ROME — Moved by “contemplative listening” at the Synod on Synodality, a Filipino synod father said he will continue the participative process in his home diocese.
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) Vice President Mylo Hubert Vergara said his Pasig diocese will work on a monitoring and evaluative process to track plans made at the parish, ministry, sectoral, and diocesan levels over the next three years.
The diocese, home to more than 2 million faithful spread over 31 parishes in the cities of Pasig and Taguig and the town of Pateros, had just finished its enhanced pastoral strategic planning, a process that took two years.
“If I will characterize the whole synodal process, it has been an experience of contemplative listening,” Vergara told CBCP News.
“My exposure here in the synod has been an opportunity to look at the stories of those ministering in the different continents. They are not only bishops, priests, but consecrated persons and many lay people. And a number of them have really been offering their lives for Christ and for the faith,” he added.
Vergara said the Pasig diocese’s monitoring and evaluation phase will adopt a synodal process, much like the strategic planning phase that took inputs not just from parish priests and consecrated men and women but also other stakeholders.
The month-long Vatican assembly’s final document has defined synodality as the “walking together of Christians with Christ and towards God’s Kingdom, in union with all humanity.”
The report insisted on mandatory participatory councils in the Church, an issue raised at all levels of synod consultations and in a 2023 synthesis report.
Vergara said: “I feel that after this ordinary assembly on synodality, there will be changes, there will be transformations, but there will also and will still be resistances.”
“But because there has been a paradigm shift, it will happen in terms of reaching out to the peripheries,” he said.
Vergara was part of a four-person national delegation to the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which held its second and final session from Oct. 2 to 27 at the Vatican.
Apart from Vergara, the delegation was composed of Cardinal-designate Pablo Virgilio David, the bishop of Kalookan, Cardinal Jose Advincula, the archbishop of Manila, and lay theologian Estela Padilla.
Vergara said he looked forward to living a “spirituality of synodality.”
“It’s a good process because it’s an out-of-the-box thing. This means creative ways to see how we can reach out to those people in need,” he said.
