Robert Royal reported faithfully from Rome on the two Bergoglian synods that preceded this one. Here is his report from opening day.
Papal Aspirations:
Day 1 of his 'youth synod'
by Robert Royal
Editor
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018
Weighing official communications about a Synod – unofficial sources are usually known quantities with greater or lesser degrees of reliability – has always been a guessing game. The past few synods on the family took guessing to a whole new level as various intermediaries in various languages with various agendas (not always Catholic) tried to put their mark on each day’s proceedings, often with little connection to what the bishops had actually discussed.
Yesterday, day one of the Synod on Young People, there was – after some back and forth – no official briefing.
But there were two major texts from Pope Francis, which lay out his hopes for the next four weeks – and the future of the Church. Francis’s language is notoriously ambiguous, and, even when you get the large lines of what he’s saying, he’s never easy to interpret. But
his homily at the inaugural Mass and his Opening Address to the synod participants are of interest for what they say – and don’t say.
Two-third of Americans have lost confidence in Pope Francis, according to recent surveys, because of his handling of the abuse crisis. And many traditional Catholics have, unfortunately, become skeptical about almost anything he says. It’s worth the effort, however, to understand at least what he said yesterday that he’s hoping to achieve.
I’m going to take the two texts in reverse temporal order. The address to the Synod participants came late in the afternoon yesterday, the homily at the morning Mass.
Much of the address to synod participants encourages young people to new ways of using their energy and enthusiasm in efforts to preach the Gospel. But it also sounds some notes that we’ve often heard in the past:
The Synod we are living is a moment of sharing. I wish, therefore, at the beginning of the Synod Assembly, to invite everyone to speak with courage and frankness (parrhesia), namely to integrate freedom, truth and charity. Only dialogue can help us grow. An honest, transparent critique is constructive and helpful, and does not engage in useless chatter, rumours, conjectures or prejudices.
And humility in listening must correspond to courage in speaking. I told the young people in the pre-Synod Meeting: “If you say something I do not like, I have to listen even more, because everyone has the right to be heard, just as everyone has the right to speak.”
Any conversation, of course, requires mutual speaking and listening. - But it’s difficult not to think that in many current (and endless) “dialogues,” listening has all but obliterated the Church’s obligation to speak the truth of the Gospel.
- Further, the “listening” seems to be only open to certain voices. Towards the end of the address, Francis remarks,
“Do not let yourselves be tempted, therefore, by the ‘prophets of doom,’ do not spend your energy on ‘keeping score of failures and holding on to reproaches,’ keep your gaze fixed on the good that ‘often makes no sound; it is neither a topic for blogs, nor front page news.’”
Fair enough, but
this might also be regarded as an excuse not to listen to those of us – say the tens of thousands of subscribers to this site and similar ones – who believe things are approaching a critical moment. These too are “bold” voices that deserve a hearing.
The morning homily – to a skimpy crowd – took a different tack. Probably the most noteworthy passage came near the end, when the pope quoted a line by the visionary German poet Hölderlin, who is almost unknown in the English-speaking world: “May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.”
This comes from a poem about grandmothers (a frequent reference point for Francis) and expresses the desire to remain faithful to what we loved in the warmth of grandmotherly security as children.
But Pope Francis situates that line in an unusual context: the Second Vatican Council. He tells the Synod Fathers:
“Many of us were young or taking our first steps in the religious life while the Second Vatican Council was drawing to a close.” It’s often pointed out that Francis is the first pope to have been ordained after that council (1969). He seems here to feel some sort of desire to recapture the hopes and dreams of a renewed Church that eclipsed nearly everything else in the 1960s.
For many people – the present writer included – those dreams were mostly illusions.
- Thousands left the priesthood and religious orders (Jorge Bergoglio’s own Jesuits declined sharply).
- The liturgy was not “renewed” but wrecked (and people in large numbers stopped going to Mass);
- the world was not converted; instead, large numbers of Catholics were converted by the world; and
- the Church receded in importance as a sure moral and spiritual guide.
Whatever possibilities for renewal existed in the 1960s – and there were many better roads not taken – the empirical results are clear beyond dispute.
Pope Francis seems to believe that a return to that spirit will produce a different outcome now.
By any objective measure, the Church experienced improvements during the papacies of his predecessors, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But as we’ve seen from his clear efforts to reverse much of their magisterial teaching, Francis seems to believe that they took a wrong turn, some sort of flight backwards, rather than making an effort to do well what the Church, in the decades after the Council, did badly.
You get the impression that he believes the Church didn’t go far enough after Vatican II. That dogma, canon law, tradition, are a drag on the immediate operation and inspirations of the Holy Spirit – and outreach to young people.
Any thinking person knows that rules and habits can be stifling, but it’s hard to see “clericalism,” traditionalism, or conservatism as the main problems affecting the Church at the moment and preventing the evangelization of the young. I
f anything, people – including young people – seem to come to the Church, if they come at all, precisely because they’ve had enough of empty dialogue, endless questioning, the seeking that never finds.
These are all themes that will be very much in play in coming weeks. Hope is one of the theological virtues, and we cannot predict what God has planned.
But it seems as clear as anything can be in the rough and tumble of human existence that what we need is a truly new inspiration by the Spirit, not an echo of a failed agenda now a half-century old.
And here's what I think is a bet-hedging, covering-ass analysis by Bergogliac John Allen who does see some of the writing on the wall and obviously does not want to end up once again as poor a prophet as he was before the 2005 Conclave, when for years, he never considered Joseph Ratzinger papabile until just two days before the Conclave began.
Why this synodal assembly
may be the most important of all
John L. Allen Jr.
Editor
Oct 3, 2018
ROME - Today is the opening day of the third Synod of Bishops under Pope Francis, and despite the seemingly anodyne subject - “Youth, Faith and Vocational Discernment” - it’s potentially the most significant summit so far on this pope’s watch.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but
the bishops are gathering in Rome in a moment in which the Church faces perhaps its gravest crisis since the Protestant Reformation in the form of the worldwide clerical sexual abuse scandals, and the eyes of the Catholic world will be on how they choose to engage it.
Founded after the Second Vatican Council by Blessed Pope Paul VI, who’ll be canonized at the midway point of this gathering on Oct. 14, the Synod of Bishops brings together a cross-section of bishops from around the world to discuss some specific theme, leaving it up to the pope what to do with their deliberations.
The first two synods during the Francis era triggered earthquakes ad intra, meaning within the Church’s internal life, with deep tensions over the question of allowing access to Communion for Catholics who divorce and then remarry outside the Church. Those synods culminated in Amoris Laetitia, the pope’s 2016 document on the family in which he opened a cautious door for that access, triggering a ferocious debate among Church insiders that still hasn’t abated.
This time, however, the storms surrounding the synod aren’t just ad intra - though they definitely are that - but also ad extra, meaning the Church’s relationship with the wider world.
The clerical abuse crisis has badly damaged the Church’s moral credibility, made it difficult to move the ball on anything else the Church cares about, and called into question the standing and personal integrity of Church leaders at all levels. Inside the Church and out, there’s a level of anger and disillusionment that’s crippling.
In the run-up, some leading prelates actually called on Pope Francis to cancel or postpone this synod and instead just deal head-on with the issues raised by the abuse crisis. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, for instance, suggested that Francis begin preparations for a synod on the life of bishops.
In reality, however, it almost doesn’t matter what subject the pontiff has invited bishops here to discuss. From the moment most of them get off their plane flights, they’ll want to talk about it, and whether it’s on the synod floor or during coffee breaks or at lunches and dinners, that’s exactly what they’ll spend a good chunk of the month doing.
Further, it may not ultimately matter if the bishops themselves want to face the music, because they’re not the only ones taking part. There are also 36 young “auditors,” meaning participants without voting rights, and there’s already talk that some of them want to ask for “clarification” on recent events - perhaps not so much about the Viganò charge specifically, but the crisis situation tout court.
[Good luck to them! Bonne chance, as the French say - which is more appropriate for its literal double entendre. THat I would idiomatically translate in this context as 'Fat chance!']
Of course, that won’t be the only topic of conversation. The questions of how the Church should relate to youth, how it can pass on the faith to the next generation, and how it can nurture vocations of all sorts are pressing and real - perhaps especially so in the developed West, where a strong share of young people appear profoundly alienated and mistrustful of institutions of all sorts.
To add extra portent, t
his is the first time a summit of bishops has been convened after a sitting pope has been directly accused by one of his own ex-aides of mishandling abuse allegations, in this case the charge by Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that Francis ignored a 2013 warning about misconduct concerns surrounding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Under these circumstances, the bishops gathered in Rome during October will feel enormous pressure to face up to the realities of the moment.
Survivors, child protection advocates and experts, reformers within the Church, and ordinary rank and file Catholics stung by the scandals will all be looking to these bishops to supply some sort of hope.
At the Vatican news conference on Monday, I asked Italian Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, who runs the synod in the name of Pope Francis, if he’s concerned that the fallout from the abuse scandals will cast a shadow over this gathering. The gist of his response was that
he doesn’t see the present crisis as an “impediment” but an “opportunity,” meaning a chance to show the world a church struggling honestly to get things right.
[Yeah, right! When he says he won't even have the final document of this assembly published! What is it with this pope and his vassals who keep talking of transparency but then choose to keep very significant things secret - like the actual text of its provisional agreement with China. And now this.]
That brings us to why this synod is such a high-stakes exercise for Francis, and really for him alone. To be clear, this is not a synod on the abuse crisis. Something of the sort will come in February, when Francis has summoned presidents of the bishops’ conferences around the world to join him in Rome for a three-day summit on child protection.
Yet suppose the prelates gathered in Rome this month do a creditable job of articulating the anger and anguish that their flocks are feeling, and lay all that at the feet of the pope. [I very much doubt they'll even be given a chance to articulate any of that. They will probably be ruled out of order the moment anyone brings up anything that is not already spelled out, pre-digested in the synodal assembly's working document! Don't believe Bergoglio's usual blather about parrhesia - it was worthless before and remains worthless. One would wish him to start by exercising parrhesia himself in response to Mons. Vigano's central question (and to the DUBIA and the CORRECTIO FILIALIS before that), but he won't because he can't without either perjuring or self-incriminating himself.]
Then the next question will be what he’s going to do about it - and it’s not entirely clear that waiting for the results of another meeting in February, in itself, will quite do the trick. [But he won't have to do anything about it if the subject matter is made completely taboo at this assembly!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/10/2018 02:55]