Napier: Parishes should learn from youth synod, and synod should hear African voices

October 13, 2018 CNA Daily News News Briefs 2 Print

Vatican City, Oct 13, 2018 / 12:04 pm (CNA).- A prominent South African cardinal said Saturday that the 2018 Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith, and vocational discernment can be a model for the way that Church leaders engage with youth in parishes and dioceses around the world.

Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durbin also called for revisions to a synod working document he called “Eurocentric,” saying that the synod’s work must take into account the situation of young people and the Church in other parts of the world, noting especially the needs of the Church in Africa.

The bishops meeting for the Oct. 3-28 synod are not only talking “about young people, but we’re talking with them and to them,” Napier said at on Oct. 13 press conference. He praised the conributions of 34 young people invited by Pope Francis to be active participants in a meeting predominantly comprised of bishops.

The cardinal said that those young people are active participants in the synod, offering short speeches, called interventions, just as bishops do, and participating in the small discussion circles that will help to shape the synod’s final report.

“More important than just their being in the synod hall is their presence and participation in our small groups,” he said.

The cardinal said that this is the eighth time he has participated in a synod of bishops, and that the participation of young Catholics in this synod makes it a very different experience from those he has previously attended. He added that the “proactive involvement” of Pope Francis in the synod process has also made the experience unique.

Napier said that he hopes the active involvement of young people at the synod will become a model of the Church’s engagement with youth.

For most Catholics, “the daily face of the Church is the face of the priest.” For that reason, synod fathers should encourage parish priests to listen and actively engage young people in parish life and planning in the same way the synod has.

Napier also said that the synod’s working document is written from a “Eurocentric” perspective.

African delegates to the meeting, he said, should “present the African reality much more clearly from our perspective.”

He noted that the document does not sufficiently recognize the impact of mass migration from Africa on the continent’s countries. Africa is losing some of its most gifted young people to migration, he said, because of the exploitation of natural resources and the environment.

“Those who would have been living off the land are now unable to do so” so they migrate, he said, because of the effect of deforestation and aggressive mining techniques.

He also decried the economic conditions that lead to child labor in Africa, saying that because children are put to work at a young age, they “are not getting the education they need in order to have a good start at life.”

Because of corruption within many African governments, “this cycle of exploitation just continues.”

The cardinal said there is another African reality that is not reflected in the synod’s working document.

“While many young people in the West are leaving Jesus, or at least his Church, and they’re doing this for a variety of reasons…in Africa there is a very different kind of phenomenon and that is that young people are looking for Jesus and looking for answers to their problems” in the Church.

The growth of Christianity among young Africans, he said, has important lessons for more developed nations.

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Pope Francis: Desire points our discernment in the right direction

October 12, 2022 Catholic News Agency 5
Pope Francis speaking on St. Peter’s Square, Vatican, Oct. 12, 2022 / Daniel Ibáñez / CNA

Rome Newsroom, Oct 12, 2022 / 03:35 am (CNA).

At his public audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis spoke about the role desire plays in spiritual discernment, comparing it to a compass that points one in the right direction.

“Desire is not the craving of the moment. No. The Italian word, desiderio, comes from a very beautiful Latin term, desidus, literally ‘the lack of the star,’” Pope Francis said in St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 12.

“Desire is ‘the lack of the star,’ of the reference point that orients the path of life,” he continued. “It evokes a suffering, a lack, and at the same time a tension to reach the good that is missing.”

The pope spoke in his general audience about desire as the third “indispensable ingredient” of discernment, after prayer and self-knowledge.

Pope Francis greeting pilgrims on St. Peter's Square, Oct. 12, 2022. Daniel Ibáñez / CNA
Pope Francis greeting pilgrims on St. Peter’s Square, Oct. 12, 2022. Daniel Ibáñez / CNA

On Aug. 31, Francis began a series of weekly catecheses, or messages, on discernment, which he described as “an exercise of intelligence, and also of skill and also of will, to seize the opportune moment” in order to make a good choice about one’s life.

“Desire, then,” he said in the live-streamed address on Wednesday, “is the compass to understand where I am and where I am going. Actually, it is the compass for whether I am standing still or going.”

Pope Francis addressed how someone can recognize desire within themselves in his message. “A sincere desire,” he said, “knows how to touch deeply the chords of our being, which is why it is not extinguished in the face of difficulties or setbacks.”

“Unlike a momentary craving or emotion, desire lasts through time, even a long time,” he explained.

General audience on St. Peter's Square, Oct. 12, 2022. Daniel Ibáñez / CNA
General audience on St. Peter’s Square, Oct. 12, 2022. Daniel Ibáñez / CNA

Pope Francis pointed to some of the pitfalls to knowing the desires of one’s heart; for example, society’s promotion of “the maximum freedom of choice,” while those “choices” are mostly reduced to just what is wanted most in the moment, not what will truly satisfy over the long term.

“We are bombarded by a thousand proposals, projects, possibilities, which risk distracting us and not permitting us to calmly evaluate what we really want,” the pope said, adding that many people go around “with their cell phones in their hands and they are searching, looking,” but never stopping to think or reflect.

“Desire cannot grow like that,” he said. “You live in the moment, satiated in the moment, and desire does not grow.”

Francis said that distraction can cause people a lot of suffering “because they do not know what they want from their lives; they have probably never got in touch with their deepest desire.”

Another pitfall the pope mentioned was the knowledge that one wants to do something but never actually takes action.

“And so certain changes, though desired in theory, when the opportunity arises are never implemented,” he said.

“Often,” he said, “it is indeed desire that makes the difference between a successful, coherent and lasting project, and the thousands of wishes and good intentions with which, as they say, ‘hell is paved with.’”

The moon was visible over St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, on the morning of Oct. 12. 2022. Daniel Ibáñez / CNA
The moon was visible over St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican, on the morning of Oct. 12. 2022. Daniel Ibáñez / CNA

He recalled that Jesus, before performing a miracle, often questions a person about his or her desires, like he does with the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda in chapter five of the Gospel of John. 

“Jesus asks him: ‘Do you want to be well?’ How come?” the pope said.

He explained that “Jesus’ question was an invitation to bring clarity to his heart, to welcome a possible leap forward: to no longer think of himself and his own life ‘as a paralytic,’ transported by others. … By engaging in dialogue with the Lord, we learn to understand what we truly want from life.”

The paralytic, he continued, is an “example of people [who say,] ‘Yes, yes, I want, I want,’” but in the end, never do anything.

Instead of taking action, we find excuses or complain: “But be careful,” he said, because “complaints are a poison, a poison to the soul, a poison to life because they don’t make you grow the desire to move forward.”

“If the Lord were to ask us, today, the question he asked the blind man in Jericho: ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ how would we answer?” the pope said. “Perhaps we could finally ask him to help us know his deepest desire, that God himself has placed in our heart.”

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2 Comments

  1. I am grateful that his Eminence and my fellow countryman Cardinal Napier for his defence of Catholic moral doctrine. The idea that we should simply tolerate disordered relationships is indeed a very Western, Eurocentric idea.

    Reply

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