We should not be surprised when any notion of the church as a perfect society is not embraced by people who have real wounds and struggles.

Catholics must be careful, he said, because “both the ‘progressivism’ that lines up behind the world and the ‘traditionalism’ that longs for a bygone world are not evidence of love, but of infidelity,” the pope said.

Swiss Cardinal Kurt Koch apologized for offending people and said he never intended to imply that supporters of the German church’s Synodal Path were acting similar to a group of Christian supporters of the Nazis in the 1930s.

The president of the German bishops' conference demanded an apology from a cardinal who seemed to compare the German Synodal Path with a Nazi ideology.

With reports from at least 112 of the 114 bishops’ conferences around the world, the Synod on Synodality has entered its next phase as 35 laypeople, priests and bishops meet to discern the outcome of the worldwide listening process.

In the second part of this exclusive interview, Cardinal Grech reveals in new depth the plans for the continental and Roman phases of the global synodal process.