U.S. Bishops’ Plenary Session to Take Place in November: Here’s What’s on the Agenda
All of the U.S. bishops will descend upon Baltimore next month for their 2023 Fall Plenary Assembly in which they will be voting on several new committee chairmen and offering updates on conference initiatives such as their National Eucharistic Revival.
At the gathering, which takes place Nov. 13–16, they will also be voting on items such as updates and materials related to the bishops’ guidance on political responsibility ahead of the 2024 presidential election in November 2024.
The meeting comes shortly following the close of the first October session of the universal Church’s Synod on Synodality in Rome, which is part of the culmination of a four-phase process aimed at refocusing “our gaze on God” and being “a Church that looks mercifully at humanity,” as Pope Francis put it earlier this month.
The U.S. bishops’ assembly takes place amid the second year of the Eucharistic revival, which they launched in 2022 in part to respond to a Pew Research poll that indicated that only one-third of adult Catholics in the U.S. believe in the Church’s teaching on the Blessed Sacrament.
Just last month, a new study challenged some of the findings in the Pew report demonstrating that almost two-thirds of U.S. adult Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.
