A Vatican Synod that was long on "Christianity and" and short on Bible-based doctrine

In the course of a sermon I recently gave during a guest-preaching gig, I had occasion to mention this letter from Screwtape to Wormwood, which, of course, is found in C.S. Lewis's brilliant Screwtape Letters, a series of correspondences in which a veteran devil tells a novice how to corrupt a human soul:

My dear Wormwood,

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity And’. You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing....

Your affectionate uncle,  SCREWTAPE  

I thought about it again this morning as I read Robert Royal's account at NRO of his experience of the Synod 2018 on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment. It was held over the month of October at the Vatican.

He eases into his observations and conclusions with a word of praise for the resulting document:

The one real strength of the document is the overall realization that young people today live in a much changed and rapidly pluralizing (some might say fragmenting, even self-destructing) world. In a way, that’s a cliché, of course, since the world is always changing. But the pace and scale and nature of change now is something unique.

But beyond that, it's rife with problematic aspects:

Sadly, the notion of sin has almost disappeared from the world of the young — as it also very nearly has from the document. The Devil is nowhere mentioned in those thousands of words, or the age-old struggle between Good and Evil. Is all that too strong a brew — is the whole dynamic of Redemption too overwhelming — now for the young people the Church seeks to help? 

But there was room for all the peripheral pressing-issues-du-jour to be included:

Which is why you can’t help wishing that the synod fathers had gone easier on the repeated calls for dialogue, accompaniment, listening, etc., which, given the urgency of the challenges, sound terribly weak. Subjects like environment, immigration, etc., which also came up repeatedly over the past month, are — by comparison, and by far — of secondary importance. There’s no sense of putting first things first.

Even when the subject gets closer to the truly relevant, there's a tone of listen-to-the-kids rather than share-the-good-news-of-the-Gospel-with-the-kids:

I wonder how we will look back at the past four weeks. The bishops at the Youth Synod mention subjects such as the sexual revolution, abortion, divorce and the breakup of the family, the digital pseudo-world, and the flattening of the human horizon by widespread materialist and scientistic attitudes in modern societies.

 But the almost ritualistic repetition of “listening,” “accompanying,” “discerning” reminds me of nothing so much as the old Christian–Marxist dialogue. The Church during the Cold War was dealing with a deadly serpent and treated it as if it were merely another dialogue partner. Indeed, lots of Christians went over to the Marxist/socialist side. The reverse was far more rare.

Where is the clear talk about discerning a religious vocation? About marrying? About having children, marriage and children being one of the ways young people often find their way to full adulthood and faith in the modern world? If you want to dabble in sociology, as the synod organizers clearly did: Social science itself has shown beyond all reasonable question that marriage, family, and children constitute the documented pathways to a better life, happiness, health, prosperity, and religious commitment.

Was it too judgmental or controversial to say this outright? And to encourage young people to marry and have children if they don’t have a religious vocation? Instead, the text spends much time fretting over social pathologies; social and spiritual remedies are given very ginger treatment in very general terms.

Royal concludes with a very basic question about the document:

. . . is the text — for most people, sequestered for now behind the barrier of the Italian language and of a forbidding complexity and length — meant for the pope, the bishops of the world, the Catholic faithful? Does anyone know?

He ends as graciously as he started:

For all its lumbering indecision, the final document ends well, indeed very well in its closing, 167th paragraph. On this All Saints Day, it’s good for us to read words reminding us that the whole point of the faith and of human existence is to become a saint:

Through the holiness of the young, the Church can renew its spiritual ardor and its apostolic vigor. The balm of holiness generated by the good lives of so many young people can cure the wounds of the Church and the world, recalling us to that fullness of love to which we have always been called; young saints spur us to return to our own first love.

Let’s hope that, despite the many shortcomings of us elders, it is so. 

In a world so nearly completely taken over by darkness, the institution charged with radiating true light must not get mired in self-designation as just another participant in a conversation about what works and what doesn't. It must offer God's grace.