In his speech for the Diocesan Assembly on Saturday 13 July, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB spoke about the role of listening and discernment in the proposed Pastoral Council.
“Pope Francis has said often and many of you would have come across this many times – a synodal church is a Church, which listens. He’s talking about at the universal level, the faithful people of God. Now remember, the faithful people of God, going back to what Fr Vincent reminded us of this morning – is all of us. Sometimes, people talk about the people of God, as if it’s distinct, somehow, rather, from the priests and the bishops. The faithful people of God, is all of us. Because as Fr Vincent stressed so beautifully and so strongly this morning, we’re all equal, because we’re all baptised into the community of disciples. So, it’s the faithful people of God, listening to each other. And then all listening to the College of Bishops, while the College of Bishops listens to the faithful people of God, and then the faithful people of God and the College of bishops, to the Bishop of Rome, who equally is listening to the College of Bishops, and all the people. And Pope Francis will talk about a mutual listening, in which everybody has something to learn. And he says, this is the way we can begin to listen and discern the voice of the Holy Spirit. And the other thing Pope Francis says, is that listening is much more than simply hearing. We can hear each other and dismiss it. We can hear this noise and not allow it to be anything other than noise that we forget immediately afterwards. Listening is a different thing altogether. And some of you have heard me talk about this before, if I, as I’ve tried to think this through for myself, I’ve come to the point of talking about what I call non defensive listening.
Listening in a synodal church involves non-defensive listening and what does that mean? To put it simply, I think it means that if I listen, in order to see whether the other person is smart enough to agree with me, that’s defensive listening. That I just want to have my own point of view confirmed. And if I don’t, well, they’ve obviously not understood the issue properly. That’s defensive listening.
Non-defensive listening is when I am prepared not to abandon what I believe, but to put it to one side, to listen with an open heart and an open mind to what other people are saying. And then perhaps, to allow what I’m hearing to be brought into engagement with what I think, because then I might begin to see something new in the whole point. So I really wanted to stress this because if our Diocesan Pastoral Council is to avoid the trap of the previous ones, and eventually kind of just run out of steam, we can’t afford to fall into the trap of a Council that operates on the principle of defensive listening, that we’ve got all the answers, that we’re going to tell the rest of the people in the Church what they have to do. And if they don’t go along with it, it just shows you how blind and stubborn they are. I don’t want a Diocesan Pastoral Council that operates that way. Now, this is easy to say. But even as you reflect on the three sessions we’ve had today, some of you might be able to reflect that actually, “I can understand what the Archbishop is saying, because I was kind of listening to see whether other people were agreeing with me. But I wasn’t really listening to see if there were some gems, some insight, some beautiful gift of the Holy Spirit in what they were saying that I wasn’t prepared to hear.”
My hope is that this approach to being the Church, will begin to percolate through everything that we do. Already for the last two or three sessions, for example, of our Council of Priests, which is a body of priests that provide advice to me, we’ve tried to run those Council of Priests meetings, on this model. If Parish Pastoral Councils could adopt this model, that would be great. If school staff could adopt this model, that would be great. I think there’s something in this approach to a deep and respectful listening, which offers a hope for all of us, not a blind optimism, but a hope founded in faith.”