A ‘boring’ synod?

Behind the headlines, some delegates are predicting soft landing for the four year process

Most synods convened by Pope Francis have been closely followed by both secular and Catholic media – and they have provided them with plenty of headlines.

Pope Francis at the synod on synodality. Credit: Vatican media.

From the start of the four-year synod on synodality, perhaps the flagship initiative of the Francis pontificate, the global process looked likely to follow the same pattern.

Its most ardent supporters have pitched it as a quasi ecumenical council, while its staunchest critics have warned it could cause schism, or trigger a clear departure from the Church’s teaching.

Following significant expectations and moments of high drama during previous synodal sessions, most notably the synods on young people and on the Amazonian region, even those who were more measured expectations for the current process could not rule out a significant change in how the Catholic Church looks.

But while the often messy, and often controversial four-year process continues to generate headlines, the second session of the synod of synodality has as yet failed to throw up much “new news” for secular or Catholic media to sink their teeth into.

In the words of one synod delegate to The Pillar, the synod’s finale has instead proved, at least to them, surprisingly “boring,” and “narrow.” 

So how did this happen, and why are some synodal delegates quietly predicting an uncontroversial finish to such a controversial process?

“The first session was a waste of time,” one synodal delegate told The Pillar. “Everyone was talking about everything they wanted, the methodology was messy.” 

“If you were on one table or the other, the topic being discussed would change radically, despite the fact that all conversations were supposedly about the same thing,” another delegate said.

But following last October’s relative conversational free for all, in February 2024, Pope Francis sent a letter to Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the synod, asking him to establish study groups “Study Groups for questions raised in the First Session of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the synod of Bishops to be explored in collaboration with the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia.”

These study groups covered all different kinds of topics, from the role of nuncios to digital evangelization, including one about the “theological criteria and synodal methodologies for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues” and another about “some theological and canonical issues around specific ministerial forms,” which would discuss, for example, the possibility of a female diaconate.

These groups are slated to present their conclusions to Pope Francis in 2025, but gave preliminary reports of their discussions at the beginning of the current session of the synod.

As a result, many of the topics that dominated the preliminary phase of the synod and its first session have not featured much in the second session, according to delegates.

Despite occasional headlines about female ordination, the synod discussions have focused on aspects of synodality, such as governance, lay participation, and similar topics.

Some synod watchers and participants harbor suspicions that those commissions were created to pass certain reforms without consulting the synod, as they would perhaps be too radical to pass muster among the whole body of synodal delegates. 

But as the fallout of last December’s DDF document on blessing for people in same-sex relationships, Fiducia supplicans, seemed to prove, that brand of “synodality” is optional, as one North African cardinal put it.

Others, though, see the commissions’ work as simply a way to move these off-topic and distracting discussions away from the synod, and allow for a renewed focus on what the pope really wants to be discussed, namely the concept of synodality itself. 

Whatever the real motivation and aim of the commissions, the result has been that the synod’s discussions have been narrowed down — and, perhaps, to good effect.

“Everything is more boring and technical,” a synodal delegate told The Pillar. “But it seems we’re finally getting onto something.”

Of course, earnest debates about ecclesiology and lay participation rarely yield the kind of headlines that draw international secular attention, and the second session’s meetings have offered less drama and fewer flashpoints so far. No hagan lío, if you will. 

But according to some participants, that may prove to be a good thing.

Some delegates left the first session quite skeptical about the process – “it was too handed-out,” a synodal delegate told The Pillar. 

But many have begun to change their minds about the whole process.

“‘Wasting time’ in the first session really helped us get to know each other and have fewer pre-conceived notions about delegates who have different ideas, even unorthodox ideas, so that meant that the conversations in this second session have been more fraternal, more open,” the delegate told The Pillar.

Another delegate told The Pillar that the fact that the hot-button issues were now mostly left to the study groups has meant that there is a rising sense that the synod’s final document may be more reflective of real consensus. 

Still, all of that consensus does not exclude the fact that some synodal delegations are trying to pass controversial reforms, amounting to changes in Church governance.

One synodal delegate told The Pillar that some German-speaking synodal delegates had been pushing the proposal, floated in virtually every synodal meeting of the Francis era, of giving episcopal conferences doctrinal authority, something discussed in paragraph 97 of the Instrumentum laboris and slated for discussion in the October 15 session.

In practice, such a recommendation would mean asking the pope for bishops’ conferences being allowed to approve or divert from universal Church teaching and discipline across a range of issues — including the perennial hot-button topics of a female diaconate or a revision of Church teaching on sexual ethics.

Notably, the fact that there are no German language groups in the current synodal session has meant that German-speaking delegates, who are on average tend to favor such proposals, are spread throughout the English or Italian-speaking groups, which could potentially serve to amplify their voices, seeding their proposal for bishops’ conferences into table reports from a range of groups in which they form a vocal minority.

But, despite the seismic potential of that proposal, many delegates remain unsold it will make it into the final text, noting similar language has failed to pass muster in previous documents.

Of course, whatever it says, the final synodal document will not be the last word in the synod. The entire event remains a consultative exercise, convened by the pope to make recommendations to him. Pope Francis’ own eventual apostolic exhortation will have the final say on what proposals he chooses to endorse — or even acknowledge, and that document could take some months, perhaps even a year to arrive, if he chooses to wait for his study commissions to report back.

Whenever it comes, and whatever it says, that exhortation will frame the synod’s true lasting impact. Depending on what Francis chooses to adopt as the synod’s legacy, it may frame future headlines, too.