The first stage of the Synod is slowing coming to an end. Wednesday was the last day largely devoted to interventions from the Synod fathers. There will be a final chance to intervene in Friday’s second session, but the time has come to get to work with the contributions made in the interventions and the ensuing discussions.
In yesterday’s morning session 25 Synod fathers and 2 auditors intervened. Here are some notable contributions.
Bishop Charles Drennan, of Palmerston North in New Zealand, outlines four points in which schools are important for the new evangelisation:
1. The encounter with Jesus Christ: befriending the Risen Lord, will see our schools animate with prayer, liturgy, the respect that stems from relating to others as brothers and sisters in Christ, and charitable service.
2. The diakonia of truth: in societies where the winds of relativism and individualism leave the tragic debris of moral confusion and crushed aspiration, our schools stand out as beacons of hope. Knowing the loving truth of Jesus and his Gospel – creative and life-changing, performative not just informative (cf. Spe Salvi, 2) – leads our young to discover the good: the path of inner peace, inner beauty and respect of self and other.
3. The spirit of wisdom: an antidote to the superficiality and triviality which can entrap the young and a foundation from which to strengthen the art of discernment and critique.
4. The sense of belonging to God’s people: identity and conviction are galvanized when the school reverberates with the Church’s ecclesial life of faith. Essential, is a manifest appreciation of the significance of the Day of the Lord and participation at Holy Mass.
These four points are clearly not a reality in many parts of the world, even in Catholic countries and schools, but they point in the right direction of what Catholic schools can be.
George Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney in Australia, addressed the issue of penance and fasting.
“Recently I hosted a dinner to celebrate the breaking of the Ramadan fast. The Sunni mufti was on my left, the head of the Shiites on my right, with Jewish representatives adjacent. The topic of the night became fasting and penance.
It quickly emerged that the only group who fasted less than our Latin Church was some Protestants. It would be a break from Jewish and Christian tradition if this ancient practice disappeared. I commend the English bishops for reintroducing the traditional Friday abstinence.”
Bishop Raphaël Guilavogui, of N’Zérékoré in Guinea, called for a very practical measure to better facilitate the new evangelisation:
“With the concern for a pastoral of proximity, the Conference of Bishops of Guinea asked the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples for the creation of new dioceses in Guinea.”
Guinea’s Catholics, no more than a quarter of a million, are currently spread out across three dioceses (map at left). With so few faithful it is easy to imagine that it is a challenge for the bishops to be permanently close to their flock.
Archbishop Petro Malchuk, bishop of Kyiv-Zhytomyr in Ukraine, gives the reason to evangelise:
“Here is the reason for being for an evangelizer – to prepare and accompany he who seeks Jesus to the encounter with Him. This is exactly what Andrew did: he immediately led his brother to the Messiah, saying that he had encountered He whom we have awaited for centuries. An encounter with a living God, an entirely original and transforming experience which restores everything to its place, overturns from head to foot. Immediately, there is the need to proclaim a reality, which filled with joy, is liberating and salvific. John the Evangelist will remember about this his first encounter with the Master for his entire life: when he wrote the Gospel he was over ninety years old; this marked the beginning of a new day.”
In the afternoon, Donald Cardinal Wuerl, the general relator of the Synod, read the Relatio post disceptationem, a summary of the points made in the interventions. Seven auditors offered final interventions after this reading.
Francisco Gómez Argüello Wirtz, co-founder of the Neocatechumenal Way, pointed out the responsibility of those who have already been baptised:
“Faith comes from listening and today we find ourselves in a secularized society that has closed its ears.
If we want to evangelize, we need to give the signs that open the ears of contemporary man. But how can a Christian community reach this stature of loving faith in the dimension of the Cross and perfect unity? Here we find the need for the post-baptismal catechumenate to make faith grow.”
In Caelo et in Terra 