Category: Synod

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Four ways the Catholic Church can actually listen more to young people

— Pope Francis traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, for his fourth World Youth Day, to listen to the hopes, challenges and questions of over one million young Catholics from every corner of the global Church.

Pope Francis travelled to Lisbon, Portugal, for his fourth World Youth Day, to listen to the hopes, challenges and questions of over one million young Catholics from every corner of the global Church.

Pope Francis travelled to Lisbon, Portugal, for his fourth World Youth Day, to listen to the hopes, challenges and questions of over one million young Catholics from every corner of the global Church. He met with sexual abuse survivors, Ukrainian pilgrims, university students, young people suffering from illness; and he challenged them all to work for a “hope-filled future.”

A much smaller contingent of young people will have the Pope’s ear this October in Rome at the first of two month-long meetings of the Synod on Synodality, on the themes of Communion, Participation and Mission in 2023 and 2024. For the first time in history, lay people will have the right to vote in a synod, and among the voting members are college students and men and women in their 20s and 30s.

The Pope has said, “Synod means walking on the same road, walking together.” As we embark on this new path in the life of the Church, what are some guidelines to consider when thinking about listening to, and walking with, young people?

1. Youth do not share a common perspective
Young people are not a monolith. It can be unhelpful and reductive to speak about any group in the Church as a unified bloc. In a similar way, we should avoid speaking of “young people” as if they all share a common perspective on, or experience of, Church. There are young Catholics who are drawn to more traditional liturgies and those who feel at home in a Catholic Worker House, and some find deep meaning in both. There are young Catholics who feel hurt and alienated by the Church’s teaching on sexuality and others who see the Church’s countercultural witness as a bulwark in a destabilising, relativistic world.

There are hundreds of thousands more who have not set foot in a church since their baptism or confirmation. Outside the US Church, there are young people fighting in and fleeing from the war in Ukraine; young migrants risking their lives in the Mediterranean and on the Rio Grande; and others struggling in refugee camps across the Middle East and Africa.

When framed in this way, “listening to young people” can start to seem an impossible task. But this way of speaking may also shed some light on the sometimes opaque concept of synodality. If we are to truly listen to all these young voices, it will take more than a Vatican meeting or survey. It will require a new way of being Church, a Church that accompanies its people and is attuned to their hopes, doubts and lived experiences.

2. Offer something different
The Church must admit its failures and offer something different. The working document for the synod says that a synodal Church is one that “seeks to widen the scope of communion, but which must come to terms with the contradictions, limits and wounds of history.” Most young Catholics today have known only a Church marred by the sexual abuse scandal — but that does not mean they see it as ancient history. While the Church has made great strides in the protection of children and vulnerable adults, the revelations remain shocking for each new generation of Catholics as they mature. Church leaders must be forthright with young Catholics about past failures and transparent in their ongoing efforts to hold accountable those who covered up abuse. For young people to show up at the table, they have to trust they are speaking with adults who have their best interests at heart.

But the Church has failed young people in other, more subtle ways. It can be easy to blame secular culture, or even young people themselves, for the exodus of millennials and Gen Zers from the pews. And there is plenty to critique about modern society. But we should ask ourselves: Have we failed to offer something different? Studies show that Gen Z is the loneliest generation. If these young people are not finding community in parishes, have we been bold enough in searching for new models of relationship?

In a world marked by deep polarisation, have Catholics too often indulged in those divides instead of seeking to be agents of reconciliation?

Young people today are hungry for authentic communion, both with other people and with God, but they are sceptical of institutions and allergic to hypocrisy. To be credible in their eyes, Catholics should be honest about our shortcomings but unafraid to go against the grain of an increasingly flattened, materialistic world.

3. The Church cannot act like everybody else
Listening to young people does not mean idolising youth. In his book God Is Young, Pope Francis writes: “Adolescents seek confrontation, they ask questions, they challenge everything, they look for answers. I can’t stress enough how important it is to question everything.” But he has also said that the Church cannot think “she is young because she accepts everything the world offers her, thinking that she is renewed because she sets her message aside and acts like everybody else.”

There are many young people in the Church — and many more who have left — who want to see Church teaching, especially where it relates to women, LGBTQ people and divorced Catholics, better aligned with more modern values. Those voices will be represented at the synod and should be listened to, not for show but with an ear for where the Holy Spirit may be working through them. Serious discernment will be needed to find our way forward, and that will require the wisdom from within the Church that has spanned the ages, too.

4. Be willing to accept
Ask for more, not less, from young people. Among the delegates from the United States who will have the right to vote in October’s synod is Julia Oseka, a junior at St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. When asked what emerged from her synodal conversations over the past two years, she said, “[T]he feeling that young people are not merely the future of the Church, but also the now of the Church.” While much discussion around the synod has rightly focused on Catholics with one foot in and one foot out of the Church, we should not neglect the millions of young people already active in the Church who are eager for their gifts to be more often accepted.

There are small steps we can take today, like making sure young people are invited to serve on parish councils — and that parish meetings accommodate the schedules of working adults and young parents — that could foster greater involvement among young people. But as the synod looks at more fundamental structural reforms to Church governance, participants should not overlook or underestimate the skills, energy and dedication young people are already prepared to offer the Church.

Young people will always be among us, and as Pope Francis said at his first World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, they are sometimes called to “make a mess.” The Church’s job is not to clean up after them but to harness their restless, creative energy in service of the kingdom.

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At the Catholic Church’s worldwide synod, the deacons are missing

— Many if not most Catholics think women deacons are called for.

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You may have heard that the Catholic Church is holding a worldwide Synod on Synodality, aimed at getting everybody together to talk about church. The object of all the gatherings — all the talking and praying — is for folks to understand the church’s mission. That is, to think about how to spread the Gospel in the most effective manner for their cultures.

The process began in October 2021 at the local level, with dioceses and groups eventually sending reports to Rome. Then, Rome sent a “Document for the Continental Stage” to seven continental assemblies (Africa and Madagascar; Asia; Europe; Latin America and the Caribbean; Oceania; the Middle East; and North America) and synthesized their responses.

In June, the Synod Office published what is called the “Instrumentum Laboris,” or working document for the meeting to be held in the massive Paul VI Audience Hall in Vatican City in October. Soon after, the list of nearly 450 synod participants appeared, some 364 of which are voting members; others are experts or facilitators.

In addition to Pope Francis, among voters and non-voters alike there will be some 273 bishops, 67 priests, 37 non-ordained men and women religious, 70 other lay men and women, and one deacon, Belgian Deacon Geert de Cubber.

You would not know from the list that de Cubber is, in fact, an ordained deacon. He is listed as “Mr.” not “Rev. Mr.” or “Dcn.,” as is the general custom. There are a few other mistakes. San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy’s name is spelled incorrectly. Two priests, the Rev. Eloy Bueno de la Fuente (Spain) and the Rev. Eamonn Conway (Ireland) are not noted as such. There may be a few other minor errors here and there. There may even be another deacon or two, but most probably not.

There were several deacons in the various synod processes, from parish and diocesan efforts to the national and continental levels, but that there is only one deacon in the entire assembly speaks volumes. After all, carrying the Gospel is a major diaconal task both literally and figuratively.

During Mass, the deacon carries the Gospel book and proclaims the Gospel reading and often preaches. Deacons, too, are most often connected with the church’s charity and social services.

Diaconal ministries are notably undertaken by women, and in 2016 the International Union of Superiors General, the organization of the heads of women’s religious institutes, asked Francis to examine restoring the abandoned tradition of ordaining women as deacons.

Two pontifical commissions prepared private reports for Francis on that question.

Now, according to the Instrumentum Laboris, “Most of the Continental Assemblies and the syntheses of several Episcopal Conferences call for the question of women’s inclusion in the diaconate to be considered.”

About this, it asks, “Is it possible to envisage this, and in what way?”

Many if not most Catholics think ordination is called for. But that battle has been going on for a long time.

The International Theological Commission, which advises the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, prepared reports on women deacons in 1997 and in 2002. The first reportedly determined there was no doctrine against ordaining women as deacons, but it never appeared: The prefect at the time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), refused to sign it.

The second report, while it attempted to shut down the discussion with uncited passages from a book by Munich professor, Father Gerhard L. Müller, concluded that ordaining women as deacons was a question for the church’s “ministry of discernment.” Müller followed Ratzinger as CDF prefect.

Discernment is a big word in synodality. But who is discerning what for whom? The people of God agree that the mission of the church is to carry the Gospel to the world. That task is the principal duty of the deacon. And the people of God seem to think ordaining women once again for that task is a good idea.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Synod Forecast

— How Far The Pope Will Go Toward A More Inclusive Catholic Church

Solemn Holy Mass during the Days of Goodwill People in Velehrad, Czech Republic.

Two synods by the Catholic Church, to be held in Rome in late 2023 and 2024, are to debate possible and even radical changes to the Church’s practices and rules in line with the Argentine pope’s vision of a social and inclusive Church.

By Sergio Rubin

Pope Francis wants to press ahead this year with some of the bold reforms he envisages for the Catholic Church. Ample debate is already taking place on issues and likely to be aired in two synods to be held in Rome.

These include the rule of priest celibacy, allowing married men of proven faith to become priests in parishes with an acute shortage of vocations, women as deacons (the level below priesthood), full recognition of remarriage for divorced Catholics, a place for homosexuals in the Church and greater care and attention to the poor and socially excluded.

The Church wants to hold a synod (or clerical assembly) in two phases — in October 2023 and October 2024 — so it began organizing in 2021 a broad-based consultation among its clergy and flock worldwide, to promote internal dialogue “in the light of faith.”

In what is itself a “synodal process,” Catholics are being asked their views on a range of issues including thorny ones, and while this vast exercise will yield no resolutions, it will act as a reflector of the Christian mood on matters and act as a useful pointer ahead of the first synod.

Walking together

The Pope wants the Church to be more open to dialogue. In theological terms: it should be able to discern reality under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Etymologically, a synod is a confluence or “walking together,” which means that the first synod set for October will include among its 400 participants bishops and priests, but also laymen and laywomen. The latter are to constitute a quarter of all participants and for the first time, 56 laywomen will be voting at a synod. This is radical, prompting some observers to term the synod a “mini council.”

The coming synod will effectively consider the Church’s own broader “synodality” or the same spirit of “fraternal collaboration and discernment” associated with such gatherings. The initiative is important, not just for the level of participation it has already fomented across the Church, but for consolidating “the identity of God’s people opening itself to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking in our communities, in the cries of the poor and the earth’s lament,” says Jorge Lozano, the archbishop of San Juan de Cuyo in Argentina. Monsignor Lozano has been an active contributor to preliminary consultations at the regional level.

He says “some progress” has already been made on issues like allowing married men to become priests or women as deacons.

Pope Francis attending a vigil prayer.
Pope Francis attends a vigil prayer on the eve of the XIV General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops at St Peter’s basilica on October 3, 2015 at the Vatican.

Addressing thorny issues

María Lía Zervino, president of the WUCWO (the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations) and one of the first three female members of the Dicastery for Bishops (the Vatican body that picks bishops) believes the synod is “of the utmost importance” because “only when we walk together, which we rarely do, can we preach the Good News credibly.” The synod, she says, was an opportunity to “find a new way of facing the Gospel and to apply the Vatican II Council in greater depth.” She is referring to the Church’s 20th century reforms.

Such issues should not monopolize the entire synod.

Zervino says controversial issues that had emerged in preliminary consultations were included in a working document “for consideration and treatment using the methodology of conversing in The Spirit.” But such issues should not, she says, monopolize the entire synod, nor should women’s active role in the Church be reduced to their ordination as deaconesses. Letting 56 women vote, she adds, “is an act of justice, not a feminist demand.”

Matias Taricco, an Argentine priest and theologian, sees the coming synod as a “new path for the entire Church” and undoubtedly a chance to confirm the direction Pope Francis wants it to take. He hopes the synod will address “all the thorny questions.”

Avoid bitterness

Theologian Marcela Mazzini also calls the synod a landmark as “it is dealing with nothing less than the Church adopting a new way of being.”

A more incisive presence and participation by women in the Church.

She is confident there will be advances on the contested issues, though cannot say which exactly, and how much. She doubted it would immediately pave the way for deaconesses in the Catholic Church, but “certainly it will address a more incisive presence and participation by women in the Church, not just in conversions but also in places where decisions are taken.”

To avoid any bitterness, Pope Francis has said the synod is no “congress or parliament, but the Church walking together to read reality with the eyes of faith and with God’s heart.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!