From the beginning, one of the most persistent charges against Pope Francis’s Synod of Bishops on Synodality, which got underway in 2021 and wrapped up over the weekend in Rome, is that the deck was stacked with progressive voices, creating an unrepresentative sense of the totality of global Catholic opinion.
To cite a classic for-instance, critics have noted that plenty of advocates of women clergy and LGBTQ+ outreach were included among the official delegates, but no devotees of the traditional Latin Mass and few prominent pro-lifers. (Notably, the word “abortion” never appears in the 51-page concluding document.)
