Synod2018: Parish Must be a Home for Youth – Polish Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki Offers Summary of Key Points
Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki – Polish Bishops Conference
Everything must be done to make the Church our home, to make the parish our home, and so that the young can feel at home in the Church, said Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, summing up the Synod of Bishops on Young People that ended today (October 28th). According to the Archbishop, the most important thing is the Synod’s approach to youth ministry in the vocational key.
The most important result of the Synod of Bishops is, in the opinion of the President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, the need for a change in the Church, that it should be conceived as a home for the young. The point is, as the Archbishop said, that the young people should not consider the parish an office, but above all as a welcoming place, a place where they can meet each other, where they hear interesting reflections or advice and discover their vocation.
In this context, Archbishop Gądecki emphasized the need to create places dedicated to the young, where they can develop their talents, spend time together, and enrich and form one another. “This is related to the work that makes young people into missionaries for their peers, understanding their language and the same time helping them,” he said. He also drew attention to the need to organize not only one-time events in the Church but above all to think about the formative movement that reaches deep and forms consciences.
The “vocational change,” mentioned by Archbishop Gądecki, must impact not only youth ministry—for example, academic ministry—but all of the pastoral care, which should be imbued with a “vocational desire.” As the President of the Episcopate explained, the point is not that all should enter the seminary or a convent, but that pastoral work may help the young person to discover a true life vocation, one that suits his or her character and, above all, “the place that God indicates them, not only in society but also in the Church.”
As Archbishop Gądecki reported, the synod fathers spoke about the need for each Bishops’ Conference to prepare a special directorate regarding youth ministry, understood precisely in the vocational key, to support this form of pastoral work.
Archbishop Gądecki also highlighted the question of the renewal of missionary zeal. “If there is talk somewhere about a full Catholic life, then it always includes the mission. If there is no missionary action, the Catholic spirit is not fully mature,” said the President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference. Missionary action, as Archbishop Gądecki said, can be carried out in different spheres of life and activity, such as work, social engagement, culture, politics, ecology, or interreligious dialogue. The head of the Episcopate emphasized that the virtual culture, too, is a space where young people can meet and acquire a missionary spirit and being on a mission also means being a missionary on the web. Emphasizing the existence of dangers related to virtual reality, he also stressed the need to help young people to move around in it. Furthermore, he indicated the need for centers where formators are prepared to help others to train themselves in a missionary sense for tasks they can accomplish in the world and in the Church.
Read the source: https://zenit.org/articles/synod2018-parish-must-be-a-home-for-youth/
Paolo Ruffini 9 Oct. 2018 @ Vatican News
Vatican Communications’ Prefect Paolo Ruffini Highlights Concrete Proposals of Synod 2018’s Final Document
An Organization Representing Young People at the International Level
On presenting the Final Document of the Synod on Young People to the press, on October 28, 2018, Paolo Ruffini highlighted some concrete proposals of the Synod Fathers.
The Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication paused notably on number 123 of the Document, in which the Synod “asked to make effective and ordinary the active participation of young people in places of co-responsibility of the particular Churches, as well as in the organizations of the Episcopal Conferences and of the universal Church.” It also calls for “the reinforcement of the activity of the Department of Young People of the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life, including through the establishment of an organization representing young people at the international level.”
Number 141 pleads for “better coordination” of pastoral realities concerning young people — pastoral ministry of young people, family, vocation, university, social, cultural, charitable, leisure, etc. In fact, in this “fragmented world, which produces dispersion and multiplies belongings, young people need to be helped to unify their life,” reads the text.
Paolo Ruffini also mentioned number 119, speaking of young people’s desire to be involved in the Synod as “protagonists of life and of the mission of the Church.” It’s an appeal, the Synod Fathers believe, to “practice synodality . . . at all levels,” namely, to “promote the participation of all the baptized and of persons of good will, each according to his/her age, state of life and vocation.”
Moreover, in number 17, the Synod Fathers hope to give back priority to the pastoral and spiritual engagements of priests, by relieving them of administrative tasks, to have more time and energy to put at the service of young people.
Finally, the Dicastery’s Prefect mentioned the paragraphs that stress the role of women (13, 55, 163), and especially number 148, which recommends “a courageous cultural conversion and a change in daily pastoral practice,” to promote “the feminine presence in ecclesial organs at all levels, including in responsible functions,” as well as “feminine participation in ecclesial decisional processes, in respect of the role of the ordained ministry.”
Read the source: https://zenit.org/articles/vatican-communications-prefect-paolo-ruffini-highlights-concrete-propositions-of-synod-2018s-final-document/
Young Catholics tell world’s bishops: ‘We want orthodoxy…we want truth’
October 29, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – We want orthodoxy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and bishops who act like successors of the apostles rather than politicians, a group of young Catholics said in a message released to the world’s bishops today.
In a video debuted just two days after the release of the Youth Synod’s final document, young Catholics who attended a LifeSiteNews and Voice of the Family conference in Rome earlier this month implored bishops to proclaim the Church’s teaching without compromise and let the Church influence the world rather than the world influence the Church. The 18- to 29-year-olds asked Church leaders to support Catholic youth who are trying to live out the Catholic faith. One urged bishops who recognize error and do not call it out – even if it’s coming from the Pope – to resign and think about what their responsibilities are.
Some of the things the young Catholics said to the bishops are:
- “Catholic youth today really want to be told the truth, not a watered-down version of the truth.”
- “Please protect Catholic tradition, because that is what Our Lord would want. Without following the Lord’s will, what good are we actually going to do? He knows better than we do.”
- “One reason why the young love John Paul II so much [was] because he told them fornication was wrong and he told them in love.”
- “We want orthodoxy, we want the Latin Mass, we want religious orders that wear their habits, we want big families. We want everything that the Church has taught for 2,000 years.”
- “Do not listen to the world, but rather allow the world to listen to Christ.”
- “Young people today don’t want the faith to be handing us what the world is handing us. We want to have the unique truth that is found only in the Church.”
- “There isn’t a crisis of vocations, but there’s a conspiracy against vocations, especially for those who appreciate the Traditional Latin Mass…there is an over-abundance of young men who love the beauty of the faith as it was before the Second Vatican Council…they’ve been suppressed by their bishops, by those at the Vatican, and by their local clergy, too, who seem to dismantle that vocation.”
Everyone at the October 18-21 conference — about 50 people altogether — was kept busy with daily Mass in the Extraordinary Form and talks on the Catholic faith, vocations, and the state of the Church from pro-life activists, religious, and historian Professor Roberto de Mattei. The conference culminated with a talk and question and answer session with Cardinal Raymond Burke, all-night Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament – a number of the young people stayed in Adoration all night rather than just through their scheduled shifts – and Sunday Mass with Cardinal Burke.
The purpose of the all-night Adoration vigil was to pray for the Church and her leaders, many of whom were gathered in Rome at the same time for the Youth Synod. Since its very beginning, Catholics were concerned about the synod being used as a vehicle to normalize heterodoxy and undermine Church teaching.
The Synod final document contains a number of vague passages, including one about how youth should be helped to “integrate the sexual dimension more and more into their personality.”
The phrase is prefaced by, “In this way we help every young person, no one excluded,” raising questions about whether Church leaders are suggesting intrinsically disordered inclinations ought to be made part of people’s identities.
Some say the simultaneous translations of the document that the bishops received before voting was inadequate.
According to Archbishop Charles Chaput, “many bishops were frustrated by the lack of advance translations for important issues they were expected to vote on. As one of the synod fathers argued, it’s actually immoral to vote ‘yes’ on significant issues if you can’t even read and reflect on what the text says.”
The final document also says it should be read alongside the synod’s widely-criticized Instrumentum laboris (IL), or working document. The working document is the first Church document in history to use the ideologically drive phrase “LGBT.”
St. John Paul II’s biographer, George Weigel, called the IL “a bloated, tedious door stop full of sociologese but woefully lacking in spiritual or theological insight.”
“Moreover, and more sadly,” he added, “the IL has little to say about ‘the faith’ except to hint on numerous occasions that its authors are somewhat embarrassed by Catholic teaching – and not because that teaching has been betrayed by churchmen of various ranks, but because that teaching challenges the world’s smug sureties about, and its fanatical commitment to, the sexual revolution in all its expressions.” – Read the source: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/young-catholics-tell-worlds-bishops-we-want-orthodoxy…we-want-truth
Editor’s note: The credit for this video goes to Brian Limas, who LifeSiteNews would like to thank for his tireless work on it.
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