Synodality did not begin in 2021. It began in Jerusalem, around AD 49.

---

Synodality, I keep reading, is confusing, maybe even undefinable. I recently sat through three days of it in practice, and nobody seemed confused.

On July 6, Catholic News Service reported that the bishops representing North America in the synodal process want the concept simplified.^[1] Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the USCCB, warned that unless the Church finds plainer language, synodality risks becoming “the exclusive domain of specialists or ‘the initiated.’”

Then, in an interview with The College of Cardinals Report, recorded in late June and released July 15, Cardinal Raymond Burke went further.^[2] He declared that “there is no definition of synodality, there’s no history of it in the Church,” and that “this whole synodality business” must stop pending serious study.

The same week, I was at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington for the thirtieth Orientale Lumen Conference, where Catholic and Orthodox bishops, clergy, and laity discussed primacy and synodality without once pausing to ask what the word “synodality” meant. The Orthodox participants have lived under synodal governance their entire lives. Their churches are run by bodies explicitly called Holy Synods.

What these most traditional of Churches have voiced in recent ecumenical discussion is not shock that Rome has invented something new, but happy recognition that Rome has remembered something as old — older even than the Great Schism. More than one Orthodox voice said that the Latin Church’s recovered emphasis on synodality makes reunion easier to imagine than it was a generation ago.

So which is it? An undefined novelty, or a practice so ancient that our estranged brethren recognize it as our family resemblance? Cardinal Burke’s claim that synodality has “no history” in the Church is the easiest claim to check. Its history begins in the Acts of the Apostles.

When the early Church faced its first doctrinal crisis, the circumcision controversy, the apostles did not settle it by decree from Peter alone. They gathered in Jerusalem, and the apostles and presbyters deliberated together, “with the whole church” involved in the outcome (Acts 15:22). The decision went out with the exclamation, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). That council, around AD 49, first established the logic of synodality. After long debate Peter rose and settled the principle being contested, and the assembly fell silent (Acts 15:12). Barnabas and Paul testified to what God had done among the Gentiles. James then applied the practical conclusion for the communities where Jewish and Gentile believers had to eat at the same table. The decree went out from the apostles and the presbyters, with the whole church (Acts 15:22–23). St. John Chrysostom explained the ordering, noting that James speaks last because he is the bishop of that place.^[3]

This logic held throughout the early Church. St. Cyprian of Carthage resolved in the third century to do nothing “without the counsel of the presbyters and the consent of the people,”^[4] as he presided over African councils that shaped the Church’s teaching on baptism and reconciliation.

The Council of Nicaea, in 325, issued a canon requiring synods as the standard practice of the Church, ordering the bishops of every province to meet twice a year.^[5] The so-called Apostolic Canons, from the fourth century, mandate the same.^[6] Regional synods at Carthage, Toledo, Orléans, and a hundred other sees hammered out doctrine and discipline this way for a millennium.

Some may object that synods and synodality are here being conflated. In one sense, the objection is fair. On its face, synodality is simply the noun for what synods do, but the word is new, and a new word used in an ecclesial setting deserves some study.

Yet that study already exists. In 2018, the International Theological Commission published Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church, a book-length historical and theological examination of the subject.^[7] The Commission takes up the linguistic question at the outset of the document:

In the Catholic Church the distinction between the use of the words ‘council’ and ‘synod’ is a recent one. In Vatican II they are synonymous … A precise distinction was introduced by the Codex Iuris Canonici of the Latin Church (1983)…^[8]

It continues:

In the theological, canonical and pastoral literature of recent decades, a neologism has appeared, the noun ‘synodality,’ a correlate of the adjective ‘synodal,’ with both of these deriving from the word ‘synod.’ Thus people speak of synodality as a ‘constitutive dimension’ of the Church…. This linguistic novelty … is a sign of something new that has been maturing in the ecclesial consciousness starting from the Magisterium of Vatican II….^[9]

The Commission freely acknowledges that the term synodality is modern. What it denies is that the reality is modern. It even observes that the distinction between “synod” and “council” on which many contemporary discussions rely is itself comparatively recent. The historical question, then, is not whether fourth-century Christians employed a twenty-first-century term, but whether their lives reflected the ecclesial reality that noun describes.

They clearly did. The ancient Greek language never developed separate terminology for a “synod” and a “council.” The ecumenical Council of Nicaea itself was commonly described in the East as “the Holy and Great Synod,” and the same terminology is used for Chalcedon and the other ecumenical councils. If the Church’s most authoritative assemblies were themselves understood as synodoi, the burden rests on those who would argue that synods and synodality are historically unrelated. The distinction belongs primarily to modern theological vocabulary. What is novel therefore is not synodality, but the argument against it.

But synodality was never only councils. Collegiality is the affair of bishops whereas synodality is the condition of the whole baptized people. The Fathers took both for granted. Ignatius of Antioch, around the year 107, calls all Christians synodoi, meaning, “companions on the journey.”^[10] The word was applied to the baptized as such, therefore, before any real conciliar system existed. Neither was the authority of the Apostles, as bishops, challenged by it. This is the same Ignatius who told the Philadelphians to “do nothing without the bishop.”^[11] Ignatius saw no opposition between synodality and hierarchy, because there was none.

As Chrysostom put it simply: “Church” is a name for “walking together.”^[12]

Cyprian would earlier tell the churches of Spain that the people “have the power either of choosing worthy priests, or of rejecting unworthy ones” — priests meaning bishops here, for the letter was written to uphold the deposing of two Spanish bishops who had lapsed in faith during persecution.^[13]

Ambrose was lifted to bishop of the see of Milan by popular acclamation while still an unbaptized governor. Augustine designated his successor Eraclius before an assembly whose lay acclamations were counted and entered into the record.^[14]

Leo the Great stated this principle succinctly: “He who is to govern all, should be chosen by all.”^[15]

The apostolic Church worked the same way even before Jerusalem. The community participated in the replacement of Judas (Acts 1), and “the whole multitude” selected the seven whom the apostles then ordained (Acts 6).

Discernment by the body, followed by decision by the ministers. This was the template the early Church followed. And when councils did meet, their teaching bound the Church as the whole Church received it — which is why, as Newman documented in his 1859 Rambler essay, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, the faith of Nicaea was preserved through the Arian decades as much by the instinct of the faithful as by the episcopate.^[16]

Nor did this practice of synodality die with antiquity. The Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, made the requirement a matter of universal law.^[17] Canon 6 states:

As is known to have been ordained of old by the holy fathers, metropolitans should not fail to hold provincial councils each year with their suffragans in which they consider diligently and in the fear of God the correction of excesses and the reform of morals, especially among the clergy. … [L]et them appoint for each diocese suitable persons, that is to say prudent and honest persons, who will simply and summarily, without any jurisdiction, throughout the whole year, carefully investigate what needs correction or reform and will then faithfully report these matters to the metropolitan and suffragans and others at the next council, so that they may proceed with careful deliberation against these and other matters according to what is profitable and decent. Let them see to the observance of the things that they decree, publishing them in episcopal synods which are to be held annually in each diocese. Whoever neglects to carry out this salutary statute is to be suspended from his benefices and from the execution of his office, until his superior decides to release him.^[18]

The Council of Trent renewed the requirement in 1563, ordering a diocesan synod every year and a provincial council every three.^[19] That Trent had to repeat what Lateran IV already commanded tells you the law was honored unevenly, but the law itself was never in doubt. Few if any dioceses sustained the annual pace required by Trent, though St. Charles Borromeo’s Milan naturally came closest, with eleven diocesan synods and six provincial councils in his twenty years as archbishop.^[20] Milan has held forty-seven diocesan synods in all, the forty-seventh under Cardinal Martini in the 1990s.^[21] The 1917 Code of Canon Law relaxed the requirement to once a decade,^[22] while the 1983 Code left the interval to the bishop’s judgment.^[23] Only the interval ever changed.

The traditionalist Catholic who wants to set aside Vatican II and the synodality of today and return to the Church of Trent is asking for more synodality, not less: Trent bound every bishop to a synod annually, under pain of law, while today’s Code merely invites him to hold one when circumstances suggest it. The Vatican II document Christus Dominus earnestly desired “that the venerable institution of synods and councils flourish with fresh vigor”^[24] — a suggestion, whereas Trent commanded synods.

The synods Trent commanded were assemblies of clergy. The Council restored the discipline of regular assembly without restoring the older breadth of consultation that Cyprian and Leo took for granted. What the present synodal process attempts is to reunite the two — the regularity of synods with pre-Tridentine consultation of all the faithful. None of this is an innovation. The synods prescribed by Trent were taken up again after centuries of neglect. Consulting the baptized is older still, and something Trent of course never forbade. The synodality of today simply preserves what Trent instructed and completes what Trent left unprescribed.

American Catholics, of all people, should welcome this. The Church in the United States was built on what were the equivalent of diocesan synods. Between 1829 and 1884, the Provincial and Plenary Councils of Baltimore, organized dioceses, founded The Catholic University of America, mandated the parochial school system, and produced the Baltimore Catechism. During these sessions, the theologians and priests debated the church laws in preparatory congregations, offered their professional opinions, drafted the wording of the proposed rules, and held a consultative vote (votum consultivum). Following this vote, the bishops would deliberate and cast their decisive vote (votum deliberativum).^[25]

Even prior to these provincial and plenary councils stood the 1791 diocesan synod of Baltimore, attended by exactly one bishop — John Carroll — and 22 priests.^[26] Canon law made that synod, like the councils that followed, a fundamentally consultative assembly — which is what the synodality of today is: consultative, producing study documents, binding only if and when the Church’s hierarchy ratifies them.

Nor did the Baltimore councils invent even American synodality. St. Turibius of Mogrovejo held three provincial councils and thirteen diocesan synods in Lima, and Mexico saw three provincial councils, all in the sixteenth century.^[27]

When an American Catholic denounces synodality, they are denouncing their own patrimony.

So the history can be found in the book of Acts and the councils, and the definition and study the Cardinal asks for is seen in the first two chapters of the Commission’s document released seven years ago.^[28]

A more serious objection voiced by Cardinal Burke, is that synodality dissolves hierarchical authority into something resembling conciliarism, the medieval error that subordinated the pope to the council.

This objection has it backwards, however. Historically, synods have been instruments of hierarchy, not threats to it. It was bishops who convoked them, bishops who presided, bishops who signed the acts. The Council of Jerusalem did not diminish Peter; rather, it placed his authority on full display.

And the classic text on the relationship between primacy and synodality, the thirty-fourth Apostolic Canon, cherished by East and West alike, binds the two together. The bishops of every region must recognize the one who is first among them and do nothing important without him, but neither should the first do anything without the consent of all, “for so there will be concord, and God will be glorified.”^[29]

That canon is the working text of the modern Catholic-Orthodox dialogue. The Ravenna statement of 2007 built its central affirmation on it, and the Chieti statement of 2016 traced this pairing through the entire first millennium.^[30] A primacy without synodality drifts toward a monarchy the East cannot recognize as apostolic, and synodality without primacy dissolves into the national fragmentation that has plagued Orthodoxy.

This is why the ecumenical stakes are so much higher than the domestic culture war admits. When St. John Paul II, in Ut Unum Sint, invited other Christians to help him find a way of exercising the papacy “open to a new situation,” the Orthodox answer should have been predictable: show us a primacy embedded in synodality, as in the first millennium, and reunion becomes thinkable.^[31] A Latin Church that has abandoned synodality, treating it as a fad, would be slamming shut the very door our ecumenical pope John Paul sought to open.

Here the critics deserve a fair hearing, because some of what travels under the banner of synodality warrants their alarm.

The German Synodal Way is not true synodality. The German process, with its binding votes, its parity of bishops and lay representatives, and its ambition to revise settled teaching, has been corrected by Rome repeatedly and explicitly, from Pope Francis’s 2019 letter to the German faithful through the Vatican’s 2022 declaration that the Synodal Way “does not have the power” to oblige bishops doctrinally.^[32] The correction came from within the synodal pontificate of Francis, and Rome’s February 2024 letter to the German bishops was signed by the prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops — Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV.^[33]

Nor is synodality parliamentary democracy. Pope Francis said so with almost wearying frequency: “the synod” he said, “is not a parliament or an opinion poll; the Synod is an ecclesial event and its protagonist is the Holy Spirit.”^[34] The 2024 Final Document of the Synod on Synodality repeats the point and adds the structural safeguard the critics claim is missing: consultation is broad, but discernment and decision remain with the pastors, and nothing in the process binds apart from the pope’s own authority. When the 2024 Final Document acquired magisterial weight, it did so not because the assembly voted for it but because the pope ratified and promulgated it.^[35]

A parliament’s authority comes from below, from the aggregation of wills. A synod’s comes from above, from the Spirit whom the assembly begs to hear. Confusing the two is like confusing a papal conclave with an election-night watch party.

This is also what distinguishes Catholic synodality from the synodal government of the Protestant ecclesial communities, where authority rises from the congregation. In the Catholic context authority descends through the apostolic ministry, and the synod is only how the sensus fidelium is heard, not how it rules.

Finally, synodality as a dimension of the Church’s life should be distinguished from the Synod on Synodality as a particular event, with its methods, worksheets, and facilitators. One can find the small-group format tedious, as Cardinal Burke relayed that he found the June consistory, and question whether consensus reports effectively transmit minority insights to the pope, a legitimate procedural criticism (and perhaps the strongest point he made in his interview), without concluding that the underlying ecclesiological reality is a fiction.

Others have also addressed the cardinal’s argument, including Msgr. Arthur Holquin in a recent essay.^[36]

I want to press a different claim than he, because I spent this week watching it play out at an East-West ecumenical conference: synodality is a major condition for reunion.

For nearly a millennium, the deepest Orthodox objection to Rome has not been the Filioque or the calendar. It is that the papacy grew into a monarchy detached from the synodal fabric of the first-millennium Church, a primacy over the bishops rather than within their communion. Whether that charge is fair is a long argument — my grandfather spent sixty years contesting the Orthodox version of it — but the charge itself explains why the present moment matters. When the Latin Church recovers her own synodal inheritance, she is not importing something Eastern. She is removing the East’s best argument against reunion.

The reverse is also true, and Latin critics of synodality should reckon with what their words sound like across the Bosphorus. When Catholics denounce synodality as an alien novelty, they are heard not as defending tradition but as rejecting it — as declaring that the practice of the Fathers, the practice of Nicaea and Chalcedon and every church the apostles planted, is foreign to the Church of Rome. No Orthodox Christian could receive that message as anything but confirmation that schism has been necessary. A traditionalism that disowns the councils of the undivided Church is not traditional. Such behavior cannot be justified as a holy nostalgia for a purer exercise of papal primacy but is rather a form of ecclesial amnesia.

The bishops who told CNS that synodality needs simpler language are right, and here is an attempt at simplicity. Synodality means the Church deliberates the way she deliberated at the first Synod of Jerusalem: everyone contributes, the pastors discern, Peter confirms, the Spirit governs.

Cardinal Burke has asked that synodality be stopped and studied. But a practice with two millennia of councils behind it, a 2018 theological commission study defining it, and the hopes of Catholic-Orthodox reunion riding on it does not need to be stopped. It needs to be better known. Most Catholics have never heard of the Baltimore councils, let alone the synods of Lima or Milan. So when the word “synodality” turns up in a headline it sounds like something new, and men who love the Church sound the alarm — not in bad faith, but without having looked. The question now, then, is not whether synodality has a venerable history. The question is why so many of the faithful are not yet being taught it.

 

 

Author bio: Andrew Likoudis is a Catholic scholar working in ecclesiology, ecumenism, and liturgy, with an M.A. in Catholic Studies from Franciscan University of Steubenville. He organized and edited Faith in Crisis (En Route, 2025), a 40-chapter volume with a foreword by Rocco Buttiglione, praised in Word on Fire’s Evangelization & Culture journal as “an impressive labor of love.” His recent editorial work includes the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Yves Congar’s Challenge to the Church (En Route, 2026) and the third edition of Ending the Byzantine Greek Schism (Emmaus Road, 2026), with a foreword by Scott Hahn. Founder and president of the Likoudis Legacy Foundation, he directs its journal The Kydones Review. More at andrewlikoudis.com.

^[1] Carol Glatz, “Church Needs Simpler, Better Ways to Explain Synodality, Some Bishops Say,” Catholic News Service, July 6, 2026, reprinted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, https://www.usccb.org/news/2026/church-needs-simpler-better-ways-explain-synodality-some-bishops-say.

^[2] Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, video interview, The College of Cardinals Report, interview recorded June 28, 2026, published July 15, 2026, https://collegeofcardinalsreport.com/cardinals/raymond-leo-burke.

^[3] Peter’s speech (Acts 15:7–11) answers the doctrinal question, how the Gentiles are saved, whereas James (15:13–21) answers the pastoral question, how Jewish and Gentile believers are to live together, applying what Peter had settled. James speaks with authority because he is bishop of Jerusalem, presiding in his own church, not because he holds an office equal to or above Peter. See John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, hom. 33, on Acts 15:13–15, who gives the reason for the order plainly: James was the local bishop, and therefore speaks last as a matter of subsidiarity. The decree itself issues not from James but from the apostles and the presbyters with the whole church (15:22).

^[4] Cyprian, Ep. 14.4 (modern numbering; Ep. 5 in the ANF edition).

^[5] Council of Nicaea (325), canon 5.

^[6] Apostolic Canons, canon 37.

^[7] International Theological Commission (ITC), Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2018), nos. 3–5, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20180302_sinodalita_en.html.

^[8] International Theological Commission, Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church, no. 4.

^[9] International Theological Commission, Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church, no. 5.

^[10] Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 9:2; see ITC, Synodality, no. 25.

^[11] Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Philadelphians 7.2; cf. Letter to the Trallians 2.2, in Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers.

^[12] John Chrysostom, Expositio in Psalmum 149, as translated in International Theological Commission, Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church (2018), no. 3.

^[13] Cyprian, Ep. 67.3 (ANF trans.).

^[14] Augustine, Ep. 213 (26 September 426; PL 33:966).

^[15] Leo the Great, Ep. 10.6, to the bishops of the province of Vienne.

^[16] John Henry Newman, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” The Rambler, n.s. 1, pt. 2 (July 1859): 198–230; ed. John Coulson (London: Collins, 1986), esp. 75–77 on the Arian decades and the failure of the episcopate as a body.

^[17] Fourth Lateran Council (1215), canon 6, trans. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990).

^[18] Fourth Lateran Council (1215), canon 6, trans. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), at https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm#6. Note what the canon establishes: “prudent and honest persons” appointed in every diocese, investigating “without any jurisdiction,” whose findings are reported to the metropolitan and suffragans so that the council “may proceed with careful deliberation.” An investigative body holding no jurisdiction of its own, gathering material year-round to inform an assembly of bishops who alone decide — one may ask how this differs, except in scale, from the study groups and working documents that prepare the Synod on Synodality, or why the one is treated as a venerable discipline and the other an alarming novelty.

^[19] Council of Trent, Session XXIV (11 November 1563), Decree on Reformation, ch. 2.

^[20] The Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (Milan, 1582, with expanded posthumous editions) collects the constitutions of Borromeo’s six provincial councils (1565–1582) and the acts of his eleven diocesan synods. The International Theological Commission’s Synodality, no. 35, gives the count of provincial synods as five; the acta themselves count six.

^[21] The forty-seventh Diocesan Synod of Milan was convoked by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini on 4 November 1993 and concluded on 1 February 1995.

^[22] 1917 Code of Canon Law, can. 356 §1.

^[23] 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 461 §1.

^[24] Second Vatican Council, Christus Dominus (1965), no. 36.

^[25] Seven provincial councils (1829, 1833, 1837, 1840, 1843, 1846, 1849) and three plenary councils (1852, 1866, 1884) were held. In terms of procedure, these Councils saw preparatory congregations of theologians and consultors, the drafting of schemata, the votum consultivum of the theologians, and the votum deliberativum reserved to the bishops. See Peter Guilday, A History of the Councils of Baltimore, 1791–1884 (New York: Macmillan, 1932). The Third Plenary Council (1884) mandated the parochial school system, ordered the catechism that appeared in 1885 as the Baltimore Catechism, and gave effect to the founding of The Catholic University of America, chartered 1887 and opened 1889.

^[26] The first Diocesan Synod of Baltimore met 7–10 November 1791 at the Baltimore Basilica; 22 priests attended with Bishop Carroll and 24 statutes were promulgated. It was the only synod Carroll held in 25 years as bishop and archbishop. See The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “John Carroll”; and the Archdiocese of Baltimore, “The Synods and Councils of Baltimore (1791–1884).”

^[27] St. Turibius of Mogrovejo, archbishop of Lima 1581–1606, assembled 13 diocesan synods and three provincial councils, the most consequential being the Third Council of Lima (15 August 1582 – 18 October 1583), whose acts were confirmed by the Holy See in 1588 and applied throughout Spanish South America. See The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Toribio Alfonso Mogrovejo.” The three Mexican provincial councils met in 1555, 1565, and 1585.

^[28] International Theological Commission, Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church (2018), chs. 1–2.

^[29] Apostolic Canons, canon 34, appended to the Apostolic Constitutions, bk. 8; text in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 14, ed. Henry R. Percival (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900). The canon is cited at Ravenna (2007), no. 10, and quoted in full at Chieti (2016), no. 13. This is not a negation of primacy either, for it speaks of harmony and concord as the fruit of conciliarity — to be distinguished from conciliarism, the theory that a council holds authority over the pope, a position the First Vatican Council condemned. The Pope is not strictly required to listen to the Bishops or lay people in making his decisions, though it is advisable. In any matter, his judgment is not subject to the judgment of the faithful, and cannot be vetoed.

^[30] Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority (Ravenna, 13 October 2007), esp. no. 10, which cites Apostolic Canon 34 in defining the conciliar dimension at the local, regional, and universal levels; and Synodality and Primacy during the First Millennium: Towards a Common Understanding in Service to the Unity of the Church (Chieti, 21 September 2016), nos. 13 and 20.

^[31] John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint (1995), no. 95. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25051995_ut-unum-sint.html.

^[32] Francis, Letter to the Pilgrim People of God in Germany, 29 June 2019; and the unsigned Declaration of the Holy See on the German “Synodal Way,” released by the Holy See Press Office in German and Italian on 21 July 2022, which denies the Synodal Way any power to compel bishops or faithful to adopt new forms of governance or new orientations in doctrine and morals.

^[33] Cardinals Pietro Parolin (Secretariat of State), Víctor Manuel Fernández (Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith), and Robert Francis Prevost (Dicastery for Bishops), letter to the German Bishops’ Conference, 16 February 2024, published at dbk.de. The letter states that the proposed synodal council is not foreseen by canon law, that a resolution establishing it would therefore be invalid, and that these conclusions had been submitted to Pope Francis and approved by him.

^[34] Francis, Moment of Reflection for the Beginning of the Synodal Journey, 9 October 2021, at https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/october/documents/20211009-apertura-camminosinodale.html. See also, Address at the Opening of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, 4 October 2023; Homily at the Opening Mass, 4 October 2023.

^[35] Episcopalis Communio (2018), art. 18: if the Roman Pontiff has granted deliberative power to the assembly, the Final Document “participates in the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter once it has been ratified and promulgated by him.” Francis promulgated the 2024 Final Document directly rather than issuing a post-synodal exhortation.

^[36] Arthur A. Holquin, “It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us,” Liturgy and Truth (Substack), July 17, 2026 (a direct reply to the interview); see also “Tradition and Synodality: One Reality, Two Names,” July 21, 2026.

Photo from Vatican News: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-03/note-of-the-general-secretariat-of-the-synod.html.