Listening Together: Meditations on Synodality

2025 Catholic Media Association Second Place Award, The Future of the Church

The full collection of conference talks from Pope Francis’s appointed retreat master, Timothy Radcliffe, heard first during the historic October 2023 General Assembly of the Synod on Synodality. 

The Synod on Synodality held in Rome in October 2023, gathered Catholics from all over the world to listen, pray, and reflect on a new way of being church. Dominican priest Timothy Radcliffe, the official retreat master and spiritual advisor for this assembly, was appointed by Pope Francis to deliver a series of retreat talks and meditations to the delegates during the assembly of the Synod on Synodality. Those talks are offered here, as well as Radcliffe’s further reflections on our current challenges and where we could be headed as a church. He then provides a specific Dominican experience as an example of synodality-in-action.   

In Listening Together, Radcliffe’s words not only set the spirit for the historic synod gathering, but now, in written form, they open the possibility for individuals or groups to read and continue to reflect on this synodal journey we all share. Listening Together serves as a powerful reminder of the themes of enduring relevance included in Radcliffe’s retreat talks and synod meditations. In entertaining and engaging prose, Radcliffe’s reflections encourage readers to think about conflicting hopes; different visions of the church as home; the need for unity; friendship; and above all, the importance of listening, discernment, and mission as a means for this synodal journey to continue to succeed. In these pages, Radcliffe offers a “spirituality of listening” that can take us forward together on a journey of discovery and communion. 

Timothy Cardinal Radcliffe, OP, retreat master and spiritual advisor for the Synod on Synodality, is a member of the community at Blackfriars, Oxford, and was master general of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001. He is the only member of the English Province of the Dominicans to have held the office since the Order's foundation in 1216. He is the author of Surprised by Hope: Further Meditations on Synodality and Listening Together: Meditations on Synodality, as well as a number of popular books on theology, including his book with Lukasz Popko Questioning God (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is an editorial advisor and contributor to Give Us This Day, published by Liturgical Press.