WelCom March 2024
The next session of the sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops – the Synod on Synodality – will take place in October this year.
The General Secretariat of the Synod has announced that the session will begin with a two-day retreat from 30 September to 1 October, followed by three-and-a-half weeks of official discussions on 2–27 October.
Delegates will address topics drawn from the synthesis report from last October’s session, with the 2024 discussions set to focus on the practice of synodality at all levels of Church life, according to the synod secretariat.
In a chirograph (a direct papal instruction) issued the same day, Pope Francis directed the secretariat and the Vatican’s dicasteries to coordinate ‘by mutual agreement’ a series of study groups to reflect on some of the synod’s themes.
It instructs ‘the dicasteries of the Roman Curia [to] collaborate, according to their respective specific competences, in the activity of the General Secretariat of the Synod, forming study groups that shall begin, following the synodal method, an in-depth study of some of the themes that emerged’.
The chirograph did not detail what the groups would study. Subjects where the synod delegates did not reach a consensus in the 2023 session were listed as ‘matters of consideration’ in the synthesis report, and included norms on priestly celibacy and the prospect of ordaining women to the diaconate.
Last month a Spanish nun who took part in the two most recent meetings of the Pope’s Council of Cardinals – the ‘C9’ – said that Francis was very much in favour of the female diaconate’ but was ‘still trying to understand how to put it into practice’.
Sr Linda Pocher, a Salesian theologian, contributed to two C9 meetings on the role of women in the Church.
Speaking after the meeting on 5–6 February, Pocher said the Pope was already changing ways ‘of thinking and living the difference between ordained ministry and the baptismal priesthood, extending to all the baptised some rights that until recently belonged to bishops, priests, or religious’.
Source: The Tablet