Synod on Synodality

What is the Instrumentum laboris (IL)?
As the Latin word suggests, the IL is first and foremost a working tool for the participants in the work of the first session of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops. In this sense, the IL does not suggest answers, but notes, articulates some insights that have emerged in the process, opens up questions and invites further study.

It is therefore also a document for the discernment of the participants in the October 2023 Assembly. In fact, unlike previous synods for which the IL was a document to be amended, improved, in order to arrive at a new document, the current IL is primarily aimed at and in support of the assembly’s methodology…

On June 20, the secretariat for the synod published the working document (known by its Latin title instrumentum laboris) for the first session of the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on synodality that will be held in the Vatican from October 4 to October 29, 2023. The second session will be held in October 2024.

Cardinal Grech described the working document as “the fruit of a synodal process” that started on Oct. 10, 2021, and “involved the whole church” in an exercise of listening to the people of God…

On October 27, 2022, the Working Document for the Continental Stage – the fruit of the Syntheses resulting from the consultation of the People of God in the first phase of the synodal process – was released… The document, titled “Enlarge the Space of Your Tent” was produced by a team of 30 advisors who gathered in Frascati, Italy for two weeks in late-September and early October, the majority of whom were lay Catholics…

Please take some time to read the Working Document for the Continental Stage – you will find many of the major themes that were central in our own SJSP Collaborative Synod Synthesis Report are reflected in the document…

Becoming a Synodal Church: Issues and Challenges
Sr. Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ Undersecretary for the General Secretariat of the Synod
Thursday, October 27 at 5:30pm to 7:00pm – Corcoran Commons, Heights Room, Chestnut Hill Campus – Attend in person or virtually
The Synod on Synodality is a transformative process in which all the baptized are protagonists and discern together the calls of the Holy Spirit, uniting as a listening Church of participation and co-responsibility…

In a surprise announcement after reciting the Angelus with thousands of pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square on October 6, Pope Francis has significantly lengthened the final Roman phase of the ongoing Synod on Synodality.  It will now extend over two sessions from October 4-29, 2023, and in October 2024.

“I hope that this decision will favor the comprehension of synodality as a constitutive dimension of the church and help everyone to live it as a journey of brothers and sisters who witness to the joy of the Gospel,” the pope said when he broke the news.

“The fruits of the synodal process that has gone ahead are many, but in order for them to bear much fruit, we can’t hurry,” said Francis.

The 60th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council is a moment of particular grace also for the Synod, which represents a fruit of that ecumenical assembly, indeed one of its “most precious legacies” (Francis, Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis Communio, Sept. 15, 2018, 1). The Synodus Episoporum, in fact, was instituted by St. Paul VI at the beginning of the fourth and final period of the Council (Sept. 15, 1965), responding to requests made by many council fathers…

The synodal process currently underway, dedicated to “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church,” is also within the Council’s wake…