ROME — At the big picture level, the story of the 2024 Synod of Bishops on Synodality is harmony. Despite quasi-apocalyptic forecasts of chaos and schism three years ago when the process began, it ended Oct. 26 on a Saturday night in Rome without earthquakes and, to a remarkable degree, without much by way of hard feelings.
In its 51-page final document, the synod did not demand the dramatic changes in teaching and practice many had expected on issues such as women deacons, outreach to gay, lesbian, and transgender persons, and married priests. In fact, the “LGBT community” and married priests were never even mentioned, while the lone reference to women deacons was a recommendation for more study — the classic bureaucratic equivalent of a punt.
To a large extent, this result was due to Pope Francis, who took these hot-button issues off the table by assigning them to a series of study groups, who are to report their findings by June 2025.
In the end, there were differing assessments of the significance of the synod. Some hailed it as a watershed in Catholic history, ushering in a new age of bottom-up rather than top-down decision-making, while others dismissed it as largely sound and fury signifying nothing, a three-year process that produced nothing of real consequence.
Wherever a given participant fell on that spectrum, however, no one seemed truly angry, and perhaps that itself was the real accomplishment.
The absence of rancor, however, doesn’t mean there was no disagreement at all. A careful reading of the final document, along with voting totals on its individual paragraphs released by the Vatican, provides an interesting X-ray of where the fault lines ran.
Of the 368 participants in the synod, 355 actually cast votes Saturday night. Individual votes were taken on each of the document’s 155 paragraphs, and for the most part they were adopted almost without objection — a typical result was 352 to 3, for instance, or 354 to 1.
Only in eight instances did a given paragraph attract at least 35 “no” votes, meaning that 147 paragraphs received more than 90% support. Those few which dropped below the 90% threshold, therefore, are good indicators of where the debate inside the synod, such as it was, took place.
Let’s take them one by one, in order of the resistance they generated.
Paragraph 60 (97 no votes”): This paragraph deals with women, including the diaconate. Its key language is: “The question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.” The 97 no’s were more than double the total for any other paragraph, perhaps because it’s likely that both conservatives and liberals may have objected. Some conservatives likely felt the question should be closed, not left open, while some liberals may feel the time for study has passed and now’s the moment for action.
Paragraph 125 (45 no votes): The subject here is bishops’ conferences, including a recommendation “to specify precisely the domain of the doctrinal and disciplinary competence of Episcopal Conferences.” This alarmed some participants who don’t feel a conference should have any authority over doctrine — that’s the business of the individual bishop in his diocese, or for the pope and/or an ecumenical council at the level of the universal Church.
Paragraph 27 (43 no votes): Concerned with liturgy, this paragraph includes a recommendation for a study group to ponder “how to make liturgical celebrations more an expression of synodality.” That’s more or less a coded way of talking about greater inculturation, which, for some, may have stirred memories of the Pachamama controversy during the 2019 Synod for the Amazon. More broadly, the reaction reflects continuing tension between diversity and consistency in liturgical questions.
Paragraph 148 (40 no votes): In the context of a paragraph on formation, mostly to the priesthood but also to the episcopacy, the overall thrust is to call for a more “synodal” process, including an emphasis on collaboration and “ecclesial discernment.” Critics may fear that such an approach to formation could result in priests and bishops who see their roles mostly as moderators or facilitators, not as real leaders empowered to teach, preach, and govern.
Paragraph 92 (39 no votes): This paragraph acknowledges hierarchical authority, but asserts “it may not ignore a direction which emerges through proper discernment within a consultative process” and calls for a revision of canon law to clarify the relationship between consultation and deliberation. To some, this may sound a bit like a slippery slope toward the “democratization” of Catholicism, supplanting leadership by the bishops and the pope with the vox populi (voice of the people).
Paragraph 129 (38 no votes): Focused on particular councils (meaning summits either of all the bishops of an episcopal conference, or the bishops of an ecclesiastical province), this paragraph includes a recommendation that Vatican approval of their results, for matters not directly touching faith, morals or the sacraments, should be quasi-automatic. For some, this can’t help but seem like weakening the Vatican’s role as the Church’s last line of defense.
Paragraph 133 (37 no votes): In the context of discussing the Eastern Catholic churches, this paragraph mentions the problem of faithful of the Eastern churches who migrate into regions of the Latin Rite, but doesn’t address the issue of Eastern churches enjoying some sort of universal jurisdiction over their faithful, simply recommending instead “sincere dialogue and fraternal collaboration between Latin and Eastern Bishops.” Naturally, that formula likely disappointed some on both sides of the issue.
Paragraph 136 (37 no votes): This paragraph deals with the synod itself, and basically asserts that the nature of the last two assemblies, the 2023 and 2024 editions on synodality — including opening membership to other constituencies in the Church beyond the bishops) is not only the pattern for all future synods, but for any exercise of leadership in the Church. For those who found this process unwieldy and confused, such a prospect may not be welcome.
What emerges is this: Aside from women deacons and liturgy, every other disputed component of the final document deals with what we might loosely call “decentralization,” implying a shift in power away from the top and toward the bottom. In that sense, the document has defined the terms of debate for what “synodality” may look like in practice, depending on how these contested matters are resolved.
Ironically this debate has been engineered by a pope who called this synod on his own authority, and who intervened repeatedly without consulting anyone. How to square the call for decentralization with the exercise of top-down authority which helped produce it is, perhaps, a matter for another day.
