The Vatican and the Chinese government are renewing their agreement on the appointment of bishops and extending it from a two-year to a four-year term, both sides announced.

Pope Francis decided the question of ordaining women deacons was not to be discussed at the 2024 Synod of Bishops, and he directed a synod-related study group on women’s ministries not to explore the matter, according to the Vatican’s doctrinal chief.

The Vatican’s safeguarding commission has “an opportunity and obligation to make the church a more Samaritan church,” Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, told commission members during its plenary assembly.

Even if some members of the Synod of Bishops end up feeling disappointed by the results of the synod, “God’s providence is at work in this assembly, bringing us to the Kingdom in ways that God alone knows,” the spiritual adviser to the synod on synodality told them.

As members of the Synod of Bishops entered the last week of their meeting in Rome, the synod’s secretary-general urged them to resist the temptation of “covetousness” — the desire “to keep everything for ourselves, to possess, to hoard, to define, to close.”

Pope Francis called on the faithful to yearn to serve, not thirst for power, as he proclaimed 14 new saints, including Canada-born St. Marie-Léonie Paradis, founder of the Little Sisters of the Holy Family, and 11 martyrs.

The listening that has been part of the Synod of Bishops changes people, can change the Catholic Church and can change the world for the better, four synod members told U.S. university students in Rome.

While some media reported a move at the Synod of Bishops to allow every national bishops’ conference to make Catholic doctrine, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, N.J., said that was not precisely what he heard.

The number of Catholics and permanent deacons in the world rose in 2022, while the number of seminarians, priests, men and women in religious orders, and baptisms declined, according to Vatican statistics.

As the Synod of Bishops on synodality engaged in conversation on the church’s hierarchy, synod delegates examined the relationship between the local and universal church during a public theological and pastoral forum.