“We can’t go backward,” Cardinal Robert McElroy told America’s Vatican correspondent Gerard O‘Connell at the end of the first session of the Synod on Synodality.

Exclusive interview: Cardinal Cupich on the end of the first session of the Synod on Synodality.

What message does it send to women when the first synod to include them as full, voting members opts to forgo an actual vote in favor of approval by applause?

When asked whether the women in the synod hall felt they were being heard, Sister Pat Murray replied as any tough nun might: “We have been well able to make our point and use our time and space well.”

On “Inside the Vatican, host Colleen Dulle and veteran Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell sit down in Rome to cover the second week of the synod, which covered contentious issues in the church, such as the inclusion of L.G.B.T. people and women deacons.

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.