Surely the problems facing the modern family, the Amazon, the universal church cannot be boiled down to a single headline.

“The synod is not a council. It does not take decisions as a council does. Its task is to discern, not decide,” one synod member explained to me.

The synod secretariat has gone to extraordinary lengths to encourage each member into a disposition of openness so that maybe, just maybe, the Holy Spirit can act.

What strikes me most about the synod, now in its third day, is the climate of prayer that envelops it, Gerry O’Connell writes.

An inauspicious first day in Rome was also a chance for me to hit pause and and try to shed some of my own fears about the synod process.

I have spent the better part of the past two years trying to understand what synodality is. Today, it finally started to click.