Vatican Shares Notes Showing Traditional Trend Among Young People in the Church
CV NEWS FEED // The Vatican shared a photo of handwritten prayer intentions from young people who attended World Youth Day on social media this week, and all of the notes asked for a return to tradition and renewal.
The post highlighted “Young people’s prayers for the synod and the Church at the World Youth Day,” the image featuring a series of handwritten prayer intentions on post-it notes, and was posted to the Vatican’s official synod X account on August 28.
One of the slips of paper read: “For a return to Orthodoxy and Tradition”; another— “Dear Lord, help the people not impose their ideologies in the synod deliberations.”
The X post comes in the midst of speculation surrounding the upcoming October 2023 Synod on Synodality, which will address a wide range of hot button topics—including LGBTQ+ inclusion, female ordination, and divorce—during its proceedings.
Tridentine Brewing, a popular traditional Catholic X account which regularly promotes the Latin mass, commented on the Vatican’s post saying: “Will [Pope Francis] listen to the calls of the youth? Or continue imposing a failed, rigid ideology from the 1960s on the young people of the Church?”
The synodal process began in 2021 in dioceses all over the world with a global “listening process”, the results of which were sent to the Vatican. A continental assembly of bishops then reviewed the results and made a series of propositions on a way forward.
Traditional Catholics have criticized the synodal process as unprecedented in the Catholic tradition.
“We are told that the Church which we profess, in communion with our ancestors in the faith from the time of the Apostles to be One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic is now to be defined by synodality, a term which has no history in the doctrine of the Church and for which there is no reasonable definition,” said Cardinal Raymond Burke in his foreword to The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box.
There will be synodal gatherings in October 2023 and 2024 which will review these findings in light of the official post-synodal document Amoris Laetitia, an exhortation by Pope Francis on love and Christian marriage and family.
