Impressions after the first sinoditalgu

(Written between 2022-02-17 and 2022-02-19)

Here are (some of) my impressions after the first meeting of the sinoditalgutiim. Thanks be to God for this inspiring and encouraging meeting! Thanks to those who prayed for us, thanks to those who participated in person, thanks to the Sisters of the Pirita convent who accepted us as their guests.

I currently see the sinoditalgutiim as a group of diverse people who love the Church, feel co-responsible and are not afraid of speaking boldly.

The expected final outcome of the work of this team is a document that has the public consent of at least two members from different confessions and can be submitted as our report to the sinoditiim on March 30. It is not needed that all members publicly consent to our report. Those who don’t consent publicly may consent privately, remain undecided or even explicitly disagree with the document (and I plan to publish these numbers as part of our report). When I say “we” (or “our” or “us”) in my draft of the printable document, I express what I hope to become the common position of those who are going to sign this document on March 30.

At the moment I am the team leader, the secretary and the editor of our report. That’s a case of accumulation of offices, which is suboptimal but acceptable in a small team. Let me know if you feel called to become our leader, secretary or editor.

Note the technical difference between “my website” and “my draft for our report”. The former is made using Sphinx and every (committed) change is visible in the history of the GitLab project. The latter is a printable document produced using LibreOffice without a detailed history of every change, I just manually log an overview of the different versions (in Change history).

We do not yet know how long our report will be. It might become much longer than 10 pages. Or maybe the opposite. Whom do we want to read it? Only the fathers of the Synod in Rome? I can imagine that we will eventually publish it as a pdf document under a CC BY-ND license and distribute it to anybody who is interested.

It seems clear that I must try to find more members from other denominations (Orthodox, other Protestants than Lutherans, …)

There are many things in version 10 we didn’t didn’t have time to speak about. The title of version 10 was “Towards a synodal church”, which is just one of several ideas. We should speak about the title. Any other suggestions?

I changed the page First meeting of the sinoditalgutiim from future tense to past tense and started a new page Second meeting of the sinoditalgutiim. Our instrumentum laboris didn’t have a version number (its filename was simply 20220216.odt), but actually it was version 10 of “my draft”. I made changes on my website to Synodality.

I still wait for more feedback on version 10, but I also started to work on a version 11 (which is currently “under development” or “not released”). It seems that I should reintroduce my “vision of the naked Pope Francis” because it is important. But I must somehow make clear that it is “just a vision” and that we don’t expect it to become true as such.

I realized (already since 2022-02-15) that my differentiation between “to know” and “to believe” needs a fundamental revision. Both terms actually describe the same concept. Their only difference is how open you are for doubts. When somebody says “I know”, then it actually just means “I believe and refuse to discuss about this”. The truth is what remains true (or real) even if we fail to believe or know it.