Dean Rademacher participated in not one, but two Parish Synod Leadership Team meetings — one at St. Joseph in New Hope, where he works as the parish director, and the other at his home parish, Guardian Angels in Oakdale. The consultations were the final step in the 2022 Archdiocesan Synod process before the three-day Synod Assembly in June.

While participating in two separate daylong events was a time commitment, Rademacher thought both were valuable because they brought together key Catholics to brainstorm and think strategically around critical issues in their parish and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Held in parishes at the end of February or beginning of March, the six-hour PSLT consultation asked groups of 10 to gather with their pastor to refine draft Synod propositions — statements of ideas related to the Synod’s three topic areas — before those propositions advanced to the Synod Assembly weekend.

Groups also watched three short video presentations from local theology experts and discussed what it would look like to hypothetically implement three of the propositions at their own parishes.

The Archdiocesan Synod launched in 2019 with 30 listening sessions around the archdiocese, where Archbishop Bernard Hebda gathered broad feedback on the successes and challenges of the local Church. In 2020, he identified three focus areas for the Synod: 1. Forming parishes that are in the service of evangelization, 2. Forming missionary disciples who know Jesus’ love and respond to his call, and 3. Forming youth and young adults in and for a Church that is always young.

In October and November 2021, parishes hosted small groups for six-week sessions to explore the focus areas and shape the Synod Assembly in the form of Synod propositions. Synod leaders refined those propositions and sought further feedback through the PSLT consultation. Participants evaluated 20 propositions related to focus area No. 1, 14 related to focus area No. 2, and 16 related to focus area No. 3.

Based on consultation input, the propositions will be finalized for the Synod Assembly, where they will be discussed and prayed about. Those propositions will help attendees make recommendations to Archbishop Hebda on the future of the local Church. In November, the archbishop plans to release a pastoral letter informed by work at the assembly.

Two PSLT participants from each parish will attend the Synod Assembly, a gathering of an estimated 500 people.

The Archdiocesan Synod has been inspiring for Todd Flowerday, the liturgist at St. Katharine Drexel in Ramsey, who moved from Washington state for the job 18 months ago. Knowing that the archdiocese was engaged in a synod helped attract him to the area, he said. “It was a very good sign,” he said, of the local Church’s health.

Flowerday participated in the PSLT consultation at St. Katharine Drexel, and he praised the quality of the videos that guided the event. “It was clear that it was well thought out,” he said. “It was much better than I thought it was going to be.”

Rademacher, the current chairman of the Coalition of Ministry Associations and former chair of the Association of Parish Business Administrators — both organizations of ministry professionals in the archdiocese — noted that while at least one person at the PSLT consultation voiced initial concern about whether the time would be worthwhile, he or she reported it was an enrichening experience.

That’s what Synod leaders heard, too.

“The feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive,” Synod Director Therese Coons and Assistant Director Father Joseph Bambenek told The Catholic Spirit in a March 18 email. “People were energized by the discussions, especially the discussions about how to move forward. As one person put it, ‘None of us wanted to be there at the start of the day, and then none of us wanted to leave when it was over.’”

Almost all parishes participated in the PSLT meetings, Synod leaders confirmed.

Rademacher said he “feels sad for the parishes that didn’t take the Synod seriously.”

“They missed a huge opportunity to engage key leadership and to work collaboratively with the archbishop on something all of us have,” he said. “These topics were not ‘pie in the sky topics,’ these are really … where the rubber hits the road.”

The consultation’s exercise of exploring how the parish could hypothetically implement three of the propositions was a foretaste of what’s expected to come from the archbishop’s pastoral letter and related plan.

In that brainstorming exercise, participants were also asked whether it would be beneficial to work with other parishes, and how the archdiocese could assist the parish in that work.

“This part of the consultation had a two-fold purpose,” Coons and Father Bambenek said. “First, to have parishes begin to think about implementation, as the Synod will result in a pastoral Letter with pastoral priorities for the archdiocese. We heard back that some parishes found these discussions so valuable they are taking action now based on them. Second, to provide the archdiocese with valuable feedback on how parishes approach this work and thereby how the archdiocese can better support them. Imagine the immense value of seeing how nearly every parish in the archdiocese would go about concretely implementing three of these propositions.”