Disagreement Is Data: What San Antonio Taught Me About Synodality on Campus
by Rosie Chinea Shawver, MDiv
This week I sat with Catholic higher education leaders from CENTERS, a Lilly Endowment grant, in San Antonio to talk about synodality. I came home with a full notebook and one question underlined twice: How do we do this better?
San Antonio is a good place to ask it. The Archdiocese is marking a century. It opened an office for synodality in 2021 so that synodal conversations would actually happen, not just be talked about. And the roots go deeper than the recent synod. The Mexican American Catholic College opened here in 1972. The bishops of Latin America were practicing pastoral de conjunto, ministry done together, long before most of us in the U.S. had heard the word synodality. As one speaker put it, the universal synod didn't invent something new. It gave us a name for something the Church has been doing since the Acts of the Apostles.
From doing to being with
Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller said something I keep returning to. Synodality moves us from doing to being with.
He reminded us that it's possible to be surrounded by people and still be completely alone. Think of a crowded airplane or a city bus. Then think of a residence hall on a Friday night. Our students live this. They are connected all day and lonely by evening. Everyone craves communion. Everyone will suffer. A synodal Church is one that is willing to touch that suffering instead of managing it from a distance.
He also said that universities can help the Church discern with rigor and humility, without turning people into data points. For those of us who love a good metric, that one landed. Data convinces. But students are not data. They are the people we are sent to.
Three things the panel got right
A panel of leaders from the Archdiocese and Villanova's Jaisy Joseph offered a short list worth posting above every campus ministry desk.
Disagreement is data, not failure. Stay at the table when you disagree. The tension is telling you something.
Listening only matters if you use what you hear. The pastoral ministries office in San Antonio restructured because of what it heard. Listening sends us out, and it may not lead down the path we planned.
Ask who is not at the table. In every encounter, that is the most important question. On campus, it's often students themselves. It's often the commuter, the first-gen student, the young adult who stopped coming and never told us why.
Not a strategy. A spirituality.
The line I wrote in all caps: synodality is not something you do. It's something you live. It's not a strategic planning technique. It's a form of spirituality.
That matters for us. Conversation in the Spirit is a beautiful tool, but it asks a lot of vulnerability, and it isn't the only way to listen. We need many modalities, the walk across the quad, the late-night conversation after Mass, the student leader meeting where the agenda gets set aside because someone is hurting. Underneath all of it is real spiritual work: learning to see God in all things. Too often we live in our heads and not our hearts.
So spiritual formation is foundational. Synodal campus ministers aren't produced by a workshop. They are formed, slowly, in prayer, in community, over the long haul.
What this means for CCMA
The Archbishop told us he had no agenda. Whatever we do, we will do together. When people asked what he wanted from them, his answer was simple: listen.
That is a word for us. Campus ministers are on the front lines of the Church's listening. They hear what students carry before anyone else does. CCMA's work, accompany, equip, and send, depends on that listening becoming a way of life, not an event.
So here is the question I brought home, and I'm asking it of our whole network: How do we do this better? Where are we listening well? Who is missing from our table?
I'd love to hear from you. Synodality, after all, needs all of us, and the Holy Spirit.