Bishop Williams: Church a ‘sleeping beauty’ that Synod can stir awake through faithful’s gifts

For Bishop Joseph Williams, it’s no coincidence that his schedule in the weeks leading up to the 2022 Synod Assembly include confirmations of young people from across the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Conferring that sacrament — one of the special roles reserved for a bishop — has allowed for greater reflection on the gifts of the Holy Spirit that confirmands receive in a new way, he said.

Bishop Williams expects that the 2022 Synod Assembly June 3-5 will call on all of the faithful in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to “unwrap” those gifts to fulfill their calling and approach the Church’s mission with a “newfound boldness.”

“If we stay focused” on the Synod’s priorities, “there will be a cultural change in our Church,” said Bishop Williams, the auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis and chairman of the 2022 Archdiocesan Synod Executive Committee.

When Bishop Williams was ordained a bishop in January, Archbishop Bernard Hebda asked him to make the Synod his primary focus, and he has been involved in preparations for the Synod Assembly, where about 500 invited participants will reflect, pray and vote on propositions related to the Synod’s three focus areas: 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.

Participants’ feedback will help inform a pastoral letter Archbishop Hebda plans to release in November around the feast of Christ the King, which will be followed by an action plan to help parishes implement ideas in that pastoral letter.

The three-day Synod Assembly includes procedures mandated for local Church synods by canon law, Bishop Williams said May 16, “but the procedure is at the service of the Spirit, at the service of renewal.”

He pointed to the Church’s history of councils, including the first council in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, where the “Apostles and the elders were gathered together” to consider questions of circumcision and the Mosaic law for non-Jews who had become Christians, to the Second Vatican Council, held 1962 to 1965 to address the Church in the modern world.

“You can’t lead without meetings, without councils. It’s where the Spirit speaks,” Bishop Williams said.

As he took leadership of the Synod, Bishop Williams believes God had prepared him through the south Minneapolis parishes he shepherds: St. Stephen and Holy Rosary. The Synod’s focus areas “are precisely what we have been living in the parishes where God has asked me to serve … from forming parishes that are … bases of evangelization, to forming missionary disciples.”

“We’ve done this kind of formation,” he said of his parishes. “We have 70 right now in a missionary discipleship (program) — 70 adults — and that’s commonplace for us.”

Bishop Williams believes the Holy Spirit has primed the archdiocese “for this moment to support our archbishop and his vision for leadership in this local Church,” he said. “It’s really exciting.”

His evidence for that includes the sufferings he sees in the local Church, including fear, sadness and loneliness of its members, especially young people. “There’s some very alarming statistics about the pervasive sadness experienced by high schoolers in our country, and the Lord wants to send his Holy Spirit into that sadness. But there’s also fear, and it’s not just amongst our young people, it’s in our whole Church. It’s the fear of admitting we believe (while living) in an unbelieving world, let alone speaking the name of Jesus amongst our family and our friends and our classmates.”

The “true power of the Church,” he said, “is the power to witness to the resurrection of Jesus. And it’s only given through that outpouring of the Holy Spirit.”

All confirmed Catholics have been given a particular outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and it’s those gifts — wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord — that Bishop Williams hopes Catholics can put to the service of Jesus and his Church. He likens the image of a Christmas tree with unopened presents under it to Catholics who have received the gifts of the Holy Spirit but “never opened that gift.”

He relates to that, he said, because he was in his 20s, a decade after his confirmation, before he recognized how God was calling him to use those gifts.

“I see the Church as the sleeping beauty,” he said. “She’s beautiful because she’s Christ’s bride. … But she’s asleep — asleep fundamentally to what is her principal vocation, which is to evangelize.” When Catholics begin to evangelize, “it’s like the sleeping beauty is being kissed into life. And the layperson realizes, ‘This is what I was confirmed for, right? This is what it means to be Church.’ And you see a joy that comes with that.”

The question of the Archdiocesan Synod is “will … it turn the tide? … And I believe it will,” Bishop Williams said.

He encouraged all Catholics in the archdiocese to pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Synod Assembly, which takes place over Pentecost weekend, especially through the Synod novena (see sidebar).

The Synod Assembly “is going to be a process, but it’s also going to be a work of the Lord,” he said. “So, we can’t pretend to know exactly what it will look like, but we can say, I sure hope it is like that southwest hill in Jerusalem where the Upper Room was. And I sure hope it’s like what the bishops and (Pope St.) John XXIII experienced in the ‘upper room’ of the Second Vatican Council, because our Church needs that.”