Chronological overview

In September 2021 the Bishop asked me whether I’d agree to be the Synodal Contact Person. And I accepted (How I got appointed). I then called a number of people, asking them whether they would join a team to help me with this job. This team (I call it the sinoditiim in Estonian) received benediction and was officially presented to the public on 2021-10-17 in the Cathedral (The opening mass).

In September and October 2021, the first big job of the sinoditiim was to produce a website where we invited people to participate in the consultation phase (https://sinod.katoliku.ee). Consenting on the content of this website took us much energy. I was grateful and proud about the result.

In November 2021 it had become clear that the sinoditiim and I had difficulties to dialogue because we had a number of opposing convictions. See The two camps. I felt as if I was talking to a wall. During a meeting on 2021-11-09 the Bishop made clear that he considered my plans for the consultation phase as useless individual endeavour. I abandoned my hope that this team would produce something useful. I decided to do “what the Pope asks me to do rather than what the Bishop asks me to do”.

One week later I had a vision (The naked Pope) and started to tell people about it. It caused controversial emotions but helped me to enter into dialogue with non-catholic people.

In December 2021 I had the idea of using an iterative method: I published a “draft” and told people “This is what I would write to the Vatican if I would have to write my synthesis right now. Tell me what’s wrong or what’s missing.” Many people gave concrete feedback, both critical and complimentary. A few persons were irritated and said “How dare you write a synthesis before the consultation phase has finished”.

Between January and March 2022, I formed an “alternative” team and lead a project of writing an inter-confessional consultation report based on my draft. We met four times during 4 hours in a row (sinoditalgud) where we discussed about the content of our report. Our report is probably the most representative document about Synodality in Estonia that has been written during the consultation phase. It has not only four authors, it also has dozens of participants who contributed to the content, ten of which publicly confirmed our summary, among them two atheists.

Exactly on 2022-03-31, I submitted this document to the sinoditiim as our report of the consultation phase. See The inter-confessional report.

Besides our interconfessional report, the sinoditiim collected 16 other reports, 8 of which were actual meeting reports, 8 were individual responses. Of course none of these other reports came from outside of the Roman-Catholic Church.

In April 2022, the sinoditiim started the discernment phase, where our job was to synthesize all the reports. I imagined that I would finally get the sinoditiim to continue the work of the inter-confessional team and to apply my iterative method. But another team member took leadership, and I did not fight back. One can say that I quiet quitted the sinoditiim during this first meeting in April. My remaining interactions with them were just work-to-rule. In my comment, I tried to summarize what “we” did during this phase.

On 2022-05-27 the new leader of the sinoditiim had produced a first internal draft of a 10 pages report, which reflected what they believed “good” Catholics in Estonia would say at the Synod. It was a selection of what they had liked in the reports. Not a single idea expressed in the inter-confessional report had made it into this synthesis. All members of the sinoditiim –except me– agreed to this synthesis without discussion. I suggested to start a new synthesis from scratch where the authors of the 17 reports would participate. But I had to admit that time was running out. And of course a team that uses the Waterfall approach cannot imagine to start from scratch when you are close to the end. The Bishop then found a compromise: I would write my personal “comment”, which he would include into his letter along with the synthesis.

In June 2022 I worked on this comment, where I concluded that the “fact of having failed to reach a consensus between the two teams might be our most valuable contribution to the Synod”.

In July 2022 I had final discussions with the Bishop about minor details and on 2022-07-22 I finally sent “our” synthesis and the Bishop’s letter to the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops. Done.

In August 2022 I read that the Bishop changed his mind and gave permission to publish the Estonian synthesis (Estonian synthesis went public).

On October 4th, 2022 I informed the Bishop that I won’t work any more as the Synodal Contact Person (Prophets not welcome in Estonia).