ROME—In an interview with America magazine, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., makes it clear that he is having none of the agitation against Pope Francis’s Synod on the Family. Nothing has been “rigged.” Nothing has been “manipulated.” Rather, the cardinal approves of this synod process, which is much more open than any other anyone can remember. “I see it as widening the participation of the bishops (compared to the past),” the cardinal said. He reiterated many of the same points in his interview with the National Catholic Reporter.

As for those who have been critical of this synod, he told Gerard O’Connell:

There are some bishops whose position is that we shouldn’t be discussing any of this anyway. They were the ones at the last synod that were giving interviews, and denouncing and claiming there were intrigues and manipulation. That, I think, falls on them. I don’t see it with a foundation in reality.

What about those who suggest the pope has been puppet-mastering the whole shebang?

I wonder if some of these people who are speaking, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes half-way implying, then backing off and then twisting around, I wonder if it is really that they find they just don’t like this pope. I wonder if that isn’t part of it.

O’Connell asked what the cardinal thought would come out of the synod:

I think that right now there has been so much tainting of how the synod is being seen. I don’t think the process has been tainted, I don’t think the synod itself has been tainted, but the lens through which it is being seen by many, many people has been tainted, and so I suspect that that will have some impact. It’s not going to be a long term impact because you can only paint something in false tones and have it remain understood incorrectly for so long, after a while the church wins out.  The great maxim—magna est veritas et semper prevalebit—the truth is great and it always wins out, even with all of this propaganda and all of this distortion.

Cardinal Wuerl is no radical. He is speaking for himself, of course, but he’s been around for a while. He has attended many synods—and held a primary leadership role in the 2012 synod. He knows of what he speaks. No doubt the cardinal is giving voice to the frustration of many other synod fathers. Is he hedging against a possible no-result? I don’t think so, not after Pope Francis’s remember-I’m-the-pope speech yesterday (which sounded a lot like the one he gave last year, just before he appointed a commission to study the question of the annulment process, which he eventually reformed). Cardinal Wuerl may have just reset the table for the synod’s most important work—which begins tomorrow.