Polls, as a rule of thumb, should be taken with a grain of salt. Or even, at times, with a salt shaker.
That said, the recent online poll by @Synod.va—the official X (formerly Twitter) account of the Secretariat of the Synod—was surprising. When I took a screenshot of it on the afternoon of Friday, July 26, nearly 6,000 votes had been cast. And they were overwhelmingly negative—to the tune of 88% voting “No” to the following statement: “Do you believe that synodality as a path of conversion and reform can enhance the mission and participation of all the baptized?”
Not long afterwards, after some 7,000 votes had been registered, the poll was removed.
A couple of days later, I was on the phone with a priest who had worked in the Vatican for several years and is now the pastor of a large parish in a large U.S. city. “No one really cares about it,” he said when I asked what his parishioners think about synodality. “Nobody really knows what it means,” he said, “and it has little or no bearing on their daily lives as Catholics.” Again, polls should come with salt and anecdotes are limited. But synodality—the Pope Francis, current Vatican version of it—seems to hold little interest for many Catholics.
Part of the problem is, I think, simple enough: if you’re going to claim that Product Z is a new and improved version of Product A, you’d better be able to explain what it is, how it works, and why it is better. And why it is necessary.
In my April 18, 2023 essay on this site, titled “Ambiguity and Clarity in the Age of Synodality,” I noted that the meaning of “synodality” is important “for many reasons, not least that we’ve been living in a ‘synodal Church’ since sometime in October 2015.” That was when Pope Francis, at a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI instituting the synod of bishops, stated:
A synodal Church is a Church which listens, which realizes that listening “is more than simply hearing”. It is a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of truth” (Jn 14:17), in order to know what he “says to the Churches” (Rev 2:7).
Synods, of course, go back to the early centuries of the Church. But the idea of a “synodal Church” is, again, very new. Also new is the quickly expanding lexicon used to explain that concept, including “synodal process,” “synodal listening,” “synodal conversion,” “synodal path,” “synodal journey,” “synodal life,” “synodal method,” “synodal perspective,” “synodal practice”—well, you get the synodal idea.
And yet, oddly enough, the synodal flood of synodal adjectives, rather than shedding light, appears to have mostly bewildered, befuddled, confused, or annoyed many Catholics (at least, those who have paid attention). Ironically, while “listening” (or “synodal listening”) plays a major role in the synodal process, one has to wonder how many are listening.
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