Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, delivered the opening lecture of the academic year at the Pontifical Urban University, which is run by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

The prelate’s address, entitled “A Constitutively Synodal and Missionary Church,” offers insight into how one of the Church’s most influential prelates defines “synodality”—a word that he notes was coined in French in the 1980s.

Synodality, he told the students, “expresses the subject of the whole Church and everyone in the Church. Believers are ‘synodoi’, companions on the journey, called to be active subjects insofar as they participate in the one priesthood of Christ and are recipients of the various charisms conferred by the Holy Spirit for the common good.”

Synodality, he added, is an “antidote to a static and ahistorical vision of the Church”; it “jolts the ecclesial body, putting it back in motion.”