By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Catholic Church’s youngest cardinal, 51-year-old Cardinal Dieudonne Nzapalainga of Bangui, Central African Republic, said the key question before the Synod of Bishops is: “What is God trying to tell us through young people?”

Finding better ways to pass the faith on to younger generations is one part of the task, the cardinal told reporters Oct. 6. The other part is to encourage them and support them in sharing the faith with others.

Participants in the synod of bishops — the 267 voting bishops, priests and religious brothers, as well as the 72 experts and observers — spent the evening of Oct. 5 and the morning of Oct. 6 getting to know each other in their small groups, which are divided by language.

The groups, taking what they hear in the synod’s general assembly sessions, are to make suggestions for a final synod document.

The Vatican does not publish the texts of speeches given in the sessions but allows the bishops to do so.

Auxiliary Bishop Mark Edwards of Melbourne, addressing the synod during the morning session Oct. 5, suggested taking St. John Vianney and his experience in Ars, France, as a model.

Moving to Ars, the bishop said, St. John Vianney did not know exactly where the town was, so he convinced a shepherd to take him, promising, “If you show me the way to Ars, I will show you the way to heaven.”

And once the priest arrived in the town, he said, he got to know it and its people, not treating it “as a version of the previous parish where he had worked.”

“We stand at the edge of a new era,” Bishop Edwards told the synod. “We knew how to be Church in the past, how to pass on the faith and how to be effective missionaries,” but “at least some of what we did isn’t effective anymore.”

Young people, though, “more instinctively grasp the lay of this land with its values of equality, inclusion, respect, authenticity and the integration of multiple aspects of life such as body and soul.”

Bishop Edwards did not suggest that older Church members just give up, but said an “intergenerational encounter” is necessary. Church leaders and ministers must say to young people, “You show us the lay of this land, the way to the place where you dwell, and we will show you the way to God.”

Walking with young people, elders in the faith can help them encounter Christ, the bishop said. “When they meet Jesus, he will change their hearts. And this will enable them to discover appropriate ways to live fruitfully and really humanly and as effective Church in the tensions of this new age.”

Archbishop Luc Cyr of Sherbrooke, Quebec, spoke to the synod Oct. 4 about the importance of guiding and protecting the freedom of Catholic young people involved in new movements or religious communities.

When young people feel a call to religious life, “we must do everything to assure that their freedom” is respected, he said. In some groups, he said, “it was evident that the exploration of a vocation was not done in conditions that were favorable to making an informed choice.”

The archbishop did not mention any group by name. However, his archdiocese is home to the Marie-Jeunesse Family, which in January closed all but its Sherbrooke house and began what it termed a period of “deep restructuring.”

Archbishop Cyr told the synod that when young people are enveloped too quickly in a community “where the way of life leaves little space for freedom and empowerment,” some of them experience enormous pressure to enter religious life and don’t realize until they are in their 30s or 40s that they had not made the choice in full freedom.

For “healthy discernment” of a vocation, a young person needs a wise guide, the availability of a counselor outside the group and continued contact with his or her family, the archbishop said.

“Above all,” he said, “it is important to reiterate to everyone that the Lord calls people freely to freedom.”

Ukrainian Catholic Bishop Bryan Bayda of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, spoke to the synod about how young people are looking for authentic Christians to accompany them and that means people who will challenge the young to be authentic Christians themselves.

“Youth seek relationships of trust and discover how certain people, places or things either support or deceive them in their search,” he said. “They want commitment from others as they search for belonging, safety, honesty, integrity, peace and meaningfulness in life.”

Over time, he said, they should “discover their vocation in life is to become the very people they seek in friendships; that is, recognizing holiness is desirable, visioning themselves as holy and pursuing holiness.”

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, general secretary of the Synod of Bishops, introduced the work of the synod on young people Oct. 3 with a variety of statistics and informational notes.

He told the gathering that the 267 voting members of the synod include: 51 cardinals (including two patriarchs and three major archbishops of Eastern Catholic Churches); four other patriarchs of Eastern Catholic Churches; the major archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church; 45 archbishops; 102 diocesan bishops; 37 auxiliary bishops; six apostolic vicars; one bishop prelate; eight religious-order priests and two religious brothers representing the Union of Superiors General; and 10 diocesan and religious-order priests nominated by Pope Francis.

The synod’s working document was prepared with input from an online questionnaire for young people, responses from bishops’ conferences around the world and the results of a presynod meeting of young adults in March.

More than 220,000 people accessed the online questionnaire the Synod of Bishops’ office had active in June-December 2017, the cardinal said. Just over 100,000 people ages 16-29 — 58,000 young women and 42,500 young men — completed the survey.

Just over 50 percent of the respondents were 16-19 years old, he said. And more than 16,000 of the completed questionnaires originated with users in Uganda, making it the country with the highest response rate.

The preparatory document for the synod was released in January 2017 and included a series of questions to be answered by national bishops’ conferences or bishops’ synods of the Eastern Catholic Churches and by the offices of the Roman Curia. Cardinal Baldisseri said 40 percent of the Eastern Churches and 68.4 percent of the bishops’ conferences responded.

The rate is low for a synod. For the first assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the family in 2014, more than 80 percent of bishops’ conferences responded; for the 2012 synod on new evangelization, the synod office had reported that 81.5 percent of the conferences responded.

The general sessions in each of the first three weeks of the synod are devoted to one section of the three-part working document, Cardinal Baldisseri explained. Each voting member of the synod is allowed to address the general session only once and only for four minutes. His remarks must refer to the section of the working document being discussed that week.

In addition, at each working session, one of the 34 synod of observers who is between the ages of 18 and 29 will speak.

Continuing a practice begun by Pope Benedict XVI, the evening sessions of the synod end with one hour of “free discussion.” Again, each synod member may speak for no more than four minutes.

The 12 sessions of the synod’s working groups are where members can shake off those time limits and where experts, observers and the eight fraternal delegates from other Christian denominations also are free to speak.

The synod participants will be divided into 14 working groups according to language: French, Italian, English, Portuguese, Spanish or German. Although the groups are commonly referred to by their Latin name — “circuli minores” — there no longer is a Latin-language small group at the synod.

In accordance with new rules published just before the synod, participants will not be working on “propositions” to submit to Pope Francis, but on “amendments” to the synod’s working document with a view of transforming it into a final document to be submitted to the pope.

Pope Francis will decide whether it can be published, and he can decide whether to adopt it as his own teaching.

Bishop Fabio Fabene, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, told reporters Oct. 4 that no decision had been made yet on whether the bishops will be voting on the final document as a whole or whether they will be voting on the document’s individual paragraphs. “As we move along, we will decide.”

By Junno Arocho Esteves
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Catholic Church needs to communicate the beauty and intelligence of faith to young men and women without resorting to condescending and aggressive methods, Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles told members of the Synod of Bishops.

A “renewed apologetics and catechesis” can help young people who are tempted to leave the Church due to convictions “that religion is opposed to science or that it cannot stand up to rational scrutiny, that its beliefs are outmoded, a holdover from a primitive time, that the Bible is unreliable, that religious belief gives rise to violence and that God is a threat to human freedom,” Bishop Barron said in his speech to the synod Oct. 4.

“I hope it is clear that arrogant proselytizing has no place in our pastoral outreach, but I hope it is equally clear that an intelligent, respectful and culturally sensitive explication of the faith (‘giving a reason for the hope that is within us’) is certainly a ‘desideratum (desire),’” he said.

Later that evening, Bishop Barron joined Nigerian Bishop Godfrey Igwebuike Onah of Nsukka at an event dedicated to the synod on youth, faith and vocational discernment.

The University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture sponsored the event in Rome.

Seven Notre Dame students spoke at the event about their faith, highlighting their positive experiences while also expressing their concerns that internal divisions and the scandal of sexual abuse are wounding the Church.

Bishop Onah, 62, told participants it was important for bishops to listen to young men and women, otherwise the synod risks becoming a meeting of “only old people” talking about young people.

“As one bishop rightly pointed out,” he said, “sometimes we talk about our own experience of youth thinking that it corresponds with the present experience of young people, not remembering that our experience 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago is quite different from the experience of young people today.”

Nevertheless, Bishop Onah added, “even though many old people are talking about youth, it is still positive that they are doing that.”

The Nigerian bishop said he was moved by the testimonies of the students, including Aly Cox, a Notre Dame law student, who said that the Church — wounded by the scandal of division and abuse — “is in need of healing.”

Bishop Onah said that like Christ’s wounds, which were still visible after his resurrection, the Church’s wounds do “not deprive the Church from being a healer.”

“The wounds on the body of the Church, the wounds on the body of Christ, will never destroy the Church,” he said. “That is my feeling because that body is risen.”

He also said one root of the scandal is that seminarians, priests and bishops are “wrongly made to believe that we are different.”

“We are not (different),” Bishop Onah said. “We are struggling with the same emotions, the same passions and rejoicing over the little achievements we make on our road to holiness as you do.”

If Church leaders had realized that sooner, he added, “we wouldn’t have had to cause all this harm in hiding the fact that we are just men, ordinary men.”

Earlier that day, Bishop Barron told the synod that his work as founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries confirmed that inadequate education about Church teaching is among the “crucial stumbling blocks to the acceptance of the faith among young people.”

Among the major religions, he explained, “Catholicism was second to last in passing on its traditions,” and the “army of our young who claim that religion is irrational is a bitter fruit of this failure in education.”

While some may view apologetics as “something rationalistic, aggressive, condescending,” he said he would propose a new way of explaining and defending religious doctrine that “would not be imposed from above but would rather emerge organically from below, a response to the yearning of the mind and the heart.”

The works of St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, often emerged from lively debates over disputed questions “that stood at the heart of the educational process in the medieval university,” he said. “Thomas was deeply interested in what young people were really asking. So should we.”

He also told the members of the Synod of Bishops that, without “denigrating the sciences,” a renewed catechesis can show young men and women that there are “non-scientific and yet eminently rational paths that conduce toward knowledge of the real.”

Bishop Barron said the beauty of faith as depicted in music, art, architecture and liturgy as well as the compelling lives of the saints can also provide “a powerful matrix for evangelization.”

The Church, he said, “must walk with young people, listen to them with attention and love, and then be ready intelligently to give a reason for the hope that is within us. This, I trust, will set the hearts of the young on fire.”

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia told members of the Synod of Bishops their task was to help young people understand Catholic teaching on sexuality and to avoid using terms like “LGBTQ” that make it seem as if the Church categorizes people that way.

The working document for the Oct. 3-28 synod on “young people, the faith and vocational discernment” used the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender once. It said:

“Some LGBT youths, through various contributions that were received by the General Secretariat of the synod, wish to ‘benefit from greater closeness’ and experience greater care by the Church, while some bishops’ conferences ask themselves what to suggest ‘to young people who decide to create homosexual instead of heterosexual couples and, above all, would like to be close to the Church.’”

The text of Archbishop Chaput’s speech was published online by catholicherald.co.uk; his office confirmed the text was his.

The archbishop, a member of the synod’s permanent committee, told the synod that “what the Church holds to be true about human sexuality is not a stumbling block. It is the only real path to joy and wholeness.”

And, he said, for the Church “there is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are.”

Because there are not “discrete communities of differing but equal integrity” within the Church, he said, “it follows that ‘LGBTQ’ and similar language should not be used in Church documents, because using it suggests that these are real, autonomous groups, and the Church simply doesn’t categorize people that way.”

During a synod session that included several speeches recognizing ways in which Church members have failed the younger generation, Archbishop Chaput cited “a combination of ignorance, cowardice and laziness in forming young people to carry the faith into the future.”

“Explaining why Catholic teaching about human sexuality is true, and why it’s ennobling and merciful, seems crucial to any discussion of anthropological issues,” the archbishop said. “Yet it’s regrettably missing” from the synod’s working document, which participants will use as the basis of their discussions and will amend to form a final text.

“The elders of the faith community have the task of passing the truth of the Gospel from age to age, undamaged by compromise or deformation,” the archbishop said.

“The clergy sexual abuse crisis is precisely a result of the self-indulgence and confusion introduced into the Church in my lifetime, even among those tasked with teaching and leading,” he said. “And minors — our young people — have paid the price for it.”

Catholics believe that “who we are as creatures, what it means to be human, why we should imagine we have any special dignity at all” are all questions that find their ultimate answer “only in the person of Jesus Christ, redeemer of man.”

“If we lack the confidence to preach Jesus Christ without hesitation or excuses to every generation, especially to the young,” he told the synod, “then the Church is just another purveyor of ethical pieties the world doesn’t need.”