Ask a Vatican official about synodality and you will get, at minimum, ten minutes of unbroken conviction: about listening, about the People of God walking together, about a Church that discerns rather than dictates. Ask a parishioner leaving 10am Mass the same question and you are more likely to get a shrug, or a faintly apologetic admission that they filled in a listening-exercise form three years ago and never heard what became of it.
That gap is worth taking seriously, because it is not going away. The General Secretariat of the Synod has confirmed that the "implementation phase" set in motion by the 2024 Final Document will run all the way to an Ecclesial Assembly in October 2028, with dioceses and bishops' conferences invited to keep reporting back on the fruits of a process that officially concluded four years earlier. Synodality, in other words, has stopped being an event and become a permanent feature of Church administration. What began in 2021 as a "three-year process of listening and dialogue" has quietly become a standing structure with its own secretariat, its own calendar and, inevitably, its own bureaucratic momentum.
