‘LGBT’ should not appear in Vatican documents,
Archbishop Chaput tells synodal assembly
by Diane Montagna
VATICAN CITY, October 4, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia today told Pope Francis and members of the Synod of Bishops that “LGBTQ” and other similar language should not be used in the Vatican Youth Synod document.
In his intervention this morning on the floor of the Vatican’s Synod Hall (see full text below), Archbishop Chaput told the Pope, cardinals, bishops and young people convened in the Synod Hall:
“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; as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community, the body of Jesus Christ.
“This has never been true in the life of the Church, and is not true now. 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.” ”
Archbishop Chaput’s remarks come just three days after Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, General Secretary for the Synod of Bishops, refused to remove the term “LGBT youth” from the synod’s working document (Instrumentum laboris).
At an Oct. 1 Vatican press conference, LifeSiteNews reminded Cardinal Baldisseri that he had initially claimed the phrase “LGBT youth” was a quote taken from a pre-synodal document compiled by young people at their meeting with the Pope and Synod organizers, March 19-24, 2018.
We told Baldisseri that we had looked at the final document compiled by young people, and the acronym “LGBT” appears nowhere.
“It’s not there?” Baldisseri replied. “No,” we said.
This correspondent therefore asked Cardinal Baldisseri if he would consider removing the phrase “LGBT youth” from the Instrumentum Laboris to avoid it being inserted into the final document, and becoming part of the Magisterium of the Church.
“Look, I am not removing anything,” Cardinal Baldisseri responded. “The Synod Fathers will discuss it article by article. All the texts, even the loftiest in the world, will be discussed.”
The passage in question, contained in paragraph 197 of the Instrumentum Laboris, reads:
Some LGBT youth, through various contributions that came to the Secretariat of the Synod, wish to “benefit from a greater closeness” and experience greater care on the part of the Church, while some ECs [Episcopal Conferences] ask what to propose “to young people who instead of forming a heterosexual couple decide to form a homosexual couple and, above all, wish to be close to the Church.”
The Holy See has never before used the acronym “LGBT” in a Vatican document.
Fr. James Martin, SJ
[passionately militant 'patron satan' of LGBTQism], swiftly responded to news of Archbishop Chaput’s synod intervention, tweeting out:
No mention of Archbishop Chaput’s intervention was made at the synod press briefing today.
Father Thomas Rosica, the English language media attaché to the synod, who spoke with journalists after the briefing, also made no mention of Chaput’s remarks.
Asked if “homosexuality” and “gay relationships” were part of the interventions, Father Rosica replied: “Not those exact words, the issue was present, but there wasn’t any dominant issue.”
Father Rosica did confirm that sexual abuse was raised in several interventions. “The sex abuse issue has affected young people, and they want clarity, transparency, authenticity from us.”
Here below is the full text of Archbishop Chaput's intervention at the Synod.
SYNOD INTERVENTION
Chapter IV, paragraphs 51-63
+Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Archbishop of Philadelphia
10.4.18
Brothers,
I was elected to the synod’s permanent council three years ago. At the time, I was asked, along with other members, to suggest themes for this synod. My counsel then was to focus on Psalm 8. We all know the text: “When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?”
Who we are as creatures, what it means to be human, why we should imagine we have any special dignity at all – these are the chronic questions behind all our anxieties and conflicts. And the answer to all of them will not be found in ideologies or the social sciences, but only in the person of Jesus Christ, redeemer of man. Which of course means we need to understand, at the deepest level, why we need to be redeemed in the first place.
If we lack the confidence to preach Jesus Christ without hesitation or excuses to every generation, especially to the young, then the Church is just another purveyor of ethical pieties the world doesn’t need.
In this light, I read Chapter IV of the instrumentum, grafs 51-63, with keen interest. The chapter does a good job of describing the anthropological and cultural challenges facing our young people. In fact, describing today’s problems, and noting the need to accompany young people as they face those problems, are strengths of the instrumentum overall.
But I believe graf 51 is misleading when it speaks of young people as the “watchmen and seismographs of every age.” This is false flattery, and it masks a loss of adult trust in the continuing beauty and power of the beliefs we have received.
In reality, young people are too often products of the age, shaped in part by the words, the love, the confidence, and the witness of their parents and teachers, but more profoundly today by a culture that is both deeply appealing and essentially atheist.
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. Yet too often my generation of leaders, in our families and in the Church, has abdicated that responsibility out of a combination of ignorance, cowardice and laziness in forming young people to carry the faith into the future.
Shaping young lives is hard work in the face of a hostile culture. 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. And minors – our young people – have paid the price for it.
Finally, 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.
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; as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community, the body of Jesus Christ. This has never been true in the life of the Church, and is not true now. 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.
Explaining why Catholic teaching about human sexuality is true, and why it’s ennobling and merciful, seems crucial to any discussion of anthropological issues. Yet it’s regrettably missing from this chapter and this document. I hope revisions by the Synod Fathers can address that.
Here is how the Vatican Insider - virtual house organ of Casa Santa Marta - reported Day 1 of the synodal deliberations. I am unable to access the original Italian report - and the site's English translation is awkward, to say the least.
Migrants, abuses, sexuality among
the first interventions at the synod
by Iacopo Scaramuzzi
from the English online edition of
October 4, 2018
VATICAN CITY - Migrants, “almost all young people”, sexual abuse and other “failings” for which the Church wants to ask forgiveness, the question of sexuality and corporality, dimensions that should not be contained but accompanied in the development of the person: these are some of the issues that emerged during the first morning of the Synod on Young People the Pope opened yesterday morning in the Vatican (3-28 October).
Having formed the commission for information, Cardinal Robert Sarah resigned for personal reasons. [A puzzling sentence, until I read towards the end of the story that Cardinal Sarah was elected to the Committee on Information but that he declined it, and Cardinal Napier of South Africa was chosen to take his place.]
The meeting fell on the day of Saint Francis
[i.e., Oct 4 is the liturgical feast of St Francis of Assisi] and began with good wishes and applause to the Pope.
Among the 25 speeches of the morning, the Prefect of the Vatican Department for Communication, Paolo Ruffini, reporting for to his first briefing in the Vatican press room, said there was talk of the need to listen to young people in the concrete situations in which they find themselves, of the many young people “discarded” from the present society, of the capacity of “prophecy” of the young, of the difficulty experienced by the Church in transmitting the faith to the new generations, of youth ministry that must not “tame” the young, of inter-generational relations, along with many other controversial issues.
Such as “the forgiveness that the Church has asked for and continues to ask for not being up to the tasks, in all fields, including the theme of abuse”, Ruffini said. “Not only that: one can and must ask for forgiveness also of other shortcomings that all of us, priests, religious and laity, may have had”, all issues to be included in the more general dimension of “credibility” of the Church and in the “discernment on what the Church must do or has not done enough”, in order to “recover the capacity to listen” to young people.
There were “five or six” synod fathers who openly talked about the request for forgiveness, the sociologist Chiara Giaccardi said during the briefing, while others “implied” this theme as
a more general “awareness of general defect, which is the tip of the iceberg of the Church’s failures to live its mandate fully”.
Giaccardi referred to some interventions on the “theme of sexuality and corporeity”, which she said was “faced by many of the synod fathers in a very open and frank way, recognizing this dimension not as the enemy of a person’s development, but, on the contrary, as fundamental, because not cultivating all of a person’s dimensions means handing them over to drift if not to perversion.
Some interventions, she said, recognized the “lack of accompaniment of this dimension” and the need to “rethink it in an integral way, not only contain it but help it to express itself in a way that is beautiful and develops their personality.
But the most emotional moment - Ruffini said, was "when we talked about migrants, almost all of them young”.
[What exactly did they say about migrants?]
During the briefing, moderated by the director of the Vatican press room, Greg Burke, and attended also by the Argentine bishop Carlos José Tissera and
the young Vietnamese auditor Joseph Cao Huu Minh Tri [refers to one of 35 young lay people chosen to take part as auditors without voting rights], the members of the commission for information, elected yesterday, were announced. In addition to Ruffini and the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civilta Cattolica, the members are Cardinals Wilfried Fox Napier, Luis Antonio Tagle, Gérald Cyprien Lacroix and Christoph Schoenborn and Msgr. Anthony Fisher. The Undersecretary of the Synod, Msgr. Fabio Fabene, confirmed that Cardinal Robert Sarah, initially voted, had declined “for personal reasons”, and Fox Napier took his place.
Pope Francis “invited to frankness (parrhesia) and I believe that his invitation was accepted”, Giaccardi said. “There was no downplaying, no sugar-coating, there was much frankness and authenticity. It’s a good sign for the beginning, the Church of this synod is not a
plastered [???] one”.
For Ruffini, “Nothing surprised me to the point of making me jump off the chair.
What I have perceived instead is the constant desire to dream with the young, to look at the world with their eyes to make the Church walk with them”.
[Oh please! Speaking of 'no sugar coating'!]
Father Spadaro intervened to explain that
both the Pope’s request for three minutes of silence after every five interventions and the invitation not to feel bound to the prepared text fall within the typically Jesuit discernment applied to a Synod that “is not a Parliament or a debate of ideas and opinions but a place of discernment”. [Right, pile on the candy frosting!]
Ruffini then announced that during the briefing,
the names of the fathers or auditors present will not be indicated, nor will it be specified who said what so to “tell how the thought of the Synod in its communion forms [???] , in a procedure so different from that which I saw in environments other than the Church", the former director of TV2000 said.
To the journalist who expressed the “prayer” of giving indications on the identities and geographical areas of the various participants, Greg Burke replied by concluding the briefing, that “it is the first time that we finish a press conference with a prayer”.
The final document that will be approved at the end of the Synod, Msgr. Fabene explained, could be approved
en bloc or paragraph by paragraph: “It will depend very much on how the document will be done: neither one nor the other possibility is excluded”.
[In any case, Synodal drill sergeant Cardinal Baldisseri has already announced that the document will not be made public!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/10/2018 05:35]