One Example Among Many – WYD 2023
Some days news from the Vatican is so troubling and sad that I can hardly believe what I am reading or hearing. Recently, it has been on the matter of the World Youth Day, which is but one example among many radical departures from “the Church” I used to know, love, believe, and follow in Christ.
World Youth Day was established by Pope (now Saint) John Paul II in 1985, to be celebrated every three years or so with the pope in office at the time. The intention and purpose of the Day, as described on the official website for World Youth Day, WYD, is this:
WYD is open to all young people who want to take part in a festive encounter centered on Jesus Christ together with their peers. This event is an opportunity to personally experience the universality of the Catholic Church, and to share with the whole world the hope of many young people who are committing their lives to Christ and His Church. World Youth Day is a unique way to deepen your faith and grow closer to Christ, through prayer and the sacraments, together with hundreds of thousands of other young people who share your interests and ambitions.
If we hear the new head of the WYD rightly, anyone going to the event this year, expecting to find it as described in its website, will be as stunned and troubled as I was to read there is a new WYD, re-defined by our current pope. It is very near. The next WYD will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, August 1-6, 2023 – a mere 2 weeks and 4 days from now, as I write this, and as I write this, I am still stunned from reading the radical and disconcerting news of the new intention and purpose of WYD as envisioned by Pope Francis. And his intention is to be implemented by his newly named Cardinal of the Church – just announced – upon the hundreds of thousands of youth anticipated to be present.
This new purpose of WYD is definitely no longer to introduce youth of the world to Christ and His saving Gospel, and to His Church sent to the world – not at all. The Cardinal-designate Bishop Américo Aguiar, auxiliary bishop of Lisbon and new president of the WYD Lisbon 2023 Foundation – described in the Catholic News Agency this redefinition and intention of the event this way:
In the interview [by Walter Sanchez Silva, and Natalia Zimbrão] the bishop said that in his opinion the intention of World Youth Day is to have young people journey together, respecting their diversity.
For the cardinal-designate, the goal is to enable each young person to say: “‘I think differently, I feel differently, I organize my life in a different way, but we are brothers and we go together to build the future.’ This is the main message of this encounter with the living Christ that the pope wants to provide to young people.”
“We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all,” Aguiar continued. “We want it to be normal for a young Catholic Christian to say and bear witness to who he is or for a young Muslim, Jew, or of another religion to also have no problem saying who he is and bearing witness to it, and for a young person who has no religion to feel welcome and to perhaps not feel strange for thinking in a different way.”
The prelate stressed that it’s important “that we all understand that differences are a richness and the world will be objectively better if we are capable of placing in the hearts of all young people this certainty of Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All), that the pope has made an enormous effort so that this enters the hearts of all.” (Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti is dedicated to “fraternity and social friendship.”)
World Youth Day had always been – as described above from the website – an opportunity for young people from all over the world to personally encounter Christ through the witness and example of committed young Catholics, and thus to be encouraged to also choose to give themselves completely to His service, perhaps even in the priesthood or in consecrated life. These days things are changing.
Pope Francis’s “gospel” of “fraternity and social friendship” for the youth of the world and for the Church, is laid out in his encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. It preaches a very different vision, and his to-be-Cardinal and new Head of the WYD Foundation has echoed the same, if I may say so. Please read it yourselves! Here is a passage in the encyclical that illustrates the often confusing if not problematic writings of this pope, here in lifting up his chosen model, St Francis of Assisi:
4. Francis did not wage a war of words aimed at imposing doctrines; he simply spread the love of God. He understood that “God is love and those who abide in love abide in God” (1 Jn 4:16). In this way, he became a father to all and inspired the vision of a fraternal society. Indeed, “only the man who approaches others, not to draw them into his own life, but to help them become ever more fully themselves, can truly be called a father”
There are some important problems with two imprecise statements in the quote above, in Fratelli Tutti, which prove to be central to the pope’s whole thesis:
1.) “Love” has widely divergent interpretations, especially in these days! By “the love of God”, a saint and the Gospel would mean here divine love, godly love, the love with which God loves. The Greek word “agape” in Scripture is well-described in its perfection as self-emptying love of Jesus in His Incarnation (Phil 2:7) as well as the “kenosis” of His Passion, not the self-seeking, self-fulfilling “love” of this world.
Even true “friendship”, a recurrent theme of this papal encyclical, has its new meaning in the Gospel:
Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:13-15)
2.) Such godly love and friendship does not seek to help others “become ever more fully themselves” until they have received the new self in Christ given in Christian Baptism! Thus we are sent to evangelize! To make disciples, not “diversity.” Then with disciples begins the life-long journey of sanctification in Him, the journey of dying to the old self and growing in the new. Then, one can truly be “friend” and even “father” to the other, as Paul wrote:
I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me. (1 Cor 4:14-16)
By such imprecise uses of very significant and important words, the encyclical is confusing. It carries a very soft and “spongy” gospel, and its “rubber” is really hitting the road in a matter of a few weeks. What has happened to the command “Go and make disciples [of Jesus Christ!] in all the nations of the world (Cf Mt 28:20), because Jesus is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life, and no one comes to the Father, but by Him! (Cf Jn 14:6)? Is this traditional and historic basis of the Catholic Faith now become… what? “Divisive”? Not “inclusive” enough? Not respecting the “richness” of “diversity” of the non-Christian religions of the world?
Lord God help us. These days foreshadow a deep darkness, and troubles ahead. Holy Church – how long can you sit silently, while sterile progressivism – present from antiquity in the world, and growing even in the Church – is being proclaimed among the hearts and souls of the faithful? Your saints of these days are being cancelled, while contradictions of Truth are being preached instead of Truth as “gospel” to the innocent and vulnerable. Lord, send grace, and raise up saints among Your people! Let us pray.
