Lived Catholicism Conference 2025

I was delighted to be invited to contribute a paper on 'walking pilgrimage as an unsung site of synodality' to the 2025 Lived Catholicism conference.

The conference took place over two days in December 2025. It brought together scholars of theology, ecclesiology, ethnography, anthropology, organisational studies, and cultural studies as well as practitioners (like me) to explore the diversity of synodality as it is unfolding.

I argued that walking pilgrimage is an 'unsung site of synodality'. What do I mean by this? Well synodality from the Greek words; ‘synodos’ and ‘hodos’ meaning walking together. Since the Second Vatican Council the Church has described itself as the ‘pilgrim people of God’. We are a pilgrim people learning to walk together. Walking pilgrimage is 'unsung' in England & Wales because it was prohibited after the Reformation and the tradition lost.

The walking metaphor continues because the School for Synodality UK describes 'four steps' to synodality:

Encountering a changing world
Listening to all the voices
Discerning the Holy Spirit
Moving to action.

In my conference presentation I argued that the people who took part in the 2025 Pilgrimage of Hope experienced all of these, often abundantly. We should therefore recognise walking pilgrimage as a site where synodality can be 'sung' and actually happens, without us neccessarily being aware of it.

For more about the 2025 Lived Catholicism Conference please visit: https://livedcatholicism.org/