The General Secretariat of the Synod publishes a document outlining stages, criteria, and tools to guide local Churches toward the Ecclesial Assembly set for October 2028.
Remembering, interpreting, orienting, and celebrating. These are the four key stages accompanying local Churches, Bishops’ Conferences, and continental groupings towards the Ecclesial Assembly that will take place in October 2028 in the Vatican.
They are proposed by the General Secretariat of the Synod in support of the implementation phase through the document Towards the 2027–2028 Assemblies: stages, criteria, and tools in preparation for the 2027–2028 Assemblies, published on 20 May.
The text defines the calendar, methodology, and criteria through which local Churches throughout the world and their national and continental groupings are called to share the fruits of the journey begun after the Final Document of the 2021–2024 Synod, leading up to the Ecclesial Assembly of October 2028.
“We are proposing to local Churches not an additional task,” says Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod, “but rather a time of shared discernment and thanksgiving, in which to reread together what the Spirit is causing to grow in the Church and to recognise the steps we are called to take. The Assemblies are not sociological consultations, deliberative processes, or technical evaluations. Rather, they are a profound ecclesial and spiritual experience of discernment: a moment of synthesis and renewed impetus, so that the exchange of gifts among the Churches may become a concrete experience and synodality may increasingly be translated into the ordinary style of ecclesial life at the service of mission.”
The first two Assemblies—those at local and national level—will prepare two complementary texts: a reflection document (the narrative report for dioceses and eparchies, the theological-pastoral report for Episcopal Conferences) and a letter to the other local Churches, drafted during the Assembly itself.
It is this latter document that becomes the concrete instrument of the exchange of gifts: every community offers what it has matured and becomes ready to receive what is offered by other Churches.
The continental Assemblies, meanwhile, will prepare a forward-looking report that will serve in drafting the Instrumentum laboris for the 2028 Ecclesial Assembly. All materials will be sent to the General Secretariat of the Synod according to the following timetable: by 30 June 2027 for the diocesan and eparchial stage; by 31 December 2027 for the Episcopal Conferences stage; and by 30 April 2028 for the continental stage, in preparation for the Ecclesial Assembly of October 2028.
