Chant Café

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The young man who questioned whether the final presynodal document accurately reflected the concerns expressed by his fellow young Catholics online has appended this note to the relevant paragraph:

(Edit: for those into online conspiracy theories, we were passed the phrase ‘Extraordinary Form’ by the Synod social media team, and we changed it based on the above translation issue, an edit among many. No Vatican cover up to see here folks.)

“Conspiracy theories” aside, it is nonetheless apparent that there exists for the benefit of the Church’s bishops a huge amount of raw data, written by young Catholics, explaining to the listening Magisterium exactly what is on their minds.

Fifteen THOUSAND young people took time to express themselves in Facebook groups.

Edit: According to interviews conducted by Crux, volunteers reduced the 1000+ responses from each of the Facebook groups into summaries of only one (Portuguese) to three (English) pages.

This is more information than can be summarized for a working group, drafting three versions of a final document, in one week.

Since the organizers of the presynodal meeting are eager that the Church be “a transparent, welcoming, honest, inviting, communicative, accessible, joyful and interactive community,” why not “listen,” in a thorough way, to what these thousands of young people have said?

This would certainly be valuable information whether there were a synod or not. Shouldn’t the Facebook groups’  input be given to an independent organization of sociologists, accustomed to transforming enormous amounts of raw ecclesial data into useful reports?

Edit 2: Crux reports today that the five volunteers who compiled the Facebook posts for their language groups mentioned “Extraordinary Form” 3 times in their summaries.

But today, a third kind of shouting is possible: “And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He replied, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out”” (Lk 19: 39-40).

The temptation to silence young people has always existed. The Pharisees themselves rebuke Jesus and ask him to silence them.

There are many ways to silence young people and make them invisible. Many ways to anaesthetize them, to make them keep quiet, ask nothing, question nothing. “Keep quiet, you!” There are many ways to sedate them, to keep them from getting involved, to make their dreams flat and dreary, petty and plaintive.

Pope Francis, today.

God grant that with the angels and the children we may be faithful, and sing with them to the conqueror of death: Hosanna in the highest.

Ant. 2, Morning Prayer

A member of the preparatory commission reflects:

On the journey, I checked in with the online community in the Pre-Synod English group and discovered a very different dialogue going on to the one present to us. There was a huge online community asking for the Extraordinary Form to be represented in the document, and I realised going through these comments that we as a writing team had not been shown the wealth of online commenting. We were given only a summary of these comments, and so I was saddened to see that many in this group felt disheartened or not listened to. I had turned to my Lebanese and Latin American editing colleagues and had asked them if the phrases ‘Extraordinary Form’ or even ‘Latin mass’ translated for them. They both said that they did not know what I meant, so I included the phrase, ‘reverential liturgies’ hoping to express those things, but looking online, I really saw that the document would have been different had the online world been represented properly.

More here.

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