Catholic Church releases document to guide forthcoming General Assembly in Rome

By Francis Jjunju

20^th June 2023

The Vatican has published a document that will guide the work of the two-part General Assembly that will meet in Rome in October 2023 and October 2024.

This working document of sixty pages is dubbed Instrumentum Laboris and it incorporates the experiences of local Churches in every region of the world and also focuses on the views collected about the synod on synodality from all Episcopal Conferences across the world.

In his address Mario Cardinal Grech, the Secretary General of the General Secretariat of the Synod explained to the Press on Tuesday afternoon that the Instrumentum Laboris (IL) is the working document for the first session of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops that will sit from 4-29 October 2023).

According to Cardinal Grech, the second session will be held around the same month in 2024 from Rome and the two sessions are to be attended by the Bishops, experts and special guests in various fields of discussion.

In 2021, Pope Francis declared synod on synodality, calling for mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn in the spirit of what God expects of the Church in the 21st century.

The synod is looking at all aspects such as the family, the earth and environment, societal problems, Church’s participation in all aspects of life, its faithfulness and the involvement of members of other faiths.

Cardinal Grech said there is desire to pray for discernment through the Spirit, to guide in the whole process to discuss views for the common Catholic Church seeking the Will of God rather than the dynamism of ordinary parliamentary bodies, where debates end with a vote that divides the majority from the minority.

For this reason, the Assembly’s work will be structured in five segments, and the last segment of the work will be dedicated to gathering the fruits or results and formulating them into a text that makes them communicable by the end of October 2024.

Pope Francis launched the Synod on Synodality in October 2021 as a worldwide undertaking during which Catholics were encouraged to submit feedback to their local dioceses.

The second, continental phase took place from September 2022 to March 2023.

At this stage, Continental Synodal Assemblies convened between January and March 2023 from where their document was sent to Rome.