Synodality

“[W]henever a bishop or priest acts as both father and brother—and, with St. Bernard, we should add as a mother—to his people, the community comes alive, sacramental life deepens, and the coordinated and nurtured gifts of the Spirit transform the Church community into communion.”

“Hierarchical ministry is not delegated or authorized by members of the Church; it is a gift of grace.”

“The Christian life and the Church’s evangelizing mission are not administrative programs but a culture and way of life.”

“Questions of power and its exercise in the Church are real and need to be resolved, but we must not let them become a distraction from the more fundamental questions of truth, fidelity, and apostolic mission, to which all authority in the Church is ordered.”

“[T]he inheritance of Paul’s letters is a function of the common faith and practice that binds all the Christian churches together in harmony and guarantees the fidelity of the present to the apostolic pillars of the past.”

“The loss of authority is an evacuation of the substance of political existence—indeed, the radical impoverishment of all community from top to bottom.”

“Our crisis is one in which liturgy is no longer the source of our vision, theology is alienated from life, and piety is fed by soft sentimentalism.”

“The essential ecclesiological purpose of the college of bishops is not to form a central ecclesiastical government, but precisely the reverse: to help build up the Church as an organism that grows in living cells and is alive and one.”