The Second Vatican Council’s document Lumen Gentium (light of the nations) clearly taught that the Church consists of all the baptized, not just the clergy.
The return to this conciliar concept surely is a powerful antidote to the recent discoveries of clerical domination and abuse in almost all spheres of ecclesial life.
In fact, the unprecedented opposition to this papal initiative even from within the Church — mostly from a powerful lobby of a vociferous clerical minority — is a clear sign that they are set to lose all the undue and excessive power and authority they had been used to wielding unjustly over the laity within the Church.
One characteristic of the current worldwide synodal process is to get all the baptized — the bishops, priests, religious and laity — involved in the ecclesial decision-making processes.
The unprecedented consultation of the baptized at grassroots levels on crucially important ecclesial issues was modeled for the harnessing of the sensus fidei fidelium (the sense of the faith of the believers) as it was done in the early Christian communities as we find in the New Testament, especially in the Acts of the Apostles.
This consultation — in the form of a questionnaire — thus, was uniquely novel in the sense that it was a process that began from the lowest rungs of the Church hierarchy — from the parish or ecclesial communities spread all over the world.
Those responses of the ecclesial grassroots were collected and sent to Rome by the bishops’ conferences in each country by August 2022.
It was this CSD that was sent to the seven zones of the world known as “continents”, namely, North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Oceania for further discussion and discernment.
The two-day Asian continental stage of the synodal process concluded on Feb. 26 at Samphran, Thailand with an ecclesial assembly consisting of delegates from all the episcopal conferences of Asia.