World Youth Day

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1. “For, sadly, many sons and daughters of Ireland are drifting away from the practice of the faith; some may even have abandoned God.”

   https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/47750

   This was Archbishop Eamon Martin at a Mass for World Youth Day on the Hill of Slane – but why, always, is this day organised in a way that can involve only a tiny proportion of any nation’s young people? Why does it centre always on high-flown addresses from senior clerics – never arranging for every parish everywhere to hear its own young people tell of their needs and hopes and fears – and questions for – the church?

   Recently, the BBC highlighted the fact that about 8,000 young people in Northern Ireland are helping to care for ill or disadvantaged family members, according to the last census. Many of those must be Catholic young people – who would presumably have particular difficulty in heading off to Lisbon for World Youth Day. Isn’t that another reason for questioning the way that event is currently conceived and arranged?

   Five years after the global synod on youth in 2018 we in Ireland still do not know the findings of research into the minds of Irish young people, research that reportedly took place everywhere – including Ireland – in preparation for that, in 2017. In 2022 as part of diocesan synodality discussions, every Irish Catholic school leaving year group could have been invited to submit a digest of its own hopes and fears for the church – but that didn’t happen either.

   All of which points to the conclusion that senior churchmen fear what young people would tell their elders if encouraged everywhere to do so, frankly – and so prefer that the rest of us should hear only FROM churchmen ABOUT young people – on ‘World Youth Day’.

   Question: In how many parishes in Ireland was World Youth Day 2023 even mentioned this August?

   Meanwhile synodality is apparently ‘on hold’ – even though issues like the failure of the HSE to provide care for so many suffering children and young people is lamented by Ireland’s Children’s Ombudsman and crying out for discussion and protest by all of us.

   Are Catholic Christian faith – and the People of God – supposed to be detached from all that? What the Children’s Ombudsman seems to be reporting is a colossal failure of pastoral care by the Irish secular state, but who in the church is noticing?

   And what about the relevance of Christian faith for young people suffering judgementalism, abuse or exploitation on the Internet?

   So much for synodality to be attending to these times – while church buildings increasingly go silent and unused. High time for Catholic ‘World Youth Day’ to catch itself on, to become truly synodal everywhere, and to ‘get real’!

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2. Yes Sean I agree with your sentiments. I also wonder what kind of structures, resources are available in parishes to the youth who were blessed to participate in WYD?
   What concrete ways are parishes providing to these youth to really live out the message they heard? Do they see this message lived out in their parishes? Let us begin…

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