In a surprise announcement this morning, Pope Francis has announced that the final, Roman phase of the ongoing Synod on Synodality will extend over two sessions from October 4-29, 2023, and in October 2024.

For our latest "Inside the Vatican" deep dive, we interviewed top officials in the Vatican’s synod office and ordinary Catholics holding listening sessions around the world—including someone who is more critical of the synod.

We should not be surprised when any notion of the church as a perfect society is not embraced by people who have real wounds and struggles.

Catholics must be careful, he said, because “both the ‘progressivism’ that lines up behind the world and the ‘traditionalism’ that longs for a bygone world are not evidence of love, but of infidelity,” the pope said.

Swiss Cardinal Kurt Koch apologized for offending people and said he never intended to imply that supporters of the German church’s Synodal Path were acting similar to a group of Christian supporters of the Nazis in the 1930s.

The president of the German bishops' conference demanded an apology from a cardinal who seemed to compare the German Synodal Path with a Nazi ideology.