By Robert Royal has delegates

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow - Thursday, October 3rd at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal (from Rome) will join contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray and host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the second Synod on Synodality now underway, as well as other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

As the second (and final?) session of the Synod on Synodality opens today, many people are still asking: What is synodality? There seems to be no good answer to that question. Indeed, the synod organizers think the very question is wrong. The best that anyone with some authority to say has been able to come up with is that synodality is not a "what" but a "process." It "is" what it "does."

What kind of process, other than continued talking with one another, is hard to say. But it's an open-ended process that is to continue beyond the closing date of the synodal session later in the month - the end of the beginning, so to speak, not the beginning of the end. Not only for the chosen delegates and those appointed by Pope Francis to ongoing "study groups" slated to report at the earliest in June of 2025, but for the future of the worldwide Catholic Church.

In addition to the also somewhat woolly synodal aims of "communion, participation, and mission" - all of which have been going on for 2000 years without benefit of the synod on synodality - there's been a renewed emphasis during this process on a "new way of being Church."

For those too young to have been there, "being Church" - not being "the" Church (more on this below) - was an ungrammatical but stylish neologism in the decade or so after Vatican II. Its meaning was not very clear then either, but the phrase signaled the very latest in Catholic self-definition. The Synod's leaning heavily on this 1970s coinage, which had gone into remission from roughly 1978 to 2013, doesn't seem very likely to produce much that's living and new and cutting-edge now, any more than it did then.

Yet expectations have been allowed to run high. The Instrumentum laboris ("Working Document") states clearly that "Without tangible changes, the vision of a synodal Church will not be credible." Asking whether that vision is desirable might be a good use of the synod's time too. And hardly a "sin against synodality," but a crucial part of listening to all points of view, which is synodality's professed reason for being.

So it's only right to ask: What kinds of "tangible changes"?

Clearly, as was predictable from the outset, for Catholic progressives it's the usual list: women's ordination; some sort of "welcoming" of LGBT (a term now being used in Vatican documents without getting dangerously close to specifying what welcoming means); devolution of powers to lay people; greater autonomy for local bishops and churches except if they veer off into Latin Masses and other "old" ways of being the Church. (The German bishops have thrown a monkey wrench into this last notion by planning to set up an unauthorized German synod that would make heterodox doctrinal decisions independent of Rome and the universal tradition of the Church.)

All these changes fit rather comfortably with the views of nominal Catholics in the developed world. A recent Pew poll found that Catholics in America favor women's ordination, contraception, LGBT relationships, and Pope Francis. Whether those same "Catholics" actually go to Mass, Confession, pray, fast, give alms, read Scripture, actually pay attention to the pope was not part of the survey. Elsewhere such views produce strong negative reactions: See, for instance, the African bishops, the Polish hierarchy, the Eastern churches, and thousands of bishops and priests everywhere at the allowing of "blessings" of homose...