Pole that he was, Karol Wojtyła had a well developed sense of historical irony. So from his present position in the Communion of Saints, he might be struck by the ironic fact that the Synod on “Youth, Faith, and Vocational Discernment,” currently underway in Rome, coincides with the fortieth anniversary of his election as Pope John Paul II on October 16, 1978.
What’s the irony?
The irony is that the most successful papal youth minister in modern history, and perhaps all history, was largely ignored in Synod-2018’s working document. And the Synod leadership under Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri seems strangely reluctant to invoke either his teaching or his example.
But let’s get beyond irony.
What are some lessons the Synod might draw from John Paul II on this ruby anniversary of his election?
1.
The big questions remain the same.
Several bishops at Synod-2018 have remarked that today’s young people are living in a completely different world than when the bishops in question grew up. There’s obviously an element of truth here, but there’s also
a confusion between ephemera and the permanent things.
When Cardinal Adam Sapieha assigned young Fr. Wojtyła to St. Florian’s parish in 1948, in order to start a ministry to the university students who lived nearby, things in Cracow were certainly different than they were when Wojtyła was a student at the Jagiellonian University in 1938-39.
In 1948, Poland was in the deep freeze of Stalinism, and organized Catholic youth work was banned. The freewheeling social and cultural life in which Wojtyła had reveled before the Nazis shut down the Jagiellonian was no more, and atheistic propaganda was on tap in many classrooms.
But Wojtyła knew that the Big Questions that engage young adults —What’s my purpose in life? How do I form lasting friendships? What is noble and what is base? How do I navigate the rocks and shoals of life without making fatal compromises? What makes for true happiness? — are always the same. They always have been, and they always will be.
To tell today’s young adults that they’re completely different is pandering, and it’s a form of disrespect. To help maturing adults ask the big questions and wrestle with the permanent things is to pay them the compliment of taking them seriously. Wojtyła knew that, and so should the bishops of Synod-2018.
2.
Walking with young adults should lead somewhere.
Some of the Wojtyła kids from that university ministry at St. Florian’s have become friends of mine, and when I ask them what he was like as a companion, spiritual director, and confessor, they always stress two points: masterful listening that led to penetrating conversations, and an insistence on personal responsibility.
As one of them once put it to me, “We’d talk for hours and he’d shed light on a question, but I never heard him say, ‘You should do this.’ What he’d always say was, ‘You must choose.’” For Karol Wojtyła, youth minister, gently but persistently compelling serious moral decisions was the real meaning of “accompaniment” (a Synod-2018 buzzword).
3.
Heroism is never out of fashion.
When, as pope, John Paul II proposed launching what became World Youth Day, most of the Roman Curia thought he had taken leave of his senses: young adults in the late-twentieth century just weren’t interested in an international festival involving catechesis, the Way of the Cross, confession, and the Eucharist.
John Paul, by contrast, understood that the adventure of leading a life of heroic virtue was just as compelling in late modernity as it had been in his day, and he had confidence that future leaders of the third millennium of Christian history would answer that call to adventure.
That didn’t mean they’d be perfect. But as he said to young people on so many occasions,
“Never, ever settle for anything less than the spiritual and moral grandeur that God’s grace makes possible in your life. You’ll fail; we all do. But don’t lower the bar of expectation. Get up, dust yourself off, seek reconciliation. But never, ever settle for anything less than the heroism for which you were born.”
That challenge — that confidence that young adults really yearn to live with an undivided heart — began a renaissance in young adult and campus ministry in the living parts of the world Church. Synod-2018 should ponder this experience and take it very, very seriously.
The following is not so much about the fact that the outcome of this 'youth synod' was already pre-determined and its dispositive documents already drafted to be simply rubberstamped by the synodal fathers - hence the article's title is really rhetorical - but about the cast of homosexualist characters Bergoglio deployed beforehand for various tasks to 'prepare the way', as one of them describes it, that will best accommodate the LGBT agenda in the synod's 'recommendations'.
Is the synod's final document
already written?
by JULIA MELONI
October 17, 2018
Shortly after the youth synod began, Edward Pentin — the authoritative chronicler of the rigging of the Bergoglian family synods — reported that an Italian cardinal close to Pope Francis had prophesied a great “surprise,” convinced that the pope would “for sure invent something.”
Pentin said some sources had indicated that the final document’s main substance was in fact already written — hence the synod’s deep secrecy, lack of a mid-term report, and nebulous voting procedures.
As the synod progressed, increasingly ominous voices spoke confidently and buoyantly about being “open” to a new definition of family. One synod father announced at a press conference:
“As old folks we should not be afraid to embark on this new path that the pope is pointing out to us. It is a path that is leading us to new kinds of families, new family relations, in a way, and we should not be afraid to open up to this.” [No fool like an old fool, indeed!]
Meanwhile, bishops alarmed by potentially rigged voting rules planned a public group protest; synod leaders then said old procedures would remain in force.
Archbishop Forte — a member of the final document’s stacked writing committee — said, on October 11, that it was “impossible” for the text’s draft to already be written; then
Crux reported that Cardinal Baldisseri’s office had already presented its own “preliminary draft” to those writers.
I believe that text’s most likely principal writer is Fr. Giacomo Costa, S.J. - the writing committee member who has already helped author the Preparatory Document and Instrumentum Laboris and published multiple articles on the synod’s aims.
He has also, as I will show, already loaded the Instrumentum Laboris with subversive plagiarizations of his own writings on “discernment.”
Fr. Costa is the Vice President of the Carlo Martini Foundation—dedicated to the cardinal who led the St. Gallen mafia, attacked Humanae Vitae, and endorsed same-sex civil unions. Fr. Costa has praised the 2014 synodal report on the “precious support” found in same-sex relationships — rigged by none other than Archbishop Forte, the Martini disciple who joked about how he and the pope wouldn’t speak “plainly” about their plan to endorse Communion for adulterers at the family synod.
That coup was accomplished, in great part, because
Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez loaded both the 2015 final synodal document and Amoris Laetitia with plagiarizations of his old writings promoting situational ethics. Now, Fr. Costa has planted key plagiarizations of his book Il Discernimento into the Instrumentum Laboris, as these examples show (with common words in bold):
IL 117:
Questa valorizzazione della coscienza si radica nella contemplazione del modo di agire del Signore: è nella propria coscienza che Gesù, in dialogo intimo con il Padre…
Costa 17:
Questa valorizzazione della coscienza si radica nella contemplazione del modo di agire del Signore: è nella coscienza di Gesù che si svolge il suo dialogo intimo con il Padre…
IL 117:
…l’esercizio della coscienza rappresenti un valore antropologico universale: interpella ogni uomo e ogni donna, non soltanto i credenti…
Costa 18:
…il valore antropologico universale dell’esercizio della coscienza, che interpella ogni uomo e ogni donna, non soltanto i credenti…
[One does not have to know Italian to note the near-verbatim 'lifts'!]
Most importantly, Fr. Costa has fixed the Instrumentum Laboris’s section on conscience (116-117) to ventriloquize two of his book’s key claims (pp. 16-17):
[B]We must “make room” for consciences (Amoris Laetitia 37), increasing their role in the Church’s “praxis” (AL 303).
Conscience can discern that God is asking for the “gift” of committing an intrinsically wrong act (euphemized as a departure from the “ideal”) (AL 303).
This notion is supported by Gaudium et Spes 16: conscience is the “sanctuary” where man “is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.”
AL 303 is already an atomic bomb set to explode every moral law — and when it is strapped onto that decontextualized line about conscience’s “sanctuary,” it will be ready for mass distribution to souls.
In February,
Cardinal Cupich quoted those very lines to presage a “paradigm shift” on morality — for the revolutionaries are now ready to openly blow up the very concept of intrinsically wrong acts.
Then, out of the rubble and ruins, there will arise the synod’s great “surprise”: the advance of the “anti-creation” movement — the worldwide subversion of marriage and the family.
- The synod group led by Cardinal Cupich has called on the Church to recognize “other forms of family” — to “accept and even honor” every “family unit.”
- The group led by Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga has pushed for “pastoral care” on “realities such as marriage between homosexuals, surrogate pregnancy, and adoption by same-sex couples.”
Both synod fathers, notably, appear in Archbishop Viganò’s testimony. Rodriguez Maradiaga, ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s fellow “kingmaker” for Church appointments, has been embroiled in multiple homosexual-related scandals; Cupich, a top revolutionary regarding homosexuality, was reportedly elevated on their recommendation.
Outside the synod, Fr. James Martin, S.J., defended the agenda to embrace the ideological term “LGBT” —a nd “acknowledge that gay couples can form a ‘family’” and enhance society’s “flourishing” by adopting children.
“LGBT” had appeared in the Instrumentum Laboris under Cardinal Baldisseri’s false pretense that it was merely a quotation from a pre-synodal document by young people. When the cardinal was asked if he would expunge the term because it never, in fact, appears there, he said, “Look, I am not removing anything.”
Then it emerged that the secretary of the pope’s C-9 council had told a radical “LGBT” group that their input to the synod’s leaders had been worked into that very section on “LGBT youths” and “what to suggest” to young homosexual couples (197).
“Trust in the Spirit,” he said of the synod.
It was yet another example of
the “Catholic deep gay state,” crusading with cultural Marxists outside the Church to spread the brave new world of anti-creation.
Another speaker at that conference was Fr. Martin himself, the celebrity priest who helped bring a “gay tsunami” to Italy and starred in Ireland’s pro-“LGBT” World Meeting of Families, organized by a top McCarrick protégé.
Before he arrived at the World Meeting of Families, Fr. Martin told a young “LGBT” activist:
“See you soon. Prepare the way!” That young “preparer” — whose article on “How to Be Gay in the Catholic Church” features lines like
“Jesus said to love my neighbor, and I can’t help that Grindr says the nearest one is 264 feet away” — then starred in a parallel conference announcing a global crusade to push the “LGBT” agenda at the youth synod. Its architect successfully led the “gay marriage” referendum campaigns in Ireland and Australia.
Then Fr. Martin used the World Meeting of Families to promote the young preparer’s group, Out at St. Paul — which boasts “Pride Masses,” trips to “gay bars,” and priests who endorse active homosexuality, according to one member.
Fr. Costa himself contributed to a 2008 project encouraging the legal recognition of a bond between two people of the same sex. His article promoted homosexual couples’ struggle for “social and civil rights,” valorizing their attempt to shed invisibility and thus contribute “positively” to society (432).
Archbishop Forte has said that defining the rights of homosexual couples is a matter of “being civilized.” These two men are the likely principal writers of a final document that could, if approved by the pope, become part of his “ordinary magisterium” under new synod rules.
Recently, Archbishop Forte sanguinely praised Pope Francis’s “enthusiasm towards God’s surprises.” Four years earlier, the pope had approved Archbishop Forte’s rigged report on same-sex relationships, released the very day that two Italian political parties backed homosexual unions. The pope preached that day of being “open to the God of surprises” and now he is portentously repeating the theme — a cry that comes from Martini himself, the “ante-pope,” and the man who plotted all of this.
Shortly before this synod started, I wrote an open letter to Archbishop Chaput supporting his call to cancel the event in light of the sexual abuse crisis. I noted the alarming number of participants who are named in Viganò’s testimonies and said I was deeply scandalized that this synod would now be targeting youths with a homosexual agenda championed by Martini, McCarrick, and the St. Gallen mafia.
As a young Catholic, I want to thank Archbishop Chaput and every other bishop who is directly resisting this synod’s subversive agenda. I pray that, with their leadership, we may still avert this synod’s looming “surprise.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/10/2018 04:54]