One of the late Pope Francis’s most enduring legacies will be his years-long gatherings and teachings to create “synodality” as a new path forward for the worldwide Catholic Church.
Synodality is a way of being, living, and working, through which the entire Church—inclusive of clergy, religious leadership, and lay people—discerns where the Holy Spirit is leading the Church, using a deliberate process of prayer, listening, and communal discernment and dialogue. It aims to create a faith reflective of all members, emphasizing
- listening to all voices,
- being willing to be changed by others,
- discerning where the Holy Spirit is leading the Church, and
- recommitting to the true interconnectedness of all local churches that comprise the global Catholic Church.
Pope Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, has embraced synodality, recently hosting a Jubilee gathering in Rome partly aimed at helping implement it globally. As Pope Leo described synodality: “No one possesses the whole truth. We must all humbly seek it and seek it together.”
At Santa Clara University, Professor Rafael Luciani is a global expert on synodality, having learned its theological foundations in the birthplace of synodality, Latin America, as did Pope Francis. In May, Luciani joined Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology to help it become a worldwide resource on synodality.
Originally from Venezuela, Luciani studied and taught ecclesiology and Latin American theology for decades, including liberation theology and the region’s distinctive method—known as “see, judge, act”—for making pastoral and administrative decisions affecting its 400 million Catholics. That method uses multiple, inclusive listening sessions to arrive at policies that reflect the needs of Catholics regionwide. It is remarkably similar to the “synodality ” that is now official Church teaching, following the publication of a “final document” from Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality.
Now, Luciani is leading an effort at JST-SCU to bring the richness, benefits, and process of synodality to JST-SCU’s theology students and also to all the people worldwide—clergy, lay ministers, educators, and more—who are tasked with carrying out this new way of “being Church.”
Just months after joining JST-SCU, Luciani had a private audience with Pope Leo XIV to discuss synodality, including how the school and the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council of Catholic bishops (CELAM) will help create a “network of networks,” called “Together,” to lead the advancement of synodality in the Pan-American region.
Already, Luciani and his colleague Felix Palazzi, who also recently joined JST-SCU, launched a free global online course that has drawn more than 5,000 students since Oct. 20 from more than 50 countries. Featuring an inaugural keynote by the Vatican’s General Secretary of the Synod, Cardinal Mario Grech, and the Secretary General of CELAM, Bishop Lizardo Estrada Herrera O.S.A., the course is taught by 30 worldwide experts on synodality.
The following conversation about his work has been edited for length and clarity.
SCM: How did you come to be so involved in Catholic leadership in Latin America and the Americas?
Luciani: I was teaching at the Jesuit University in Caracas, one of the most important centers for religious life and theology between the 1970s and 2000s, where we engaged deeply with the work of liberation theology pioneers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, Leonardo Boff of Brazil, and Jon Sobrino, S.J., of El Salvador. These foundational liberation theologians played a decisive role in shaping Latin America’s reception of the Second Vatican Council [a pivotal Church gathering from 1962 to 1965, which resulted in changes including affirming the dignity of each person’s human development; religious liberty; and expanding the role of lay people in the Church’s mission].
In Latin America, there was a more complete, positive reception to Vatican II than in other regions, especially defining the Church as the People of God and new ministries based on the “preferential option for the poor.” Synodality has unfolded as the maturing of Vatican II.
Then, in 2014, one year after Francis was elected, I was appointed as an expert on the theological team of CELAM— a group created after Vatican II to lead the Latin American theology—because I already had so many years working in CELAM and in the Confederation of Latin American Religious Women and Men (CLAR).
When I became part of that team, we started to support Francis’ theology in a more global sphere to have a wider panorama and understanding of what he was bringing outside the Latin American church. During that time, I created what is called the Ibero-American Theology Group, which was a group that wanted to bring in the whole Iber-America—from the U.S. to Argentina and Canada (and we also included Italy at that time)— into a dialogue to promote synodality. I founded the group with Félix Palazzi, Juan Carlos Scannone, S.J., and Carlos Maríía Galli to develop synodality for the pontificate of Francis.
SCM: You’ve observed that Latin American church practices have long been “synodal” in nature. Can you elaborate?
Luciani: In Latin America, listening and discernment, and the relationship between bishops and theologians was already very different than in other regions.
CELAM is the conference of all Catholic bishops from the region. To shape the pastoral vision of the continent, the conference consults with all of the continent. They listen to all the voices. Then, they start to do a discernment among bishops and theologians, and produce a document. That was a practice we already had; we always worked as a continent, very synodally, it was never a local church doing it alone.
Since Pope Paul VI (elected in 1963), CELAM has been the most influential organization in the global Church, promoting (this way of operating), the option for the poor, and conferences with the work of theologians and bishops. The Vatican’s synod on the Amazon was an example of CELAM’s global influence. More than 80,000 people were consulted and listened to, and it was the trigger for making that the official way of practicing in the global Church.
SCM: Why do you feel it is so important that the learning and adopting of synodality be done globally, not just in regional pockets of the Church?
Luciani: As a Church, if we are not global, we are not a Church. Every local church lives from the communion with other local churches. And that’s why during the synod, the question since the beginning was not what the Spirit is asking of the Church, but of the churches. So, to be a Church implies always to be in communion and building relationships with other churches, so we cannot stay in localisms.
It’s also important to differentiate between being “international” and being “global.” Most Catholic universities in the U.S. are international because they have students from other countries. Global means going out, learning from others instead of teaching how things are locally in the U.S., expanding faculty of other countries, and expanding our theology into the global Church.
If not, we close ourselves in our own reality, socially, politically, and ecclesially. And then we become so narrow-minded that we only see our self in everything. And that is what I think has happened in institutions in the U.S., from parishes to universities, where people only think in their own reality. They don’t build bridges, not only within the U.S., but globally. And when we don’t do that, we are destined to die in any place of the world. Because, we become what Pope Francis calls self-referential, and we’re not seeing the richness that can help us transform ourself, and that richness always comes from the peripheries, from outside ourself.
SCM: What are your hopes for the online course you helped create, which will help those charged with implementing synodality worldwide better understand the final document?
Luciani: The nature of the MOOC is different than any other course forming people on synodality. It provides content that maybe you will never find in any small community or even in a parish, because you would have to pay a lot of money to get into a course on a university or pastoral institute, or to study with that particular instructor. Once you offer this free course, you can replicate it in so many parts and places, like a parish, a pastoral institute. The MOOC is impactful because it seeks to change mentalities and produce reforms, and creates the possibility of expanding knowledge to all people, without exclusion.
All that material can be used, for example, to form a parish catechist who doesn’t know about synodality, but months after the MOOC is offered, they have all that formation and access.
Ideally, the MOOC would help motivate those people to continue in a formal study in a formal program. But that’s where we have the challenge as institutions, universities, or pastoral universities—What can we offer? I think Santa Clara needs to think and discern: If we want to be really a global leader on synodality, how can we offer degrees available at an affordable cost? Because if not, we are forming elites of people who know synodality. If I want to teach in a seminary or in a university, I need an ecclesiastical degree. But, if I have to pay thousands of dollars to have that, how can I serve the global Church?
Santa Clara and JST-SCU are doing well bringing in international diversity. It will be eye-opening to not simply have people from different countries in our classrooms, but to create interactions in our classrooms, in research, in teaching, that really cause changes in everything each person—faculty, staff, and students—may do. You need this global diversity of people and cultures. Conversion never comes from a self-referentiality, but from a confrontation with others’ reality, from the peripheries. And that is why I think that being global is being Church— and the only way to proceed.