Doctrinal Clarity

Regarding your ongoing coverage of the youth synod: It is announced already that the final working paper has been completed for the Synod on “Youth, the Faith and Discernment of Vocations” scheduled for October.

Is this curious, that effective engagement with the young — a riddle that has eluded catechists for 50 years — can be finalized in five weeks — and five months early?

Or was the paper nearly completed even before the youth consultation in Rome at the end of March?

And were the problematic catchphrases of the youth “compass” paper planted in advance by clerical ventriloquists?

In any event, published critics who suspect compass-paper coaching will be reassured if the finalized working paper now handles suspect wording directly and not in sophomoric and pliable footnotes, maybe something like the following:

— That, yes, what seems an “unreachable standard” of Christianity is still possible with the elevating power of supernatural grace, and the interior life;

— That, yes, the call for communities that “empower” with a “sense of identity and belonging” is basic, but also risks conflating power with the depth of gifted and fully human belonging; (“... religion is in fact … that in which the human person discovers his essential companionship … more original to us than our solitude” Giussani, The Religious Sense);

— That, yes, for the laity to be missionary means to be partly a “presence within the Church,” but mostly a leaven in the world (“Christianity was spread ... by the spectacle of Christian morals, so opposed to the selfishness, the injustice and the corruption of the pagans,” Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate);

— That alleged “taboos — pre-fabricated, severe and morally excessive” — are actually truths about the very nature of the human person (and are already given the requested “better explanation” in Veritatis Splendor and the theology of the body, especially regarding contraception, abortion, homosexuality, cohabitation, the permanency of marriage);

— That, yes, the youth can be met “where they are,” but this does not mean that the Christ within gives us a pass for having it both ways (even euthanasia is rationalized as a statutory exception to civil laws against homicide);

— That, yes, the Church is relevant to the world, but the ordained Church hierarchy does not claim license for mission-creep to pronounce concrete solutions for the “large social issues” (leavening the world with both justice and truth is the vocation of the laity);

— That rather than “false images of Jesus,” the center of the assembled Church — distinctly more than a sola Scriptura community — is the concrete fact of Christ in history, fully God and fully man, and now in the Eucharist (the Real Presence entirely “transparent” sacramentally in “Body and Blood, [and] soul and divinity”).

Cardinal Donald Wuerl got the big picture just about right, in Rome, when he opened the Year of Faith in October 2012: “This current situation is rooted in the upheavals of the 1970s and ’80s, decades in which there was manifest poor catechesis or miscatechesis at so many levels of education. ... It is as if a tsunami of secular influence has swept across the cultural landscape, taking with it such societal markers as marriage, family, the concept of the common good and objective right and wrong.”

To transcend this tsunami, inclusive “accompaniment” of the youth can no longer exclude doctrinal clarity relating each of us personally to a self-disclosing and Triune God.

         Peter D. Beaulieu

         Shoreline, Washington

 

Defending Christendom

As a Christendom graduate, I was disturbed by the CNA/EWTN News article “Christendom Vows to Improve its Sex-Abuse Response” (Education, March 4 issue), which I found played into the hands of those seeking to damage a wonderful Catholic institution that has done enormous good in these difficult times for the Catholic Church.

No, Christendom College is not perfect, as no institution is; however, the blame in this case seems disproportionate; no member of the faculty or staff has been accused of inappropriate conduct; the one example explored by the article involved an incident by a student that occurred off campus and was not reported until the following academic year. Certainly the administration’s response could have been more prompt or proactive; but the college cannot change the size of its campus at a moment’s notice; the smallness is actually a perk, in most situations, and, short of expelling a student accused of an act off campus from the previous academic year, it is difficult to see what more Christendom could have done.

More emphasis should have been given to the fact that the incident did occur off campus; although Christendom did not have protocol in place for responding to sexual assaults, Christendom has always been extremely proactive in preventing such traumatic events from occurring. For example, Christendom has a strict dress code, requiring professional and modest clothing, as well as strict rules regarding public displays of affection and strictly enforced rules forbidding any visitation between male and female students in dorm rooms.

Only 40% of “Newman List” colleges forbid visitation in the dorms between male and female students, and several Newman List colleges allow visitation as late as midnight or 1:30am, according to the 2016-2017 Newman College Guide. Several do not have dress codes or public displays of affection rules. Surely prevention is more important than the cure!

Timothy O’Donnell has been an outstanding professor and inspiring leader of Christendom College during years of rapid growth and change for the college.

Calling for his resignation for not being proactive enough in a situation whose complexities far exceed the scope of your article is simply unjust and gives rise to the suspicion that someone has an ax to grind; someone wants to inflict as much damage as possible on Christendom and is exploiting the unfortunate situations of former students to achieve this nefarious goal.

         Agnes Penny

         Meeker, Oklahoma

 

Cause for Alarm?

In the Gospel, John 21:15-19, Jesus three times exhorts Peter to “feed my lambs,” “tend my sheep” and feed my sheep.” Reading Father Raymond J. de Souza’s column, “Lawler Paints Bleak Picture in Lost Shepherd” (Vatican, May 13 issue), gives some insight of Pope Francis’ “shepherdship,” and at the same time his comments are alarming. I wonder: Is Pope Francis failing to hear what he ought to hear or is he failing to “tend his sheep”? I then read the adjacent news story, “Communion Proposal Goes Back to Germany” by Elise Harris. I gaped, gulped down and began to fret. Did Pope Francis really say and really mean what he said, regarding the issue over a proposal to allow non-Catholic spouses in mixed-faith marriages to receive Communion, “to find, in a spirit of ecumenical communion, a possibly unanimous decision”?

While the bishops in Germany are formulating their agreement and establishing “certain conditions,” might he also appreciate the ecumenical commitment of the bishops in the U.S., Argentina, Africa, etc. negotiating their own unanimous resolution and establishing their own guidelines and specification of “certain conditions”? Surely, there will be no shortage of “certain conditions” to pave this path.

How can the universality of Church teaching and the doctrine of the faith be maintained in this “figure-it-out-yourselves” environment? It seems Lawler might have it right.

How can a non-Catholic be properly disposed to receive Holy Communion in the sacrament of the Eucharist?

I submit the answer is: Become a Catholic. 

         Frank Diorio

         Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey 

 

Corrections

Regarding “Going the Distance: Online Catholic University Marks 35 Years” (May 27, Education), Catholic Distance University was founded in 1983 by Bishop Thomas Welsh (not Welch) of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia. In addition, Michael Warsaw is the chairman of the board and CEO of EWTN Global Catholic Network, not president and CEO, as the story stated.

The Register regrets the errors.