The Vatican Synod on Synodality, which concluded on Sunday, was once widely expected to open the door to dramatic, even revolutionary, changes in the Catholic Church. Progressives hoped and conservatives feared that the assembly might issue calls for women’s ordination to the diaconate or even higher ranks of clergy; acceptance of same-sex relationships; and liberalization in other areas, including the Church’s traditional teaching against contraception.

In the end, no such statements appeared in the final document, which Pope Francis approved on Saturday. The most controversial passage was a statement that the question of women’s access to the diaconate “remains open,” words that sit uneasily, though not irreconcilably so, with the Pope’s statement earlier this year that women are not eligible for holy orders.

Many might therefore be tempted to treat the entire three-year undertaking, which began with local consultations in dioceses around the world and passed through national and continental phases before culminating in two, monthlong assemblies at the Vatican, as an expensive and time-consuming bureaucratic exercise without much lasting impact for the life of the Church. 

Yet such a judgment would be premature, because, among other reasons, the most recent synod will have an important epilogue in the conclusions of the study groups to which Pope Francis entrusted the most controversial issues, including the question of women in ministry. Those study groups are scheduled to present their findings and recommendations in June.

Whatever the outcome of that process, this latest synod, along with five other assemblies since 2014, will constitute an important part of Pope Francis’ legacy. In reshaping the Synod of Bishops, the Pope has offered a potential model of papal leadership for his successors and of governance for every level of the universal Church. In the shorter term, the gatherings have played a key role in the Pope’s strategy of changing the terms of debate within the Church.

The single most meaningful innovation that Pope Francis has introduced into the synodal process has been the inclusion of a significant minority of laypeople, including women, as voting members of an assembly that had been all male and almost exclusively limited to bishops. His unprecedented decision to adopt this year’s final report as a part of his ordinary magisterium is thus an important gesture toward the consultation of lay Catholics in the development of doctrine. It is hard to imagine that future popes will not continue to include non-clerics in future gatherings of this kind.

Pope Francis began talking about synodality almost from the beginning of his pontificate in 2013. He described his institution of an advisory Council of Cardinals as an example of synodality, and he raised the profile of the Synod of Bishops, whose periodic meetings at the Vatican became fora for some of the most controversial issues in the Church. Each gathering of the synod in this pontificate has been associated with at least one neuralgic cultural question, such as divorce, LGBT issues, married priests or women deacons. 

Yet these assemblies have never been anything like freewheeling debates. In a break with earlier practice, starting with the first synod on the family in 2014, the statements of delegates inside the hall were no longer made public, and reporters were expected to rely on summaries by Vatican-appointed spokespeople. More recently, members of the synod were instructed not to rebut each other’s statements during the assembly. 

Pope Francis, who has repeatedly stressed that the synod is not a parliament, also has shown that he feels free to disregard its conclusions, a reminder that the final word rests with him. 

After two synods on the family declined to endorse leniency on the prohibition of Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics, the Pope went ahead and encouraged such leniency in his 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. After the 2019 synod on the Amazon called for loosening the rules on the ordination of married men, Pope Francis ignored the recommendation. Last year’s synod produced a document that was notably silent on LGBT issues, but less than two months later the Pope authorized the Vatican’s doctrinal office to permit blessings for same-sex couples. He later bowed to resistance from bishops in Africa by allowing them to prohibit such blessings on their continent.

What the synods have undoubtedly done is to raise such questions and keep them in the eye of Catholics and the wider world. In that way, the assemblies have played a complementary function to that of the Pope’s in-flight news conferences and other interviews with journalists. When the Pope speaks to reporters, his words do not carry the weight of official doctrine, yet they have much more of an impact on public opinion than almost any official Vatican document ever could. The single most famous – and controversial – words of Pope Francis remain those he uttered in response to a question about homosexuality and the priesthood during his first news conference in 2013: “Who am I to judge?”

The Pope has used both the synod and the press to widen the Overton window of acceptable opinion in the Church and hence to stoke debate at its highest levels over issues that only a decade ago were considered settled. Much of that debate promises to continue past the end of the current pontificate. Pope Francis has thus helped to shape his successor’s agenda and bequeathed him, in an expanded conception of synodality, a process with which to address it.