By Michael Centore

Last year, Today’s American Catholic convened a listening session in response to the “Synod on Synodality.” A key point of our discernment was that people are longing for a deeper sense of community in their experience of faith. We discussed small Christian communities (SCCs) as a promising way to foster relationships and help participants be more proactive in learning about and living the gospel. Encouraged by this discernment, TAC started a pilot program to host, promote, and network new and existing SCCs. This essay is the second in a planned series on the practices, theology, and spirituality of SCCs; the first, “Cords of Human Kindness: An Introduction to Small Christian Communities,” is available here—Ed.

Regardless of the outcome of the universal stage of the synod this October 2023, the documents we have already assembled at the local and continental levels will remain, creating a legacy, or a repository, of what the People of God were living, thinking, feeling, reimagining, and renewing at a particular moment in the church’s history. One item that comes up repeatedly in reviewing these documents is that of “common baptismal dignity,” “the basis,” in the words of the Episcopal Conference of Mexico cited in the Continental Document, “of co-responsibility in mission.” The U.S. “Region XVI” Synthesis adds a sacerdotal shading to this theme when it includes as one of its recommendations a “return to the spirit of Vatican Council II, [to] robustly affirm by word and action the sensus fidelium, the communion of saints, and the priesthood of the baptized.” This language links directly to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The baptized have become “living stones” to be “built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5). By Baptism they share in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission. They are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that [they] may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). “Baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers” (§1268)………. Read More>>