Vatican’s Synod on Synodality Organizers Say Synod is ‘fruit’ of Second Vatican Council

The CDF document noted that in the history of the Church, synods and councils were nearly interchangeable terms for formal ecclesiastical assemblies. 

It said that the more modern view of a synod as something distinct from a council does not go back even as far as Vatican II, and that its development was accompanied by the neologism of “synodality.”

Speaking of the Church as “synodal” by its nature is something novel, the commission said, and required “careful theological clarification.”

The Vatican’s message on Monday said the “synodal process currently underway is also within the Council’s wake.”

In October 2021, the Catholic Church began the first phase of a global two-year synodal process that will culminate in a meeting of the Synod of Bishops in Rome in 2023.

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Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, is the meeting’s chief organizer.

The Maltese cardinal said the question that the Synod on Synodality was trying to answer is “what is the type of Church that the Holy Spirit is enlightening us to have for today?”

The Oct. 10 message concluded with the words of Pope Benedict XVI that the “synodal dimension is constitutive of the Church: it consists of a coming together of every people and culture in order that they become one in Christ and walk together, following him, who said: ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’”