Here’s what’s happening during the last week of the Synod on Synodality

Vatican City, Oct 19, 2024 / 08:30 am

After two and a half weeks, the last of two assemblies for the Synod on Synodality is about to enter its final stretch before officially concluding on Oct. 27.

As conversations on the agenda set by the Instrumentum Laboris, or working document, wrapped up this week, the focus going forward will be the writing and editing of the Synod on Synodality’s final document.

Schedule

After having the afternoon off on Friday, Oct. 18, the synod’s lay and female participants, a minority among the mostly bishop delegates, had special meetings with Pope Francis on Saturday.

Though the two categories have some crossover, the pope met separately with women — both religious sisters and non-religious sisters — and with non-cleric, non-religious laymen and laywomen in the Apostolic Palace on Oct. 19.

The audiences followed three and a half days of debates on the last part of the 2024 Instrumentum Laboris, which finished Friday morning with summaries of small-group discussions due for submission by 12:30 p.m.

On Sunday, Oct. 20, the synod will attend a Mass of canonization for 14 saints in St. Peter’s Square. The commission elected to oversee the creation of the final document will also meet.

The first day of the last full week of the Synod on Synodality, Oct. 21, will be mostly dedicated to prayer, including Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica and a presentation of the first draft of the final document.

Oct. 22 and 23 will be devoted to small-group discussions and speeches in the full assembly about the final document, as well as the submission of requests for changes.

The text will contain the synod’s ideas, thoughts, and recommendations — the product of the group discernment undertaken over the last couple of weeks and the culmination of a synodal process first begun by Pope Francis in October 2021.

The synod, an advisory body of the Church, will then deliver the final document to the pope, who can either adopt and publish it as an official papal text or use it as a guide for writing his own postsynodal document.

Those tasked with incorporating the requested changes to the final document will work for two days while the rest of synod members have a break Oct. 24–25.

The final draft of the document will be presented to synod delegates on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 26, and then after lunch voted on paragraph by paragraph for inclusion in the final text.

The final document is expected to be published by the Vatican the evening after the vote.

The formal closing of the Synod on Synodality will be a Mass with Pope Francis on Oct. 27 inside St. Peter’s Basilica, where the baldacchino designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini is slated to be unveiled after eight months of restorations.