will be tasked with reviewing these 10 page reports from each Diocese in the United States, and then prepare a summary document for all the dioceses in the United States which will be sent to Rome, along with summary documents from other countries. All of that information will be used by the Bishops to prepare for the Synod in Fall 2023.