Pope Francis greets Indonesian Catholics as he arrives to lead the Holy mass at Gelora Bung Karno Stadium on Sept. 5, in Jakarta, Indonesia.Robertus Pudyanto/Getty Images

Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College. His new book is The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis.

The Second Session of the Synod on Synodality will formally open in the Vatican next month. It promises to be a deciding, perhaps the deciding moment in the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio – Pope Francis.

Synodality in the Francis lexicon defines a new way of being an ecclesia – or assembly – of believers. To create that new way, he convoked a synod, or church gathering, of representatives from across the Catholic landscape – bishops and laity alike – with the intention of creating an inclusive, free and dialogue-friendly gathering where delegates speak their minds without fear of a punitive response from the Catholic Church’s senior authorities when they go off-script.

As he said in his encyclical Fratelli tutti (2020), “A healthy openness never threatens one’s own identity.” This papal maxim was tested to the limit at the First Session of the Synod on Synodality held in October, 2023. Certain hot-button issues were either shelved or referred to a specific Study Group charged with the responsibility of exploring in greater depth the multidimensional aspects of a controversial matter in the church. This was especially true of debates around women in ministry. Two commissions created by Francis to study the ordination of women to the diaconate remain stuck in the musty corridors of Roman bureaucracy.

The words of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn can serve as a cautionary warning for Francis and his church: “A wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who live in it.” The women who live in the Catholic Church are by every measure the largest and most productive component of its life and outreach; the men who run the church must get to know them in ways that don’t reduce them to a holy mystery in need of their own justificatory theology, to an abstraction rather than an encounter, to a........

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