Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, offered a deep and very rich speech about “Building a Culture of Synodality in the Church” for the Spanish Course participants at the General Curia of the Society of Jesus on September 19th.
In his speech, Card. Ravasi narrates how the synodality was present in the Bible and in the first Christian communities as a regular communitarian praxis. Also, he shares examples in which some members of the first communities lived in a divisive way “I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos“, and then remembers that “the body is one and has many members“.
During his speech, Card. Ravasi explains how us as human beings are multi-dimensional beings, need the be nurtured from different experiences to relate and learn from reality. In a similar way, he expresses that Culture is also multi-dimensional and we need to offer holistic responses to the big challenges of today, and he quotes Steve Jobs: “It is the marriage between technology and the liberal arts, science and the humanities that gives us a song in our hearts“.
Last but not least, Card. Ravasi invites the members and communities of the Church today to live in a synodal way: “to enter together as Churches for such important challenges and paradigm shifts that cannot be solved only by individual communities“, and not only in the Church, but with other actors and organizations outside the Church “We have to get into the square. Here is the effective synodality not only intra-ecclesial“.
Fr. Giacomo Costa SJ did studies in philosophy and theology, and he also obtained a master's degree in Political and Moral Sociology at the EHESS in Paris.
He is the responsible for Formation at the Society of Jesus.
Prof. Rafael Luciani received his licentiate and doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and a degree in educational sciences with a philosophical orientation from the Universidad Católica "Andrés Bello" in Caracas (Venezuela). He also studied philosophy at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome and did post-doctoral work at the Julius Maximilians Universität in Würzburg (Germany).
Nathalie Becquart serves as Undersecretary of the Secretariat of the Synod of the Bishops since March 2021.
Robert J. Bies (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Professor of Management and Founder of the Executive Master’s in Leadership Program at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. In addition, Dr. Bies is a co-author of the book, Getting Even: The Truth About Workplace Revenge—And How to Stop It.
Professor Bies’s current research focuses on leadership, the delivery of bad news, organizational justice, and revenge and forgiveness in the workplace.