THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

'All are welcome' -
to what exactly?

October 15, 2018

I have not been paying much attention to the Youth Synod because it comes across to me as a carefully crafted PR exercise to promote the current trendy agenda at the Vatican, but the few bits I have seen have confirmed my prejudice.

Chilean Youth Silvia Teresa Retamales Morales says many non-Catholics asked for a “more open Church” being a “multicultural Church open to all, not judgmental, not discriminate against minorities, or people with different sexual orientations, or the poor.” That sounds more like the United Nations than a church.

I was reminded of this piece Patrick Reardon contributed to the National Catholic Reporter some years ago:

It’s called “A Church Refreshed: A dispatch from an American Catholic Future.”Her e are a few extracts from Reardon’s American Catholic Never Never Land:

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Song leader Sophia Santiago stood to the right of the altar of St. Gertrude Church in Chicago and invited those in the crowded pews and in folding chairs to greet their neighbors. “All are welcome,” she proclaimed.

To the simple notes of a single piano, the parish choir and the congregation sang a sweet, lilting version of “Come to the Water” as liturgical dancers, altar servers, ministers of the word, parish chancellor Emma Okere and pastor Fr. Antonio Fitzgerald processed up the center aisle. The song filled the soaring interior of the 131-year-old structure. On a banner high behind the altar, in large, easily readable lettering, was a quotation from Pope Francis: “Who am I to judge?”

This was one of thousands of celebrations across the globe marking 50 years of rejuvenation and renewal dating from the election of Pope Francis in 2013, popularly called “refreshment of the faith.”

Reardon sees a Chicago Catholic church that has kept a few of those fusty old buildings with "their stained-glass windows, gold ornamentation and other finery”, but they’re supplemented by store front congregations with a preacher a piano and a soup kitchen.

In a strip mall a mile and a half to the south, another celebration was being held in a simple storefront. On the large glass window, hand-painted in red and blue, were the words “Lazarus Pastoral Center.”

“For I was hungry and you gave me food.” Deacon Liam Saranof was reading the Gospel of Matthew to 27 men, women and children seated on folding chairs in the long, narrow space, the former home of an Ethiopian restaurant.

This strip mall was also the home to a bedding showroom, a Subway sandwich deli, a $10 store and a bicycle repair shop, all of them open on this early Tuesday evening.

A short time later, Saranof’s teenage son Karim opened up a small folding table in the center of the space, then carried over a small, brightly painted plastic box containing consecrated hosts that, a few hours earlier, had been delivered by one of the parishioners from St. Gertrude.

“Some of us here think of ourselves also as members of St. Gertrude,” machinist Chloe Pardo explained. “But others are only affiliated with the community here. They like the community work we do; they like how close we become.”

Reardon’s future church is complete with female “chancellors” who really run the show, Popes named “Martin” (after dePorres) and Oscar (after St Romero) and the two big slogans are “All Are Welcome” and “Who Am I to Judge?”

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This article is a breathtaking display of liberal insanity which I commented on here. This kind of feel good, fuzzy wuzzy Christianity has virtually wiped out Catholicism in America, so the obvious remedy is “We clearly didn’t have ENOUGH feel good, fuzzy wuzzy Christianity. So let’s destroy more old churches, write more banal hymns, put up more felt banners, hire more social workers and do more left wing posturing…”

I could vent a very long time about this, but first grumble about this silly nonsense from the Youth Synod is the straw man set up that somehow the Catholic Church is not “multicultural” and not “open to all”. What? The Catholic Church is the most diverse and multicultural institution on earth.

It’s been seeking to welcome diverse peoples ever since the great missionary movements of the Counter-Reformation and the nineteenth century. That’s what we’ve done since the Great Commission: reach out to the marginalized, the dispossessed, the poor, those in moral and spiritual darkness and those who are lost.

The Catholic Church is more global and multiracial than any other group. Catholic means universal for goodness’s sake.

Consider: I am pastor in an admittedly conservative town and an unapologetically conservative Catholic parish, but when I look around on any particular Sunday my congregation is amazingly multicultural and diverse. A heart surgeon or an international business executive might be sitting next to a body shop worker who I know belongs to AA. Behind them is a family of refugees from El Salvador and next to them an African American-Indian family or a Mexican laborer. Up front some converts are next to cradle Catholics. We have the whole range of ages, nationalities, races and people: Nigerians and Indians, Italians, English, French, Polish, Philippino, Vietnamese, Chinese, Colombian and Mexican.

All are welcome and all belong to our parish family.

All are indeed welcome….but to what exactly?

The obsession with inclusivity is something mouthed by Cardinal Marx who said, ““Nobody is excluded [from the church],” he said. “Nobody is superfluous. Exclusion is not in the language of the church.”

Total inclusivity can only be proposed by a church that is used to being a wealthy establishment institution. “All Are Welcome” is the slogan of Christian leaders who know they are on the top of the social heap and feel guilty about it.
- They live in their palaces: (BTW did you know that Cardinal Marx also spent $13m refurbishing his palace and another $11m on a guesthouse in Rome) and their middle class rectories but they proclaim “All Are Welcome” to salve their consciences and make themselves feel like good Christian folk.

My question remains, “To what exactly are all welcome?”

Are people welcome to the Catholic Church? Of course all are welcome. All have always been welcome, but what are they welcome to?
- What kind of Catholic Church?
- Why should anyone want to join the Catholic Church anyway?
- What would a liberal Catholic answer?
- Is it for their soul’s salvation?
- Is it to escape the fires of hell?
- Is it to worship and serve the Lord Jesus Christ King of the Universe?
- Is it to learn how to love God and his Son Jesus Christ, to venerate and love his Blessed Mother and worship in the communion of all the saints and angels?

Probably not.

Instead all we hear is the mantra, “All Are Welcome”.

The fact is, from the very beginning all have been welcome. The only people who can’t be Catholic are the ones who don’t want to be Catholic.

I’m reminded of a gay activist who was interviewed about the church. He was yelling that he wanted the church to be more inclusive, then the interviewer said, “So if you felt the church was more inclusive which church would you attend every Sunday?”

The guy looked at the interviewer like he was a martian, “Not me. I’m not really a churchgoer.”

Correct. It seems the liberals who are unlocking the doors to empty churches are the ones crying out, “All are welcome!” but the churches aren’t empty because people are unwelcome, but because they don’t want to go to that kind of church.

The churches that are full, on the other hand, are the ones that actually preach the Christian gospel.

Without a full blooded, historic Catholic faith which preaches the need for repentance and seeking the face of the Lord for eternal salvation what are you welcoming people to?
- A luncheon club where they sing hymns and carry banners with trite slogans?
- A soup kitchen and shower facility where they hold Bible studies? - A rehab center where they find their inner goddess?
People aren’t dumb. They’ll soon ask, “Why bother with all that religious-spiritual stuff? We can do soup kitchens, rehab centers and shower facilities without all those dreary hymns, bad Christian pop music and dull homilies delivered by a fat, middle class half educated minister.

I agree that “All Are Welcome”.
- All are welcome to come face to face with the living Lord Jesus Christ in the fullness of the Catholic faith.
- All are welcome to fall on their knees in Eucharistic Adoration. - All are welcome to be received into the Catholic Church, learn how to make a good confession and share the work and worship of Christ’s one flock under one shepherd.
- All are welcome to walk in the path of perfection, to learn how to emulate the saints, love the Sacred Scriptures and share the gospel of life with others, ministering Christ’s peace and justice to a starving world.
- All Are Welcome to leave everything to follow Christ.
- All Are Welcome to repent of their sins, confess their faith and be baptized. All Are Welcome.

But some future church in which “All Are Welcome” is the only creed? You’re welcome to it.


I had started out with the good intention of reporting something everyday about the so-called youth synod, but after the first two days, news from that event confirmed if not worsened the worst fears one had about this pre-fabricated Bergoglian set-up that is even more brazen in its evil intentions than the two 'family synods'. So I have spared myself the anguish of having to comment on what has been happening, But Father Z points to a blogger priest who tells us of the worst features so far of the 'youth synod', even as he gives testimony of the young Catholics he is privileged to serve and accompany - not at all the 'youth' selectively invited to take part in the current synod...

'A leaven in the world'?
Youth synod repeats old errors
by Fr Kevin Cusick

October 15, 2018

We are now making things up as we go along. As if the Church had been founded yesterday. This nonsense was already tried in the sixties and found wanting.

Paolo Ruffini [the recently named Vatican communications czar] reported on Twitter that at a press conference for the 2018 Youth Synod now underway in Rome a speaker called for “a liturgy that is better suited to present times, more participatory, more understandable, otherwise the youth might consider it dull.”

Dull! Heaven forbid! Let’s bring back the guitars and tambourines! Everybody who can play an instrument should bring theirs and we can have a talent show. The resulting laughter at least will ensure a scarcity of boredom.

The problem with this approach is that young people do not come to the discussion with a tabula rasa as they might have in the past.
- They do not believe the Church was founded yesterday.
- Social networks, the Internet, and other factors make young people today more knowledgeable about our tradition.
- All the books that were thrown away or left on the shelves, even when I was in the seminary, are all being made available on the Internet.
- Young people are meeting other young people on social networks and inviting each other to attend and learn the Traditional Liturgy.

The Latin texts were left on the shelf. Those priests who did know Latin decided that we who were not yet priests did not need Latin so chose not to teach us. We lobbied to get one semester of Latin. The course was thereafter discontinued and that was the end of Latin for men in formation to offer the Holy Mass, the use of Latin in which was called for by Vatican II documents.

From the beginning of my priesthood whenever I offered Mass alone, I exclusively used the Latin texts. I was all the more ready to learn the Traditional Latin Mass in 2010 when assigned as pastor at St. Francis de Sales in Benedict, Md., where the old Mass has been available on Sundays since John Paul II’s Ecclesia Dei gave permission for its recovery in limited cases.

Men studying for, and discerning, the priesthood show a consistent interest in the Traditional Liturgy. For example, a young man no longer attends Mass with his family about 20 miles distant and has chosen instead to attend our Latin Mass consistently on Sundays, recently joining the parish. He has informed me that he is discerning the priesthood.

Our parish has also this month sent a young man to discern his vocation over a three-week stay with an order that exclusively offers the Traditional Liturgy.

We have additional potential religious vocations in the parish pipeline. Our altar server society encourages all the young men involved to consider the priesthood. One of our senior servers is planning to apply to a Traditional order for seminary. A young lady looks forward to a discernment visit with a Traditional order in Missouri.

Rome, deaf to this phenomenon that we hear of in so many places, continues to peddle the tried and failed ruses of the postconciliar period where the only methods not used were the Traditional ones, in flagrant violation of the Vatican II documents themselves.

Young people can go to any group today and find a self-celebratory, homemade liturgy or celebration that serves as a projection of self.
- But they come to the Church to find Christ.
- The Church owes all persons the honesty of recognizing and that the liturgy did not come down to us as a multiple choice smorgasbord.
- Rather, the revelation of Christ through the Spirit is a one-size-fits-all source of grace.
- Only God can satisfy all the longings of the human heart.
- God comes only through the integral means established by Christ handed down as the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Either those in Rome the Pope invites to churn out new documents about liturgy will listen to young people and learn — or young people will simply ignore the documents coming from Rome and continue to study and learn the old Missals and Kyriales.

True joy is never boring. Neither is the drama and love of the cross of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ which we touch and enter through the Holy Mass. I am very blessed and joyful to pray the Traditional Latin Mass, a liturgy that is timeless instead of “keeping up with the times.”

The LGBT network is also present at the synod with official approbation. These recruiters encourage young people to label themselves not as Christian believers but rather to add the LGBT qualifier which undermines that very identity with a subversive and heretical agenda.

Avera Maria Santo is a 22-year-old U.S. Catholic who lives in Alabama and blogs at her website, “Inside My Holy of Holies,” about being same-sex attracted and remaining faithful to the goodness, truth, and beauty of what the Church teaches about human sexuality.

In an open letter circulated in Rome to the bishops participating in the October 3-28 Youth Synod, Santo told them she had been “devastated” to learn of the ongoing campaign by pro-“LGBT” groups that are trying to utilize the synod as a vehicle to shift Church teaching on homosexuality.

She wrote: “I wish then to lay my heart bare, and to share some of my story and my convictions with you, dear bishops of the Holy Catholic Church, and plead with you to keep the Church’s teachings on homosexuality good, true and beautiful.”

These are the kinds of young people that should have been invited to the synod, not LGBT advocates. (See “Pope Selects Youth From Pro-Gay Vatican Consultant’s Media Org To Attend Synod” in LifeSiteNews.com, October 8.)

Another rigged Synod is now underway with predictable results. All we need to know to verify that is the information that Archbishop Bruno Forte is on the drafting committee again for this confab. He is responsible for inserting pro-LGBT propaganda in the written record of the earlier Family Synod.

Lorenzo Cardinal Baldisseri says the drafts of the final document of Synod 2018 will be kept confidential and will not be published. What has been made public thus far indicates that the synod counts on another ruse to manipulate Church teaching for ill purposes.

Pleas to stop the synod in order to give room for a response to Archbishop Viganò and to deal with the homosexual scandals were ignored. Perhaps a pre-planned useful distraction like the Youth Synod was an opportunity to good to pass up.

As the men in Rome act like a self-protective group carrying on a closed discussion, they will not frustrate the work of the Holy Spirit speaking through so many sincere young Catholics all over the world who are doing the work of genuinely evangelizing other youth.

Please pray for our group of pilgrims journeying to the holy places in Italy as you read this.

Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.


Fr Cipolla looks beyond the current travesty of a synod in Rome to exult about the signs he sees that have somehow transcended the sorry morass that this Pontificate has made of 'the Church'...



This evening, I saw the future of the Church:
It is the Traditional Mass
by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla

October 13, 2018

This evening I saw the future, the real Future of the Church, not the one being imagined by the crowd in Rome who mistake the future because of the mindless bureaucracy that thinks it has the Spirit imprisoned in the 1960s under the title of the “spirit of Vatican II.”

When the present Pontiff was elected, I wrote an essay called “Back to the Future”, which predicted that the Church would have to relive the sixties but this time with a vengeance. All those prelates and their briefcase carrying followers who went underground during the pontificate of John Paul II would meet and talk with great nostalgia during those dark (for them) years under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They talked about the “unfinished work” of the Council - that work that had little to do with Council documents but much more to do with their image of the New Church that would be updated to fit the needs and desires of Modern Man.

Poor things. They did not realize that Modern Man died in the sixties and that Post-Modern Man was emerging and was slouching towards Bethlehem.

When you live in a sealed container that is the Vatican and its bureaucracy, there is little chance you will be conversant with what is really happening in the world and in the mind and hearts of people. But the 60s crowd are back and with a vengeance.

The only 60s program that kept on going during their exile was the program of the moral corruption of the clergy. That continued to grow and flourish.

The destruction of the liturgical life of the Church was for a time halted, and it seemed that there might be a possibility of questioning the basis of liturgical reform following the Council and of at least thinking that there was in fact a discontinuity in the liturgical life of the Church that resulted in the emptying out of our churches.

But a bureaucrat cannot possibly conceive of a discontinuity in the life of the Church, for the bureaucrat must believe that whatever happens is by definition the work of the Holy Spirit, and so the only thing that he must do is to rethink and change course according to what he hears and what he is told is the latest manifestation of the Spirit, be it in a synod, or a sermon, or an encyclical, or a press conference, or what is whispered in the hallways and the loggia.

It is the bureaucrats at all levels of the clergy who kept the apparatus alive for fifty years, so that when a Pope resigned, they only had to change the direction in which they faced when they woke up in the morning: from the East to the West.

One need not wonder how the double coup of a resignation of a Pope and an election of a 60s bishop to the papacy did not result in confusion and chaos. For when those formerly in power and then underground for fifty years came into their own once again, back to the future, the supporting bureaucracy in all levels of the Church were ready and able to support them in their project of remaking the Church in their own 60s image.

And part of the glue holding this together and making it possible was the damnable success of the moral corruption of the clergy at all levels, a corruption that enabled the bureaucracy to control by intimidation based on incriminating knowledge and to advance their agenda unimpeded, except for a few gadfly cardinals and bishops.

So it is precisely while the Synod for Youth is meeting in Rome in quasi-secrecy that I saw the Future this evening. I was invited to sit in choir during a Traditional Solemn Mass in a parish church of my diocese. The celebrant, the pastor of the parish, the deacon and the sub-deacon were each young priests of the diocese.

The Mass was celebrated with no frills, no excesses, no sign of aestheticism. The Feast was the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, instituted by Pius XI to celebrate the anniversary of the Council of Ephesus, at which Mary was proclaimed as Theotokos, the bearer of God, affirming the full divinity of the person of Christ.

The music of the Mass was all Gregorian chant, Mass IX. The servers were all young men, some new to this, some quite practiced in serving this Mass. It was the worship of God in its purest form, in its traditional form, a form whose liturgical modesty and reticence invites prayer and therefore worship.

The sacred ministers gave themselves over to their roles in the Mass in a naturally self-effacing way. They knew the proper tones for the various chants and sang them well. The sermon was intelligent and truly Catholic. These three men made worship possible by getting themselves out of the way and letting the rite speak for itself.

Many of the young priests in my diocese have learnt the Traditional Roman Mass, aka the Extraordinary Form.
- They love this Mass in a sober way without any hint of “high church” prancing or panting.
- They love Christ and his Church. They are loyal to the teaching of the Magisterium.
- They are priests who are at home in any situation and who enjoy each other’s company.
- They enjoy the company of both men and women in their parishes.

The bureaucrats who run the Church do not know that these priests exist. And that is good. For while the bureaucrats are running around at synods and conferences and trying to put out noxious fires without the water of moral purity and therefore failing every time, these young priests, not only in my diocese, but in most dioceses through the Catholic world, are just learning once again how to worship and are discovering the beauty of worship, and they are teaching this to their flock. And they, and the Traditional Mass they love — they are the Future of the Church.

Here's a belated post of an October 10 blog by Edward Pentin where he discourses on the men handpicked 'to draft the final statement' of the current travesty of a synod - not that we hope to be able to see that statement at all as circusmaster Cardinal Baldisseri has already said it won't be published at all. And not that there is anything that has to be drafted, since it is almost a certainty that the 'final statement' and the post-synodal exhortation for this synod (the two documents are perhaps virtually identical, differing only in form and presentation) have long been pre-written by Bergoglio's expert doctrinal and lexical spin doctors exactly as he wants them to be... For both reasons, I did not feel any journalistic urgency to post this information but it must go on the record, nonetheless.


This Gloria.TV cartoon depicts the idea of many Catholics about Bergoglio's rigged rubber-stamp synods.

5 out of 12 Commission members
elected to draft final document of 'youth synod'
[The seven others were handpicked by the pope]


October 10, 2018

The Vatican released today the names of those who will be responsible for drafting the final document of the Synod on Youth, and although they are geographically representative, concerns surround some of them and their views on aspects of Church teaching.

The commission for drafting the final document of the Oct. 3-28 synod on “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment” consists of 12 members, five of whom were elected today by synod members, and come from the world’s five continents.

They comprise Cardinal Carlos Aguiar Retes, the archbishop of Mexico City and one of 41 delegates personally chosen by the Pope to attend the synod; Archbishop Peter Comensoli of Melbourne, Australia, also a papal delegate; Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, the prefect of the Vatican dicastery for Integral Human Development; Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the archbishop of Mumbai, India, and a member of the Pope’s ‘C9’ Council of Cardinals advising Francis on Church reform; and Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti, Italy, a member of the synod’s organizing council.

Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, and Cardinal Sérgio da Rocha of Brasilia, Brazil, the general relator of the synod, automatically have places on the commission.

The Pope has personally chosen three others to help draft the final document: Brazilian Father Alexandre Awi Mello, the secretary for the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life; Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the major archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; and Father Eduardo Gonzalo Redondo, the director of vocations ministry in Cuba.

Two other priests have been chosen who have so far helped with preparations for the synod and will serve as special secretaries on the commission: Brazilian Jesuit Father Giacomo Costa, one of the main authors of the instrumentum laboris, the director of the magazine Aggiornamenti Sociali, and the vice president of the “Carlo Maria Martini Foundation;” and Father Rossano Sala, the professor of youth pastoral outreach at the Pontifical Salesian University and director of the Italian magazine Note di Pastorale Giovanile.

The Pope’s personal choices are naturally well known to him: Father Mello was among those helping then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to draft the final document of the Fifth Latin American Episcopal Conference in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007. The document came to be seen by some as a road map for the entire Church. The Pope also knows Archbishop Shevchuk well having mentored him when the Ukrainian prelate was a young auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires in the 2000s.

It’s not clear how the Pope knows Father Redondo, but in a 2014 interview, the Cuban vocations director said young people were the “solution not the problem.” He also said the Church is Jesus whose plan for mankind is “revolutionary and transformative” and that to “implement the kingdom, we must begin here and now.” This means “the first thing we must do is banish the old structures,” he said, adding it is “faith that moves us to realize” Jesus’ plan for us.

Among those elected to the commission, Archbishop Comensoli gave a spirited intervention today at the synod, asking whether the Church had lost her “missionary fire” and become beholden to a “fake gospel” of “religious maintenance.”

“Let a pebble of spiritual disruption be dropped into our stagnant pools, to stir us back to Pentecost!” he implored. “It is time to leave behind a Church that only sits around waiting. Our task is to rediscover a young Church that goes out; not to re-create a Church for the young to come to.”

[The man seeks to reformulate Bergoglio's tired and fallacious formula about a 'church going out'. As if the Church had not been doing that since Jesus's Great Mandate to "Go and baptize all nations..."! The Church did not become the universal institution that she is by 'sitting around waiting'! This is to ignore the evangelization carried out by the Apostles and all the missionaries who spread the Gospel in the past 2000 years. Evangelization that many missionaries did with heroic zeal and at the cost of their lives. Yet Bergoglio as pope has been far from mission-friendly, but how could he without being a hypocrite, since he is so anti-Catholic he proactively claims he does not wish tp convert anyone to Catholicism and that all faiths are basically equivalent?]

But concerns surround other commission members elected today whose views on homosexuality appear questionable. This is particularly noteworthy given the controversy over the inclusion of the loaded acronym ‘LGBT,’ often used by the homosexual lobby, in the instrumentum laboris, the synod working document, and the strong criticism at the synod from Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia about its inclusion.

Together with outside pressure from a coalition of ‘LGBT’ groups, the concern is that the final document will include some phrasing that will amount to an acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle. However, the issue has hardly been raised in discussions and has yet to be mentioned at all in the small groups, but that did not stop it being included in the discussions during the first Synod on the Family 2014.

Archbishop Forte was widely known to have been behind an attempt to introduce the issue, using the highly controversial mid-term report of that synod. Despite not figuring in the discussions, the document talked about the “precious support” homosexual couples can give each other, and the “gifts and qualities” they offer the Christian community. The document was foisted on the synod fathers by releasing it to the media before the synod fathers had seen it.

An uproar followed, especially from African delegates, but despite the developing world usually having more traditional views on the issue where it is generally still a taboo, Cardinals Turkson and Gracias have views that appear to have softened in comparison to many of their peers in both Ghana and India.

In 2012, Cardinal Turkson told the Register it is important to understand the reasons behind the stigma of homosexuality in Africa. “Just as there’s a sense of a call for rights, there’s also a call to respect culture, of all kinds of people,” he said. “So, if it’s being stigmatized, in fairness, it’s probably right to find out why it is being stigmatized.”

But three years later, he told the Christian homosexual rights group, New Ways Ministry, that Western countries “have grown in regard to this issue.” He said when he studied in the United States in the 1970s, science considered homosexuality “a sickness and a disease” but that “over the years that evaluation has changed. Other countries have to grow in the same way and it can take time.”

In 2013, Cardinal Gracias opposed a ruling by India’s Supreme Court to overturn a decision taken by the High Court of Delhi in 2009, which had decriminalised homosexual acts. “For me it’s a question of understanding that it’s an orientation,” he said.

Father Costa, meanwhile, has promoted same-sex couples’ struggle for “social and civil rights.” And as vice president of the “Carlo Martini Foundation,” he is also likely to support the late cardinal’s endorsement of same-sex civil unions, as well as his opposition to Blessed Paul VI's encyclcial, Humanae Vitae.

But just how much influence these commission members will be able to have is unclear. Asked today about the challenges of drafting the final document, Cardinal Aguiar said it’s “a very taxing job” while another challenge “is time, we have to do it by midnight,” leading some to think that the bulk of the document has to have already been written.

The “biggest challenge,” he said, “is to be faithful to what was discussed, to what was agreed upon in the working groups.” As the issue of homosexuality has hardly been raised, and Humanae Vitae so far completely omitted, many will therefore be curious to see how much these topics figure in the document. Similarly, a Belgian bishop today surprised some in the synod hall by suggesting that married clergy need to be considered, but that has also been a subject hardly raised.

The Mexican cardinal, who Pope Francis raised to the College of Cardinals 2016, said a further challenge is “not for it to be a final document but that it should reflect what was discussed by the bishops in a collegial way” and then “given to the hands of the Holy Father” who could use it for his “post-synodal apostolic exhortation,” or summary document at the end of the synod.

The document also has to be voted on by all the synod fathers, either in its entirety, or section by section, and obtain a two-thirds majority, but the synod secretariat has not been clear precisely which procedure will be used. [Or if there will be a vote at all.]

Cardinal Aguiar added: “What I think is going to be reiterated is that the Church has to change a lot in its way to open spaces and go to the places where young people are.” The Church must “go out on a mission,” he said, “to be present where young people are, for example the digital world.”

He also said the second aspect is to find ways to help “accompany them, always complying with their own freedom, their own decisions, while looking and trying to offer them spiritual help so they can be conscious of themselves, and can benefit from this throughout their lives.” [Pardon me but what a load of hypocritical Bergoglio-correct BS!]