Pope Francis prays for victims of ‘tragic’ Beirut explosion as death toll climbs

Vatican City, Jun 28, 2018 / 09:50 am (CNA/EWTN News).- At a ceremony for the creation of 14 cardinals Thursday, Pope Francis said the best promotion a person can receive is to serve the person of Christ as seen in the least of his people.

“This… […]

Vatican City, Oct 12, 2018 / 10:17 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Young people are “hungry for mission,” Bishop Robert Barron said Friday during the 2018 Synod of Bishops, convened to discuss young people, the faith, and vocational discernment

“They’re hungry for involvement in the life of the Church, and to be out in the field declaring the Lord,” Barron said at an Oct. 12 Vatican press conference.

Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, is a delegate to the bishops’ synod. He has advocated in conversations in and around the synod that young people should be challenged intellectually and morally.

In his four-minute intervention at the Synod of Bishops, he called for greater intellectual faith formation of young people, particularly catechesis and apologetics.
“Why has it been the case, over the past several decades, that young people in our own Catholic secondary schools have read Shakespeare in literature class, Homer in Latin class, Einstein in physics class, but, far too often, superficial texts in religion?” Barron asked the synod.

Barron also said that acceptance and outreach to young people needs to be accompanied by a call to holiness and conversion, in response to a question about outreach to same-sex attracted young people.

“As always, the church’s first move in regard to everybody, in regard to gay and lesbians, is to reach out and say …  ‘You are a beloved child of God,” Barron responded to reporters in Rome. “It is under that rubric that the Church does its work.”

“Now, having said that, the Church also calls people to conversion. So Jesus calls, but then he always moves people to fullness of life, and so the Church also has a set of moral demands to everybody, and it calls them to conversion,” Barron continued.

“My hesitation is that ‘inclusion’ is more of a secular term. I would use the word ‘love,’” he said.

“The Church reaches out in love, and love is ‘willing the good of the other,’ and sometimes that means calling people to a change of life.”

“I think that is where the Church’s attitude is situated is included in both those moments. Of course outreach in love, but acceptance and inclusion doesn’t mean that we don’t call to conversion. So that’s again to speak about it in a more general term.”

Barron also touched on the idea that many young people will be called to holiness through a generous family life, connecting it to Pope Paul VI’s upcoming canonization Oct. 14.

The canonization on Sunday will be “a moment to celebrate some of that prophetic quality of Humanae Vitae,” said Barron.

“We certainly have talked about marriage and family life in the small groups,” he added, speaking about the synod discussions.

Youth delegates are auditing the 2018 Synod of Bishops and participate in the discussions in the synod hall in a historic first.

“Pope Francis told the young people present in the synod hall to ‘continue making noise,’” Barron shared.

At the Oct. 12 press conference, one bishop from the Netherlands said that a youth testimony in the synod hall motivated him to work with young Catholics to aid persecuted Christians.

Bishop Everard de Jong, auxiliary bishop of Roermond, Netherlands said he was very moved by the testimony from an Iraqi young man in the synod hall.

“At that moment, I realized, ‘what am I doing in my diocese for these Christians there?’” Bishop Jong  reflected.

He said that in his experience Christian refugees from Iraq have brought “a lot of faith into our Catholic communities that are getting grey, getting older, dying.”

Jong concluded that it will be good for all involved to stress the importance of learning about issues of Christian persecution all around the world in the youth pastoral care in his diocese.

“This global solidarity for our church would be very good because it is also for our faith,” Jong said.

[…]

Vatican City, Oct 12, 2018 / 03:45 pm (CNA).- The synod of bishops on young people, the faith, and vocational discernment is being held at the Vatican Oct. 3-28.

CNA plans to provide a brief daily summary of the sessions, provided by the synodal fathers from Poland.

Please find below the Polish fathers’ summary of the Oct. 12 session:

The themes discussed today were oriented by the search for general concepts that could give a new meaning to the entire document. Among them, that of the family appeared.

“It is necessary to write a new document, based on the Instrumentum Laboris,”  said the President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, summing up this day of the Synod’s work in discussion groups.

“The family is an institution that resembles the Church. The Church as a family must constantly accompany Her children. Just as no two vocations are ever exactly alike, but all are different, so too parents, in relation to their children, have to ask each day what they should do to bring them up well, to lead them to the fullness of the life towards which faith is advancing,” emphasized Archbishop Gądecki.

The family’s role in the life and the discernment of the young person’s vocation was also highlighted by Archbishop Grzegorz Ryś, who recalled that, according to the values declared by Polish youth, it is precisely the family which is the most important factor.

“Young people esteem the family in itself and if they are helped to understand the family’s value, then starting from it, one can lead them to faith, to God, who is the Creator of the family. We want to lead young people not only to truly live their youth but to discover Jesus Christ. In order to reach Him, one must first meet them in places that are important to them. Such places are friendship, work, freedom, and the family, which comes first,” said Archbishop Ryś.

Archbishop Ryś also spoke about the question of vocations.

“A vocation, in the broad sense, touches the eternal design of God in relation to every human being. Speaking about vocations, we want to say, first of all, that every person is needed and is eternally wanted by God, that God needs everyone. The fact of coming into being is accompanied by a call, that is a vocation.”

The head of the Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Gądecki, also noted that, in the course of today’s work, attention was drawn to the fact that the document lacks an acknowledgement that in order for it to be Christian, a young person’s calling must necessarily be connected with the cross.

Too often an excessively light vision of the lives of young people is presented, one which omits their worries and their engagement with the transcendental.

[…]