Modeled on John Reed’s celebrated Ten Days that Shook the World, his lively chronicling of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, this is a journal and commentary on and during the high point of the Bergoglio papacy—the October 2023 and 2024 Synod on Synodality.

“This is a sketchbook by a journalist and English literature professor, not a theologian’s measured summary of the synodal proceedings. The latter is, of course, indispensable to a full appreciation of what unfolded at the synod—but it is not what I set out to do. I wanted to create a written gallimaufry: a potpourri of perceptions, characters, factions and tensions, intrigues and turmoils, epiphanies and graced moments of insight.” 

—from the author’s Prelude