Synod Council Discusses Working Document for October 2015 Meeting

Catholic Culture
May 26, 2015

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=25038

At a two-day meeting this week, the “ordinary council” of the Synod of Bishops discussed and revised a draft of the instrumentum laboris, the working document for the Synod’s October 2015 session.

Pope Francis chaired the meeting of the ordinary council, along with Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary-general of the Synod of Bishops. Along with its work on the instrumentum laboris, the council also discussed the procedures that will be used for the October session.

The instrumentum laboris is the product of a process that began with the final statement from last year’s session of the Synod. The Office of the Synod then prepared a lineamenta, a preliminary document that included a series of questions, to stimulate responses from episcopal conferences, religious orders, and other ecclesiastical bodies. After receiving those responses, the Synod office then drafted the instrumentum laboris. Following this week’s discussion of that document, the instumentum laboris will now be finalized, translated, and published by the Synod office in preparation for the October meeting.

The final draft of the instrumentum laboris will be closely scrutinized this year, because of the controversy that erupted during the October 2014 session over charges that the Synod office was manipulating the process.