In this episode of “Inside the Vatican,” host Colleen Dulle interviews Julia McStravog, a senior advisor on the Synod on Synodality at the U.S.C.C.B., to get an inside look into how the U.S. church organized itself to carry out the national and continental phases of the synod, and how those phases inform the ongoing meeting in Rome.

A Reflection for Holy Thursday, by Jim McDermott, S.J.

How many are willing to have their minds changed, to desire for something from this synodal process that goes deeper than their pre-existing agenda?

An inauspicious first day in Rome was also a chance for me to hit pause and and try to shed some of my own fears about the synod process.

Maybe the real message of this ad should be not that “God Gets Us” but that “We Don’t Get God.”

Mere “survival should not be the utmost ambition for a people in democratic countries, but rather prosperity and welfare. I believe that Israel is going to be more Jewish and much less democratic, and we’ll all pay the price for that.”

“As I heard the chant ‘Cardinal Pell should go to Hell,’ I thought, ‘Ah ha! At least they now believe in the afterlife!’ Perhaps this is St. George Pell’s first miracle,” former Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.

The synod on synodality is not geared to “resolve particular problems” in the Catholic Church, such as the blessing of same-sex unions or women’s ordination, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo of Kinshasa, Congo, said.

Pope Francis hit out strongly against the way people have sought to manipulate Benedict’s death. “People who instrumentalize such a good person, [a man] of God, almost I would say a holy father of the church, have no ethics,” he said. “They are of a party, not of the church.”

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been coming out into the streets for the past three months in escalating pro-democracy protests against the most politically and religiously extreme right-wing government Israel has ever had.