Pope, at jubilee Mass, calls for a servant Church that is ‘entirely synodal’

October 27, 2025

Preaching at Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica yesterday (booklet, video), Pope Leo XIV called for “a Church that is entirely synodal, ministerial and attracted to Christ and therefore committed to serving the world.”

The Mass was the culminating event of the three-day Jubilee of the Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies, one of the events of the 2025 jubilee year. The event, which attracted an estimated 2,000 pilgrims, represented the “first collective moment of the implementation phase” of the 2021-2024 synod on synodality, according to the General Secretariat of the Synod. The event’s twofold purpose was to “translate the orientations of the Final Document into pastoral and structural choices consistent with the synodal nature of the Church,” as well as to “acknowledge the valuable service carried out by these bodies and by the people who serve in them, situating the building of a more synodal Church within the horizon of the Jubilee’s hope.”

In his homily at yesterday’s Mass, Pope Leo preached that relationships in the Church “do not respond to the logic of power but to that of love. The former—to recall a constant warning from Pope Francis—is a ‘worldly’ logic. Conversely, in the Christian community, primacy belongs to the spiritual life, which reveals to us that we are all children of God, brothers and sisters, called to serve one another.”

“The supreme rule in the Church is love,” the Pope continued. “No one is called to dominate; all are called to serve. No one should impose his or her own ideas; we must all listen to one another. No one is excluded; we are all called to participate. No one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together.”

Pope Leo described synodal teams and participatory bodies as

an image of this Church that lives in communion. Please trust me when I tell you that by listening to the Spirit in dialogue, fraternity and parrhesia, you will help us to understand that, prior to any differences, we are called in the Church to walk together in the pursuit of God. By clothing ourselves with the sentiments of Christ, we expand the ecclesial space so that it becomes collegial and welcoming.

This will enable us to live with confidence and a new spirit amid the tensions that run through the life of the Church: between unity and diversity, tradition and novelty, authority and participation. We must allow the Spirit to transform them, so that they do not become ideological contrapositions and harmful polarizations. It is not a question of resolving them by reducing one to the other, but of allowing them to be purified by the Spirit, so that they may be harmonized and oriented toward a common discernment.

“Dear friends, we must dream of and build a more humble Church; a Church that does not stand upright like the Pharisee, triumphant and inflated with pride, but bends down to wash the feet of humanity; a Church that does not judge as the Pharisee does the tax collector, but becomes a welcoming place for all; a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone,” the Pope added. “Let us commit ourselves to building a Church that is entirely synodal, ministerial and attracted to Christ and therefore committed to serving the world.”

 

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Further information:

• 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Holy Mass (Dicastery for Communication - Libreria Editrice Vaticana)
• Jubilee of the Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies (General Secretariat of the Synod)
• Il Giubileo dei gruppi sinodali e degli organismi di partecipazione (L'Osservatore Romano, 10/23/25)