There are some 1,378,000,000 Catholics on Planet Earth today. They live in almost every imaginable cultural, social, economic, and political circumstance. They manifest their Catholicism in distinctive ways. The vast majority of them are the lay faithful. Given those numbers and that extraordinary diversity, the claim that the “whole Church is gathered in Synod,” so often heard these past three weeks here in Rome, is obviously an exaggeration (to put it gently).