Things are changing. Never since Pope Paul VI re-established synods as a feature of Church governance in 1965 has Vatican bureaucracy sent out preparatory questions that were addressed to lay people around the world — not just select specialists and experts, but everybody. If under Francis the process begins publicly, how will it end?

Will a Pope Francis synod be different? Will the new Pope take a different path by leaning more on his bishops and less on the Curia? Will his synod be more about actual decision-making and less about consultation and guidance? Will he allow his bishops an active voice in Church governance?

That is the hope of many within the Church, and it was certainly the hope of a past generation of Canadian bishops who were on the frontlines of a battle against centralized Vatican control of synods.

Five decades ago at Vatican II, Ukrainian-Canadian Archeparch Maxim Hermaniuk begged for a permanent synod with real power. One of the more influential council fathers, Hermaniuk campaigned for a synod that would be deliberative and permanent. He wanted the Pope to relate primarily to other bishops in the synod rather than a papal court of Church professionals who had climbed to the top of their career ladders.

Hermaniuk spent another 20 years fighting to change Pope Paul VI’s vision for synods. Where Hermaniuk wanted synods to be deliberative, Pope Paul ordained they would be primarily consultative and only deliberative if and when the Pope declared them so. Hermaniuk wanted synods to be free of Vatican bureaucracy, but synods since Vatican II have been scheduled by Vatican bureaucrats to consider questions defined by Vatican bureaucrats, listen to experts chosen by Vatican bureaucrats and then produce a list of propositions to the Pope written by Vatican bureaucrats.

“It’s called a synod of bishops, but it is really a papal synod,” retired Archbishop James Hayes of Halifax told The Catholic Register in 1999. Hayes had attended the 1985 synod to consider the role of bishops on the 20th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. He was not alone in complaining that the bishops called to give advice to the Pope were being managed.

As soon as the 1987 synod on the laity was concluded Archbishop Donat Chiasson of Moncton, N.B., got on the phone to the Canadian Press to let Canadians know he felt “surprised and deceived” by the entire process of the synod. The archbishop complained that proposals he and other bishops made were either simply ignored or deliberately distorted in the summaries.

“Some of the points were dropped and some unrecognizable,” Chiasson said. “The points we made never made it to general discussion. This method of running an assembly is counterproductive.”

“There was an awful lot of control,” retired Winnipeg Archbishop James Weisgerber told The Catholic Register in March.

At the extraordinary synod of 1969, Canadian Vatican II father and bishop of Sault Ste. Marie Alexander Carter pleaded for a more meaningful and less controlled process.

“An authentic primacy is not threatened so much by an attempt to diminish centralization as by an attempt to impose a rigourous, strong control over all,” Carter said in his last address to the synod. “In our times, a central power which is exercised beyond a reasonable degree could easily cause more fragmentation and alienation than a wise and prudent change of the structures by which authority is expressed and exercised in the Church.”

Carter’s brother, Toronto Archbishop Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter, was concerned more with the outcome than the process. But that still led him to rebel against Vatican control.

“Cardinal Carter always argued that people should be able to understand what Rome has got to say,” said former St. Jerome’s University president Doug Letson. “I remember very well the release from the synod on that particular family discussion (the 1980 synod on the Christian family in today’s world) and it was in Thomistic jargon and wouldn’t have been understandable by any except philosophical and theological insiders.”

Cardinal Carter ignored the Vatican’s code of secrecy and released the working document just to make the point that the language was impenetrable.

A younger generation of bishops still worries that few people read the exhortations popes usually write a year or so after a synod. For enthusiastic theological hobbyists, another 50,000 words of closely reasoned argument at a high level of magesterial teaching can fuel debate, analysis, contemplation and study (often in that order, unfortunately). But what about people, asks Ottawa Archbishop Terry Prendergast, who don’t read 50,000-word essays?

Pope Francis’ exhortation The Joy of the Gospel addresses itself to dozens of propositions which came out of Pope Benedict’s 2012 synod on the New Evangelization. Though hailed for its non-academic style, it’s still more than 47,000 words in English.

“When you try to say everything about everything you don’t really get a focus,” said Prendergast. “I mean all I know is that The Joy of the Gospel is there, it’s important and I agree with it. I think it’s a very good exhortation. But who could possibly do all the things that are in that exhortation?”

While Prendergast wants simpler, shorter exhortations, he isn’t concerned that synods have been overly managed and controlled. As a theologian in 1987, as a bishop in 1990 and as part of the media liaison team in 2008, Prendergast has been at synods and believes they have become more and more open over time.

“I felt that it was a bit more open than I had been led to believe,” Prendergast said. “I felt that we were not being managed, that we were being helped and that what we said was being taken seriously.”

Weisgerber, who attended the 2001 synod on the role of bishops and was chosen a relator or recording secretary for a group of the English-speaking bishops, had first-hand experience of some of the ways in which bishops’ interventions were shaped and limited. At the critical stage between when propositions are assembled by relators and summaries are made for the next round of deliberations, Vatican officials judge which interventions are off-topic. In 2001 the bishops were there to talk about the role of the bishop in his diocese.

“Many of the bishops wanted to talk about issues much wider than that, particularly the role of the Curia,” recalled Weisgerber. “In my intervention, it was all about that.”

At the next stage in the synod, none of the talk about how bishops should be served by the Vatican Curia made it into the summaries.

“I suppose, if you’re trying to get something done you’ve got to keep focused,” said Weisgerber. “But it clearly was, you know, ‘We want your advice, but we’ll tell you what we want your advice about. If you’ve got any other ideas, just keep it to yourself.’ ”

As Weisgerber followed the process through, he found more openness as the bishops got closer to a final set of recommendations to the Pope. On the second go around, as the various discussions were brought together across language groups and separated into themes, Weisgerber found himself working under Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio.

“His spirit has not changed. He was in no way trying to push his own ideas,” Weisgerber said. “He just listened and was trying to get a consensus. He was wonderful to be with.”

The old debate over whether synods should be deliberative and legislative or merely consultative and advisory to the Pope is unhelpful, said Weisgerber.

“The bishops and the Pope have to work together. To say the synod is deliberative, does that mean the synod can be opposed to the Pope? I think the question doesn’t work,” he said.

A synod acting independently without the Pope in the place of St. Peter the Apostle would break with Catholic tradition, said Prendergast.

“If we had a synod that was done without Peter — without Peter being there and guiding us and listening to us and leading us — it would be very different. It wouldn’t be a Roman Catholic synod,” he said.

As an expert at the 2012 synod on the New Evangelization, Sr. Gill Goulding saw up close the evolving importance of synods and the gradual opening of the process. The Regis College professor of systematic theology and spirituality was one of 30 women attending the synod. Only a generation ago even one woman at a synod would be surprising. In 2012, the 30 were hardly remarked upon.

She also saw this synod effectively opened with two keynote addresses — one from Pope Benedict XVI and the other from the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

“The interchange of synod fathers was refreshingly honest and at times really inspiring,” Goulding told The Catholic Register in an e-mail. “Particularly when we heard repeatedly the bishops acknowledging their own need for conversion. I heard a number who had attended previous synods say that this was the best synod they had attended.”

Goulding is certain this last synod under Pope Benedict XVI accomplished enough to allow Benedict to retire. It also set the stage for the coming of the open and consultative Pope Francis, who clearly intends to incorporate synods into his vision of Church governance.

“The results of the next and future synods will be at the heart of promoting (Pope Francis’) vision for the Church and therefore a source of interest way beyond our own confines, either on a Catholic newspaper or Catholic faculty of theology,” she said.

Letson, a prolific author on Canadian Church history, is less hopeful that the centralizing forces in Rome will ever let go.

“My guess would be, you’re looking at some contentious debate (at this year’s synod) but it’s not likely to become public because the discussions that would take place in the synod hall are embargoed. The debate is not supposed to be made public,” he said. “I would be both heartened and amazed if we were to get something out of this synod that would indicate there had been an open and collegial, colloquial discussion and that that was provided to the world at large after the synod. It will be interesting to see what happens, clearly.”

The last time a synod was called to talk about marriage and the family (1980), Canadian bishops had a great deal to say that now lies quietly in archives. In 1987 Letson and his writing partner Michael Higgins dug out a few gems. Archbishop Henri Legare of Grouard- McLennan, then vice president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, took aim at the creaky philosophical structure around Church teaching.

“The essentialist philosophy within which the theology of the sacrament of marriage evolved can lead one to think that the Church is already in a state of perfection, that it has in some sense arrived at its end,” said Legare. “But that approach forgets that the Church is truly in a pilgrim state, that it is constructed in history. Therefore, should we not rethink the theology of marriage in a more existentialist and personalist framework? Such an approach obliges us to take reality into account as it is historically presented to us, while still affirming (but in a different way) the indissolubility of marriage.”

Cardinal Carter wanted the Church to speak clearly to the people who live in families and marriages — different families in different parts of the world.

“The mode of expression of moral guidance given by the magisterium of the Church as a whole must also go beyond the present and the past, beyond the conventional mode of expressing guidance in an authoritarian form, to forming a new consensus for concrete pastoral prescription both on the universal and on the regional and national levels.”

Whatever the Canadians say come this October, they have a legacy to live up to and a future looking back at them.