{"id":11097,"date":"2018-09-22T06:31:15","date_gmt":"2018-09-22T12:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=11097"},"modified":"2018-09-22T06:45:31","modified_gmt":"2018-09-22T12:45:31","slug":"do-you-understand-the-synod-on-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/09\/do-you-understand-the-synod-on-youth.html","title":{"rendered":"Do you understand the Synod on Youth?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the fifteenth Ordinary General Synod of Bishops<\/a> since these began post-Vatican II, and it has as its topic\u00a0Young People, Faith, and Vocational Discernment<\/a>, but, readers, I\u2019ll be honest, I\u2019ve tried to read the Instrumentum Laboris<\/em><\/a>, the document which serves as an agenda\/guiding document for the synod and I just didn\u2019t really get it.\u00a0 Today a friend shared a critique of the synod<\/a>\u00a0which reinforced my confusion and concerns.<\/p>\n

This synod is the successor synod to the Synod of the Family three years ago, which had as its result Amoris Laetitia, which was full of generic passages on the importance of family life, with nothing particularly remarkable except the infamous footnotes that may or may not have said that it\u2019s OK to divorce and remarry and take communion, as long as you\u2019re not a deadbeat dad.<\/p>\n

What will the outcome of this synod be?<\/p>\n

Part of what troubles me is that I can\u2019t figure out if the attendees are supposed to be experts or if there\u2019s supposed to be some process whereby they learn from experts.\u00a0 Cardinal Marx from Munich is going to be there.\u00a0 Is he going to claim he has it all figured out, or is he attending precisely so as to be able to ask the African bishops what their secret is?<\/p>\n

But the Instrumentum Laboris (or the IL, as it is apparently called) seems fairly secular in many of its concerns.\u00a0 Will this, in the end, be a matter of proclaiming that, since young people care about and are affected by income inequality, the environment, and similar issues, our concern for them make it all the more important to be active in these areas?<\/p>\n

And at the same time, there seems to be a great deal of emphasis on the new trendy buzzword of accompaniment.\u00a0 Rather than handing down the faith, one is to accompany young people as they seek out answers and try to discern what the spirit is telling them.\u00a0 \u201cVocational discernment\u201d appears not to have anything to do with vocations of religious life, but just of young people more generically trying to figure out what they\u2019re meant to do in life.<\/p>\n

There are also a few sentences about sexual morality.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing that explicitly says, \u201cmaybe we should rethink two millennia of teaching\u201d but there are comments like, \u201cwhat should we tell young people who are in same-sex relationships and want to have a connection to the church?\u201d Will this be a basis for a document which casts Catholic sexual teaching as an \u201cideal\u201d that\u2019s kinda-sorta optional, just recommended like saying a daily rosary?<\/p>\n

But the overall document just seemed so all-over-the-place in its themes, addressing anything that has to do with young people.\u00a0 And quite honestly, a young adult in the United States has so little in common with a young adult in Africa, or with an African paying a smuggler to get him to Europe, that having a synod attempting to address this as a topic seems like it will simply be unable to pull together a meaningful common set of recommendations.\u00a0 \u00a0 What\u2019s more, I don\u2019t get a particularly firm sense, other than rambling flowey language, that the authors of the synod document have any particular sense of crisis.\u00a0 Does Marx understand that a random visitor to a random parish on a random Sunday will see pretty much nothing but grey hair?\u00a0 Does Cupich have any sense of worry that the US will follow Europe in this regard?\u00a0 Or are the Pope\u2019s handpicked delegates convinced that the way to bring young people back is to get rid of whatever teachings they may dislike, because the Episcopalians are doing so well?<\/p>\n

And the recent news<\/a> that<\/p>\n

In a new apostolic constitution, Pope Francis has reformed the Synod of Bishops, creating a mechanism for the assembly\u2019s final document to be included in official Church teaching.<\/p>\n

Episcopalis Communio, promulgated by the pope on Sept. 15, establishes that the final document of a synod assembly, drafted and approved by a special commission, can be considered part of the ordinary magisterium \u2013 that is, the official teaching of the Church \u2013 if it receives a particular level of papal approval.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

left me wondering what sort of \u201cteaching\u201d might be a part of such a document that would be meaningfully \u201cnew\u201d rather than a restatement of existing teaching with applications for the situation we find ourselves in, in 2018.\u00a0 The idea that the Pope seems to envision that there might be a new teaching does concern me, and all the more so considering that Marx seems to have has already been busy promoting communion by non-Catholic spouses and by remarried individuals, and even suggested that same-sex union blessings might be fine<\/a> if deemed \u201cpastoral care.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, if Marx can steer the outcome of the synod, almost anything might be signed off on if it can be labelled \u201cpastoral care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, maybe I\u2019m reading too much into this.\u00a0 The bishops get together every three years.\u00a0 Put nicely, they build relationships and share their challenges with each other; put cynically, they gossip and work to build their power base for their next promotion.\u00a0 But they need some kind of theme to give some structure to the gathering, so \u201cyouth\u201d it is.<\/p>\n

But it still worries me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0 what\u2019s the collective noun for bishops?<\/p>\n

https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:20110716_Otto_von_Habsburg_funeral_procession_2280.jpg; By Jakub Ha\u0142un [GFDL (http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/copyleft\/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the fifteenth Ordinary General Synod of Bishops since these began post-Vatican II, and it has as its topic\u00a0Young People, Faith, and Vocational Discernment, but, readers, I\u2019ll be honest, I\u2019ve tried to read the Instrumentum Laboris, the document which serves as an agenda\/guiding document for the synod and I just didn\u2019t really get it.\u00a0 Today […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":10783,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[69,1068,420,1065],"class_list":["post-11097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archbishop-cupich","tag-bishops","tag-cardinal-marx","tag-youth-synod"],"yoast_head":"\nDo you understand the Synod on Youth?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's the fifteenth Ordinary General Synod of Bishops since these began 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