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By most accounts, Pope Francis wants the synod on the family to be a messy, earnest affair — high on dialogue and low on posturing.
By most accounts, Pope Francis wants the synod on the family to be a messy, earnest affair — high on dialogue and low on posturing.
The Oct. 5-19 extraordinary Synod of Bishops is meant to open deeper discussions throughout the church, and will culminate in another synod of bishops next year. The conversation about family will mean different things to people in different parts of the world.
- In Africa, there will be a focus on poverty, war, AIDS, interreligious marriage and polygamy.
- In Latin America, violence, jobs, inequality and the splitting up of families through migration.
- In Asia and the Middle East, war, refugees, religious persecution, interreligious marriage (especially in India) and selective abortion (in places like China).
- In the Catholic West, the focus will be on of divorce, gay marriage and birth control — matters of doctrinal law over which the laity and the hierarchy in America, where ex-Catholics would form the country’s third largest religion if classified as such, increasingly find themselves at odds.
The expectation is that the synod will hold import for the future of the church.
“This could replicate, in a somewhat different but no less fruitful way, a dynamic that was essential to the blossoming of Vatican II,” NCR columnist Robert Mickens has written.
Synod and the Church’s future
So then how does the church find its future in America today, the millennial generation?
American millennials, the digitally connected 20- to 30-somethings who grew up on the Internet and came of age during a time of war, economic decline, political dysfunction and rabid cultural polarization, are the subject of some controversy in American life.
They have been labeled the “me me me generation.”
Because many end up back home after college (those who are able to pursue higher education, that is), they have also been called the “boomerang generation.”
But dismissive labels tend to hold little sway with millennials themselves.
“I reject that notion that millennials are defined by a culture of superficiality,” said 25-year-old Christopher Hale, senior fellow at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and co-founder of Millennial, a Catholic blog featuring millennial writers.
“I find that most millennials are intelligent, open-minded people searching for a way forward in life.”
“What we need to see more than anything is a church that is willing to listen and a church that’s willing to engage,” Hale said.
“The church needs to realize that a large number of millennial Catholics did not grow up in a household with a mom and a dad. We are growing up in different times, and we still need a church to minister to us.”
“What once was alternative is now normal,” he said.
Today’s ‘normality’
In America today, normal means that more and more millennials are choosing to marry later and later in life, and that many come from broken homes or have friends who come from broken homes.
It means that millennials live in a time when the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is more than ever accepted in society, and more than ever protected by law.
It means that overwhelming numbers view access to contraception as something necessary and basic in their lives — not to be debated, not to be withheld.
At the Catholic level, there are roughly 15 million millennial faithful living in America, said Bill D’Antonio, a sociologist at The Catholic University of America.
Catholic millennials, D’Antonio said, represent the tail end of a sweeping attitudinal shift that has taken place within American Catholicism over the past quarter-century, one from obedience and compliance with authority as the norm to an overriding sense of “conscience” as the primary marker of Catholic identity in American life. Continue reading
Image: Belief Net
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