Local Catholic college students head to Rome to participate in an effort to make church decision-making more inclusive

Thirty students at local Catholic colleges, including La Salle, Villanova, St. Joseph’s and Rosemont, are among a larger national contingent heading to Rome this week where they will get a seat at the table and a voice in shaping the church’s way of decision-making.

Already there is St. Joseph’s University senior Julia Oseka, 23, who has the distinction of being the youngest female voting delegate to the General Assembly of Bishops in the history of the church. A physics and theology major from Poland, she is one of only two college students in the world with a vote.

The other local students traveling there this week won’t get a vote, but they will have the opportunity to interact with Oseka and many of the other 360-plus voting members.

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It all started in 2021 when Pope Francis announced the “Synod on Synodality” inviting Catholics worldwide to participate in a process to foster greater listening and collaborative decision-making within the church. In April 2023, he announced that for the first time in the history of the church the culminating General Assembly, which usually only included the world’s bishops as voting members, would incorporate women and lay people generally as full voting members.

The two-part General Assembly started last October and continues for this month. Oseka is among more than 50 female voting members.

“I see it as really a sign that the Church is ready and is open to listen to people — and invite people — to be very active in those big decision-making and discernment processes in the Church,” Oseka told the National Catholic Register last year before the first assembly session.

Oseka, who was not available for an interview, told The Hawk, St. Joe’s student newspaper, that she sees herself as a feminist.

Opening up the synod process is aimed at making church decision-making more inclusive and less hierarchical and clerical, lifting more people on the so-called periphery into leadership positions, said Maureen O’Connell, a La Salle University religion professor who is coordinating the national effort among 14 Catholic colleges sending students to Rome. It’s also an attempt to engage young people who increasingly have opted out of organized religion, including Catholicism, she said.

“It means an opportunity for our students to feel that they matter, that they have a voice and that their actions can make a difference,” said Sister Margaret Doyle, Rosemont College’s vice president of mission and ministry.

After the pope announced the change, eight local Catholic colleges — Neumann, Gwynedd Mercy, Immaculata, Holy Family, La Salle, St. Joe’s, Villanova and Rosemont — collaborated and put forth Oseka as a nominee for the assembly. They also had their students participate in local listening sessions leading up to the assembly and several of them created a course called The Church and Transformation on the synod process being taught on their campuses, said O’Connell, who will accompany students to Rome along with several other faculty and campus ministers.

Students generally want to see more equality among men and women in the church, more leadership opportunities and more inclusion regardless of race, gender or religion, she said.

“They are looking for a church that has integrity, that’s not afraid to acknowledge harm and seek to repair harm,” she said.

In Rome, students will have the opportunity to interact with female voting members of the assembly at a luncheon and enter the same hall, where delegates meet, for a conversation with synod leaders, a session the Vatican plans to livestream at 11 a.m. on Friday.

The synod’s work is focused on procedures. It won’t be voting, for instance, on whether women can serve as deacons or whether priests can marry but rather a more inclusive decision-making process on how that could happen, O’Connell said. Discussions will occur in small circles where everyone is given an equal opportunity to answer the same questions, she said.

Their recommendations will go to Pope Francis.

“It is a radically different way of deliberating in the very heart of the church,” O’Connell said.

Villanova University senior Rechelle Febrer said the church hasn’t done a great job of engaging young people. She grew up seeing only older white men and women distributing communion and too little emphasis on addressing world problems. Even now, there are people who don’t want to take communion from her because she’s a woman, she said.

But she’s hopeful that this process will help change that.

“This is a step in the right direction (showing) we do value and want women to be included in this conversation,” said Febrer, a biology and criminology major from Germantown, Md.

Matthew Dunne, 21, a St. Joe’s senior from Oaks, said he became interested when he took a class on the intertwined histories of the Catholic and Jewish faiths, an interest that grew when he participated in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ dialogue event for young adults from both faiths.

“I’m really excited to go to Rome,” said Dunne, who is double majoring in business intelligence and analytics and international business, “... to learn from all those people and gain greater perspectives.”

A topic of concern for him, he said, is fostering a world where all immigrants are included in conversations and equally valued.

Not all the students are Catholic. Gvantsa Tvaliashvili, a La Salle University junior majoring in political science and international relations, is a member of the Georgian Orthodox Church and a native of the country of Georgia. She took the La Salle class on the synod process and was moved by the circles of conversation. Most recently the six students in the class invited 18 peers to join them in those circles.

She said it made her feel like her voice mattered.

“I was really, really moved by the idea of a listening church,” said Rosemont College senior Elise Stankus, 21, an English major from Ewing, N.J., “a church that prioritizes encounters with people, radical solidarity with people living on the margins and overall building of bridges and relationships.”

She’s already in Rome with another program, “Discerning Deacons,” aimed at getting approval for women to serve as deacons. It’s an issue she is passionate about, along with environmental justice and antiracism, said Stankus, who is writing about her experiences for the Diocese of Trenton magazine.

The work won’t end when students return home. The eight schools received a $1.2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to continue conversations on their campuses, using the small circle synod model, O’Connell said.

“It’s a good way to engage in some of those polarizing topics that are tearing universities apart,” she said.