Are You Wondering What the 2028 Ecclesial Assembly Will Be Like? Just Look to the 2021 Latin American One

by José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue April 11, 2025 tfp./are-you-wondering-what-the-2028-ecclesial-assembly-will-be-like-just-look-to-the-2021-latin-american-one

Are You Wondering What the 2028 Ecclesial Assembly Will Be Like? Just Look to the 2021 Latin American One

On March 11, from his bed in the Gemelli Hospital—where eight days earlier he almost died—Pope Francis summoned the Universal Church to gather in an ecclesial assembly in October 2028. By then, we may already have a new pope. Seemingly, the idea would be to ensure that the Synod of Synodality attains its conclusive ‘reception’ stage. The pope intends to leave synodality as the main legacy of his pontificate.

The Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech, told Vatican News that this ecclesial assembly would replace a new synodal assembly on synodality.¹ What is the difference? For an assembly to be called synodal, most participants must be bishops. As its name indicates, this is not required in an ecclesial assembly that brings together the entire People of God, composed primarily of lay people, particularly women.

This hypothesis—raised appropriately by the well-known canonist Fr. Gerald Murray in an article for The Catholic Thing²—is confirmed by a lesser-known precedent: the First Ecclesial Assembly of Latin America and the Caribbean. It occurred between 2019 and 2021 and culminated in a hybrid event—in person and virtual—with more than a thousand delegates. Since COVID-19 epidemic restrictions were still in place, 966 delegates were online, and 72 met in person in Mexico City from November 21–28, 2021.³

The initiative for this continental ecclesial assembly came from Pope Francis himself. Leaders of the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (better known by its Spanish acronym CELAM) asked him for permission to hold the VI General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate. Instead, the pontiff proposed (“prophetically,” according to the organizers) “to give way to a process more in line with our present times: To host an ecclesial and synodal gathering, where the People of God as a whole would be able to participate and have their say,” and thus be able “to undertake new pastoral challenges.”⁴

As it turned out, the number of prelates in that final meeting in Mexico City was less than a quarter of the participants: only 10 cardinals (1%) and 233 bishops (21%). If we add to them the 264 priests and deacons (24%), clergy representatives were in the minority since the majority consisted of 428 lay men and women (39%) and 160 religious men and women (15%).⁵

The organizers were proud of this lineup: “This is the first time that we have held an Ecclesial Assembly—and not only an Episcopal Assembly—in our Church, in this region. In this we experience the newness of the Spirit who surprises us and leads us along new paths of conversion and personal, community and institutional renewal.”⁶

From the outset, the event was seen as a pioneering initiative destined to serve as a future model for the Universal Church. “Both Pope Francis and the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops are very interested in listening to the experiences and learnings that emerge from the development of the First Ecclesial Assembly and from the process of listening prior to its realization. We are bringing a novelty to the universal Church by holding for the first time an Ecclesial Assembly in which the various sectors of the People of God are actively participating.”⁷

As in the past, and notably at the 1968 Medellin Conference,^{8 “}the Church in this region has been a pioneer in many areas of reception of the Second Vatican Council and continues to be so.” Since “a very important fruit of the Amazon Synod has been the constitution of the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon (CEAMA), an unprecedented ecclesial organism in the universal Church born in June 2020, and which on October 17, 2021, was canonically erected by Pope Francis.”⁹ Obviously, the unprecedented fact is that it is an ecclesial conference and not an episcopal one like those existing worldwide. In addition, CELAM itself is being restructured, so “the foundations are being laid for a synodal Church in the region.”¹⁰ In other words, CELAM will probably cease to be a bishops’ conference and become an ecclesial council comprised of all the baptized.

What are the theological foundations for this Copernican change to Church structures? They are the same ones we denounced in our 2023 study, The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box.¹¹ The document synthesizing the proposals of the Ecclesial Assembly’s listening phase states that the pastoral conversion the Latin American Church requires must be understood “from an ecclesiology characterized by the image of the People of God,” which “comprises all its members as subjects in the Church,” “has a priestly and prophetic character through baptism,” and “is configured by the ‘charisms’ with a multiple and diverse richness of gifts” so that all faithful possess “an instinct of faith—sensus fidei—which helps them to discern what is truly from God.” It follows that “synodality cannot be just a concept or a particular event, but must be embodied in both structures and ecclesial processes” since it is “a natural way of being Church,” where lay people “are an active and creative part in the execution of pastoral projects for the benefit of the community.”¹²

The Ecclesial Assembly’s first listening phase, held between April and August 2021, aimed “to discern the signs of the times and to heed the cries and hopes of the poor, of our sister mother earth, and of all the People of God.” According to its organizers, about 70,000 people participated: 47,000 in “diverse community spaces” (meaning group meetings), “8,500 as personal contributions,” and 14,000 in thematic reflection forums.¹³

In an article for Civiltà Cattolica, Peruvian Jesuit Cardinal Pedro Barreto and Mexican layman Mauricio Lopez, co-founder of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network and former world president of Christian Life Communities (a kind of Jesuit third order for lay people), made a final assessment. Their testimony is expressive because Cardinal Barreto was a member of the Ecclesial Assembly’s animating commission, and Mauricio Lopez was the coordinator of its listening commission. They acknowledge in the article that these 70,000 people are a moderate number of participants concerning the total number of Catholics in the region (350 million). However, they say that it is a significant number considering that the consultation was carried out amid the Covid epidemic and, above all, if compared to “recent ecclesial experiences where participation was reduced to a few dozen people, almost always from official structures.”¹⁴

Nonetheless, Cardinal Barreto and Mauricio Lopez recognize that they failed to involve more deeply the voices of the “unlikely” and that, in the delegations sent to Mexico, “the temptation to delegate to groups that are more institutionalized or closer to the thinking of those in leadership positions in the Church has prevailed.” Besides, “they should have played the role of representatives of the various voices of the Church in their countries, but in many cases this was not the case.”¹⁵ There is nothing new under the sun because the same happened in the egregious German Synodal Way and the various stages of the Synod on Synodality, except that these two authors recognize it.

The listening commission coordinated by Mauricio Lopez prepared a Narrative Synthesis: Listening at the First Ecclesial Assembly of Latin America and the Caribbean,¹⁶ which collected the main speeches in more than two hundred pages and later prepared the aforementioned Document for Community Discernment made available to all of the Ecclesial Assembly’s participants. This Synthesis is valuable because it gathers in an unfiltered manner what the sensus fidei of the People of God is supposedly saying to the Church under the breath of the Holy Spirit. It is a gold mine of information regarding the radical changes that the ecclesiastical nomenklatura and its supporters on different levels seek to introduce in the Church.

To facilitate reading, the topics addressed in this document are presented differently from the order chosen by the coordinating committee. All texts are from the above-mentioned Narrative Synthesis. Only page numbers are shown as we will spare the reader the tedious task of jumping over the numbering of so many notes, since few will be able to check the Spanish original.

1. Clericalism

As was to be expected, theme 2.7, “Clericalism,” within the thematic block 2 (“Illuminating-discerning reality”) (p. 82), served as emotional fuel to instill class struggle between laity and clergy in the Church. The so-called plague of clericalism “gives excessive power to the clergy and hinders the path toward a synodal and outgoing Church” (p. 110). According to the Synthesis, “a pyramidal, hierarchical model of Church is still very present, which ignores the richness of the diversity of ministries and charisms, prevents a communitarian model of animation, and leaves many members who sustain the mission out of service roles” (p. 108). In theme 4.7, “Laity,” they insist that the hierarchical structure “leads to the exclusion of the laity” (p. 184). Forum 31 on the laity is more vehement in its criticism: “We, lay people, are the vast majority of the People of God. Our dignity comes from Baptism. Our vocation is not less worthy than that of the consecrated. We are, therefore, ecclesial subjects and mission protagonists in decision-making. We should not accept being considered collaborators of the consecrated since we have an ecclesial and social co-responsibility that is expressed in the synodal journey” (p. 185).

On the contrary, Basic Christian Communities (BCCs) “are a way of [being] church that resists clericalism” (p. 108) because in them, “there is an awakening, above all of the laity, to recognize their own dignity and ministerial role in the Church, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council” (p. 108). They contribute to “overcome the clergy-laity division/opposition to move toward a charismatic self-understanding of ecclesial communities from the community-ministries binomial to make possible the synodal conversion, to overcome clericalism” (p. 211). BCCs are the opposite of traditional parishes, which have “little effective lay participation in decision making in the parish (consultation or leadership spaces), or the Church in general” (p. 109).

To combat clericalism, “the first thing that must be revalued is to recognize the baptismal condition of each follower of Jesus, by which we are all called. We are all priests, prophets, and kings independently of the sacraments” (p. 111), so “we must move from the pyramidal power structure to another image with greater horizontality and fraternity, where the egalitarian dignity received through Baptism, and the living experience of community life prevails” (p. 111). This requires “changes in ecclesiastical structures that promote the participation of the people of God at all levels” (p. 112).

2. Synodality

Obviously, the panacea-solution to clericalism is the synodality addressed in theme 2.8 (p. 115). The most significant sign of hope is the ecclesial assembly itself, which is moving toward the goal of a synodal Church of the twenty-first century, which sees “all people with equal dignity as children of God without clericalism, which has been instituted as a caste or superior class, and trusting that the spirit speaks through all men and women” (p. 115), and, therefore, “listens to the voices of all the people of God,” helping them to “come out of the rigid structures that enclose the church” (p. 115). This exit is imperative because “the less democratic and participatory the structures of the organizations are, the more prone they are to abuses of all kinds” (p. 115). In addition, “community self-management” realizes the dream of “a Church of communities” (p. 115). To “get out of a monarchical Church,” it is necessary to ask: “Is it possible that this ecclesial structure allows the emergence of synodality?” (p. 115) For “one recognizes the need to build new church structures where democracy is understood as a way of organizing ourselves with limits in the exercise of power, with responsibilities in its exercise, and with shared and dialogued decision spaces” (p. 115). That is why they regret that “there are no milestones or tools to make visible this great ‘Copernican’ change in the structures of the church” (p. 115) because what matters is “to accept the great change in the structure of the church and let this change desired by all take place” (p. 116), thus demolishing “the anti-Christian ecclesial structures that produce clericalism” (p. 116).

3. Ministerial Feminism

The lay-clergy class struggle becomes particularly virulent in theme 2.5., titled “Women” (p. 95), which states that “what hurts most” (p. 95) concerning the situation of women in the ecclesial sphere is the fact that “some authorities, in many cases, are conservative, sexist, and clericalist” (p. 95), since “a patriarchal theology, which is not liberating, does not consider the thinking of women, and has not adapted to the new reality, is still present in many ecclesial spaces” (p. 99).

According to the “Narrative Synthesis,” the inferior position of women in the Church comes from the fact that “the Church’s hierarchical ascending structure is a blind knot; it is a structure inherited from the Middle Ages,” so “we must work to generate a more communitarian structure and a different dynamic” (p. 99) and “dismantle the sexist and patriarchal church” (p. 100) because “the medieval and patriarchal format that shaped the Church yesterday” (p. 100) still prevails to this day in the dioceses and “the clergy does not want to give up the power for women to participate in co-responsibility as equals” (p. 100). As theme 2.7 later says, clericalism “is expressed in structures designed by men and for men (with macho traits), losing the richness of feminine contribution in many areas” (p. 108).

As a result, “there is no serious reflection on the possibility of receiving ordained ministries for women although the Church is populated by a majority of women.” (p. 95). Therefore, it is necessary to “recognize the work and services of women in the Church by instituting ministries, including the priesthood and diaconate, not under the current clerical scheme but from a synodal experience” (p. 101). This translates into the specific proposal to “ask for changes in the canon law and the ecclesial structure so that women can assume ecclesial ministries / reflect seriously and open themselves to the possibility of ordained ministries (diaconate, presbyteral ministry) at the service of the church of the poor” (p. 97).

In discussing the diaconate, the Synthesis affirms that one of the most important aspects considered during the thematic forum on this topic was that “to think about women and the diaconate, there must be a change of imaginaries; it is necessary to unlearn paradigms and deconstruct outdated models of relationships between men and women[,] not to think about it as a priestly ordination. Overcome the hierarchical pyramidal, kyriarchal,¹⁷ and priestly church to become an inclusive and ministerial church of communion. It is fundamental to change these thought structures to move forward and include women again” (p.188).

Logically, the forum participants consider “of the UTMOST IMPORTANCE that current ministries and tasks (especially the priesthood and diaconate) be shared independently of the sex in question, with the certainty that the Holy Spirit works through the male or female servant independently of his/her sexuality” (p. 187). Further, they reiterate, “A synodal church is one that listens to the Spirit and in which roles and functions are assumed based on gifts and not gender” (p. 189).

Therefore, the participants in the Ecclesial Assembly’s listening phase feel hopeful for the “presence of feminist movements in the life of the Church or related to it” (p. 95) and for women’s “real and equal inclusion as neighbors and protagonists,” giving “women in the church voice and vote in places where they do not have them” (p. 97).

A supplementary step would be to allow preaching: “The fact that homilies can only be given by men is an appropriation of the Spirit. To deny women the ability to respond to their vocation is violence and an attack against the Spirit. The Church wants to be a moral voice in the world, but to deny women full membership in the Church is to allow men to continue to exercise violence against women in society” (p.189).

Women theologians can contribute much because “theologies made by women, including feminist theologies in dialogue with feminism and the gender perspective, present critiques of the androcentric vision and offer transformative perspectives for a more inclusive Church that expands spaces for women” (p. 101).

A selection of “Voices of the People of God” supports these demands. Among the pearls presented is this testimony: “Include women once and for all in the liturgy, decision making and Theology management, that is, in the government of the church and its communities with equal rights and obligations” (p. 98).

4. Women Bless Cardinals and Bishops Liturgically

Women’s inclusion in the liturgy saw a practical application during the evening mass on the Ecclesial Assembly’s fourth day, which coincided with the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. At the end of the celebration, Guatemalan Cardinal Alvaro Ramazzini, who presided over the liturgy, read a prepared text inviting the women present to come up to the altar so that we participants “may receive from them a prayer of blessing,” thus “expressing the existing equality between baptized men and women.” Acknowledging his gesture’s unusual nature, he added: “Normally, it is always us men who bless, right? If you agree, let us reverse that at this moment” as an expression of the synodal journey and the commitment to eliminate all violence against women. He concluded: “Let’s ask all women assembly members to bless us, cardinals, bishops, priests, and deacons, pastors of our Christian communities.”¹⁸

Having said this, the cardinal and the concelebrants stepped down from the altar, which the women then occupied. Raising their arms as evangelicals, they blessed those present with a formula prepared beforehand, which one of them read into the microphone. All those present, including the ecclesiastics, humbly bowed their heads during the blessing. Ultimately, a concelebrating bishop asked the women to accompany them in the recessional procession, giving them the place of greatest honor between the clergy and the concelebrants.¹⁹

Photo Credit: Asamblea Eclesial, via YouTube / Screenshot

Footnotes

1. See Andrea Tornielli, “Cardinal Grech: A New Path to Help the Church Walk in a Synodal Style,” VaticanNews.va, Mar. 15, 2025, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2025-03/grech-a-new-path-to-help-the-church-walk-in-a-synodal-style.html.
2. See Gerald E. Murray, “Processes, Accompaniment, Implementation: Synodality Forever!” The Catholic Thing, Mar. 20, 2025, https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2025/03/20/processes-accompaniment-implementation-synodality-forever/.
3. See Pedro Ricardo Barreto, S.J. and Mauricio López Oropeza, “The First Ecclesial Assembly of Latin America and the Caribbean: Experiences of a Synodal Process,” La Civiltà Cattolica, Feb. 21, 2022, https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/the-first-ecclesial-assembly-of-latin-america-and-the-caribbean-experiences-of-a-synodal-process/.
4. Toward a Synodal Church Going Forth Into the Periphery: Reflections and Pastoral Proposals Drawn From the First Ecclesial Assembly for Latin America and the Caribbean, trans. María Luisa Valencia Duarte (Bogota: CELAM, 2022), 8, https://asambleaeclesial.lat/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/ingles.pdf.
5. See Toward a Synodal Church, 15.
6. Document for Community Discernment: At the First Ecclesiastical Assembly of Latin America and the Caribbean (Mexico City: CELAM, 2021), no. 1, p. 7 (ebook), accessed Apr. 8, 2025, https://synod.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/ddc-angielski-amerykanski.pdf.
7. Document for Community Discernment, no. 8, p. 11.
8. The Second General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate, held in Medellin in 1968, was a milestone in the history of the Latin American Church. It emphasized the “preferential option for the poor,” in whose name bishops adopted a discourse influenced by Marxist categories, promoted a socio-political reading of the Gospel, and fostered an ecclesiology centered on class struggle and material liberation. In this, they weakened the supernatural dimension of the faith and favored revolutionary postures. Medellin opened the door to liberation theology, whose harmful effects included the politicization of the clergy and the migration of millions of lay Catholics to conservative evangelical sects.
9. Document for Community Discernment, nos. 8, 9, pp. 11, 12.
10. Document for Community Discernment, no. 9, p. 12.
11. José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue, The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box: 100 Questions & Answers, trans. José A. Schelini (Spring Grove, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 2023), https://issuu.com/crusademagazine/docs/the_synodal_process_is_a_pandoras_box.
12. Document for Community Discernment, nos. 5, 16, 18, pp. 16 and 18.
13. Document for Community Discernment, nos. 30, 32, p. 24.
14. Barreto and López, “The First Ecclesial Assembly.”
15. Barreto and López.
16. Comité de Escucha, Síntesis narrativa: La escucha en la 1era. Asamblea Eclesial para América Latina y el Caribe—CELAM—Voces del Pueblo de Dios, Sept. 21, 2021, https://diocesisdeirapuato.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Sintesis-Narrativa-FINAL-1-1.pdf.
17. In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a word coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992. It describes her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, including sexism, racism, ableism, ageism (including adultism), antisemitism, homophobia, classism, economic injustice, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, speciesism and other forms of dominating hierarchies in which the subordination of one person or group to another is internalized and institutionalized. See Wikipedia contributors, “Kyriarchy,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kyriarchy&oldid=1277650420 (accessed April 8, 2025).
18. “Un grupo de mujeres bendice a los obispos y sacerdotes en una misa,”
    Infovaticana, Dec. 3, 2021, https://infovaticana.com/2021/12/03/un-grupo-de-mujeres-bendice-a-los-obispos-y-sacerdotes-en-una-misa/.
19. See “Un grupo de mujeres,” Infovaticana.