No one is excluded from the love of God or from being welcomed into the Catholic Church, but God’s love and the church’s welcome also come with a call to conversion, said the English- language groups at the Synod of Bishops. Young people need to know “the church’s beautiful, yet challenging, vision, teaching and anthropology of the body, sexuality, love and life, marriage and chastity,” said the English-A group. “At the same time, we restate the church’s opposition to discrimination against any person or group, and her insistence that God loves every young person, and so does the church,” the group said in its report.

The reports, published by the Vatican on Oct. 20, were the result of reflections in the small groups — divided by language — on the final chapter of the Synod working document, which dealt with “pastoral and missionary conversion.” Most of the 14 working groups called for further local and national dialogue with young people on what they need from the Catholic Church and what they can offer the church.

Most also called for a greater involvement of women in the life of the church, including in the training of priests, and many acknowledged how the sexual abuse scandal undermines the church’s credibility.

For centuries, the archbishops of Constantinople could credibly claim to be the “Ecumenical Patriarch”. Their see was the “New Rome”, centre of the oikoumenç, the “inhabited world”. Today, their successor, Patriarch Bartholomew, looks beleaguered. The guards around his residence in the Phanar quarter of Istanbul reveal his threatened position in an increasingly Islamified Turkey. But now he seems poised to gain other powerful enemies, this time within the Orthodox Church itself, by unilaterally recognising a Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow.

The renascent Church of Russia, thought to comprise more faithful than all the other Orthodox Churches combined, covets Constantinople’s leadership role. Styled “the Third Rome” since Tsarist times, Moscow believes geopolitical reality should give it more weight than Bartholomew’s aura of the Byzantine past.

Moscow has long sought to expose Bartholomew’s weakness, as when it tried to wreck the Pan-Orthodox Great and Holy Synod of 2016. The Russians and other Churches under their influence stayed away, greatly reducing the impact of the long-planned assembly where Constantinople had hoped to bolster its prestige.

But perhaps Bartholomew now has an opportunity to strike back. Since Ukraine gained independence in 1991 two distinct groups have separated from the Moscow patriarchate, seeking to establish a distinctively Ukrainian Church. One of these groups has established a patriarchate based in Kiev, while the other group, older but much smaller, makes the less radical claim of being the autocephalous (self-governing) Church of Ukraine. So far, neither has received recognition from any other canonically recognised Orthodox Church. But conflict with Russia since the 2014 revolution has reportedly enhanced the standing of these groups with patriotic Ukrainians.

Bartholomew has announced his intention to recognise an autocephalous Ukrainian Church, uniting these groups – and anyone else who will join them – into a single jurisdiction looking to Constantinople rather than Moscow as the Mother Church.

The families of Eastern-rite Catholic priests give an important witness to what is healthy and wonderful about family life, Pope Francis said.

Speaking to laypeople, clergy and religious of the Slovak Catholic Church – a Byzantine-rite Church that has maintained its tradition of ordaining both celibate and married men – the Pope said, “the families of priests live a unique mission today.”

“When the very model of the family is called into question, if not attacked outright, you offer a healthy and exemplary testimony of life,” he said in his talk on October 6.

The Pope encouraged the small Slovak Catholic Church, which also has a diocese in Canada – the Eparchy of Sts Cyril and Methodius of Toronto – to safeguard its Byzantine tradition, “which I, too, came to know and love when I was younger.”

“Rediscover it and live it to the full just as the Second Vatican Council taught,” he said.

“The European continent, both east and west, needs to rediscover its roots and vocation; and from Christian roots, only solid trees can grow which bear the fruits of full respect for the dignity of the human person in every condition and every phase of life,” the Pope said.