A Synod is a gathering of the faithful to listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying to the Church and asking her to be and to do. This gathering can involve the faithful in different ways: pastors with lay people, bishops with the other ordained ministries, pope with bishops, etc.
Pope Francis calls it “an exercise of mutual listening, conducted at all levels of the Church and involving the entire People of God” (Pope Francis, 18 September 2021). It involves encounter, listening and the discernment of spirits.
The word synod comes from the Greek synodos, which has the general meaning of “walking together.” It offers an image of the Church as a pilgrim people, growing and developing on a journey of faith; a very different image from that of the Church as a static institution. A synodal Church expresses the Second Vatican Council vision of what sees the Church called to be: the People of God in which all baptized share the same dignity, and the essential distinction between lay people, clergy, bishops etc. is a difference of vocation and role, not of superiority.
Synods taken many forms in church history and they are currently practiced in the Church at all levels: from parish Pastoral Council meetings to Diocesan Synods, from Provincial Councils to Plenary Councils, from the assembles to the Synod of bishops to ecumenical Councils in which the bishops from across the world gather in Rome with the Pope. The practice of gathering to listen to the Spirit is as old as the Church herself, as shown by the “Council” of Jerusalem described in Acts of the Apostles 15. Synod-type mechanisms (listening, dialogue, discernment, deliberation) have always been used in monasteries and religious houses when making decisions. The conclaves, when cardinals meet to elect the new pope, is a synod event.
Pope Francis has sought from the beginning of his pontificate up to his death in April 2025 to invigorate and reconfigure the Synod of Bishops so that it might become more of an exercise of listening and discernment. Ever since his election in 2013, he has been teaching the Church about synodality and encouraging us to become a more synodal Church at every level. In an important speech on 17 October 2015, he said that the path of synodality is what God expects of the Church in the third millennium.
Pope Leo XIV, since his election as our Holy Father on May 8th 2025, has — on numerous occasions — voiced his determination to carry on this legacy of Pope Francis: Synodality… “is to help the Church fulfill its primary role in the world, which is to be missionary, to announce the Gospel… Synodality is not a campaign. It’s a way of being and a way of being Church”
