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So Francis has allowed Church conservatives, who worked hard to squelch any genuine debate in the past, to play the role of the real democrats of the Church. “Which is kind of ironic,” Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest, said in an interview on National Public Radio. “They’re saying that it’s being manipulated and preprogrammed when, in point of fact, all of the synods since the Second Vatican Council were manipulated and programmed but by the conservatives.”

The synod is a purely advisory body meant to provide useful input to the Pope. But it is hard to image the Pope issuing a concluding report at radical variance to the views of so many prominent cardinals and bishops. The risk of having held the synod at all is that, after raising the hopes of so many, Francis will be forced to issue a final statement with a lot of vague rhetoric about openness and inclusion but no substantive doctrinal change: an elephant giving birth to a mouse. The alternative would be a document that risks provoking open revolt.
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