As I write, the theme of the 2022 Synod has just been announced: ‘For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation and Mission’.Synodality, understood as a pilgrim people walking along together and with God, is to be a constitutive dimension of the Church, with communal discernment as a central element. Already the documents from the Amazon Synod of 2020 encourage local communities to develop a participative style as they move along, and to trust that the Holy Spirit will guide them, lay and clergy, into ever-deepening fidelity to the gospel. Pope Francis has long been insistent, as throughout Evangelii gaudium, that communal discernment is the way forward for the People of God if they are to respond well to the emerging challenges of our world: the term recurs in that document some twenty times.