In this week’s Tablet religion magazine …

“Your editorial in the 25 November issue highlights the very evident lack of enthusiasm of (many) bishops for Pope Francis’ synodal way,” writes Andrea Kelly on our Letters pages this week. “It is disheartening to see so many of our bishops, to whom we turn for an example of prayer, service and holiness, very obviously protecting such power as their office confers.”

Our bishops are an example of prayer, service and holiness – it’s a thankless job and the Church in England and Wales is fortunate to have the leadership it does – but Andrea’s is only one of several letters and emails I’ve had this week sharing the disappointment of many readers at the lacklustre response of the bishops to the Pope’s call to renewal through a greater exercise of synodality: by which he means more attention to the poor and vulnerable, a greater willingness to listen and to share responsibility, and a determination to turn away from the kind of culture which led to a blindness to the suffering of the victims of abuse and the cover up of the scandal out of fear of damage to the Church’s reputation. There is no widespread hostility to the synodal process here of the kind we have seen from some bishops in the United States, but there is a defensiveness that reflects an anxiety and fear of change found among many priests and lay people. Our readers’ impatience might be seen less as a scold and more as an encouragement to the bishops to see the synodal process not as a threat but as an opportunity. They desire to support the bishops in the exercise of that thankless job. But this requires a willingness from the bishops to meet them halfway.

The Synod in Rome last month was excoriated by Mary McAleese and others as “an episcopal conference in which prophetic voices won no significant concessions from the powerful and wealthy forces of conservatism … on pressing issues such as women’s ordination and teaching on LGBTQ”. Fr Vimal Tirimanna CSSR, a moral theologian from Sri Lanka who teaches in Rome and who was a delegate at the synod, writes in the letters pages that the synod was not called to address “so-called hot-button issues that hail from the developed world … but to deliberate, listen and discern how to change the very way of being Church all over the world”.

In View from Rome, Christopher Lamb writes that the bishops’ formal response to the Synod “was decidedly lukewarm”. They announced ambitious plans for a renewal of Eucharistic Adoration but there was no sign of any “concrete plans to implement synodal renewal processes at the grassroots level”. Chris adds, “All this has, no doubt, been noted with interest in Rome.”