There was such a powerful, and youthful, confluence of events the last few days that speak well of the future.
The event that caught the most media attention was the
“March for Our Lives” rallies last Saturday that involved hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly young, in major cities of the United States, as well as in other countries. The mobilizations were organized to demand tighter gun laws, following the Feb. 14 mass shooting at a high school in Florida, where a lone gunman killed 17.
The next day, Pope Francis delivered a homily for Palm Sunday that was also well covered by international media, with the homily addressing young people. The most quoted passage from the homily, used for headlines, was the Pope’s call to young people: “You have it in you to shout.”
Media noted that the Pope did not refer to the March for Our Lives mobilizations in his homily but many of the articles did not make the connection between the Pope’s homily and the conclusion of a weeklong youth meeting that the Vatican had initiated, in preparation for a synod or meeting of bishops, scheduled for October.
The meeting brought in 305 youth from around the world, but also tapped modern technology to involve another 15,000 young people online. Most of the participants were Catholic, but the organizers also arranged for people of other faiths (as well as some atheists) to participate.
Participants in Rome were divided into 20 language groups while the online participants joined six Facebook groups, all discussing burning issues.
Consensus and disagreements
The product was a 16-page document that did mention areas of consensus, as well as areas where there were disagreements. It provides us a glimpse into how young Catholics are looking at contemporary issues.
I found the document actually quite “careful,” nothing too radical. If it did “shout out” it was against “excessive moralism” in the Church, asking for “… a Church that is welcome and merciful, which appreciates its roots and patrimony and which loves everyone, even those who are not following the perceived standards.” (I will be using “Church” here as it was used in the document, to refer to the Roman Catholic Church.)
On modern information technologies, the young people found new opportunities for connections, including for evangelization, but also noted how the technologies could lead to “isolation, laziness, desolation and boredom.” The youth also asked the Church to “address the widespread crisis of pornography, including online child abuse, and the toll it takes on our humanity.”
On the role of women, the youth said women are still not given equal spaces in the Church or in society, but did not directly mention the issue of women’s ordination.
The “hot-button” issues where disagreements seemed to continue were contraception, homosexuality, abortion, cohabitation (living-in), the permanency of marriage, priesthood and, surprisingly, migration. (“Although we acknowledge our common call to care for the dignity of every human person, there’s no consensus on the question of welcoming migrants and refugees.”)
What then is the relevance of all these global developments to the Philippines?
I thought of the March for Our Lives, sparked by 17 deaths, and how our young people face their own traumas in many communities with the thousands of extrajudicial killings, raids, harassment. Our young people worry not just about lives, but about a whole future and I am saddened hearing, much more now than in the last few years, parents across all classes telling their children to study hard, finish college, and leave the Philippines.
The call then is not just of young Catholics to the institutional Catholic Church, but of young people of all nationalities and faiths, to get older people to dialogue, to become more transparent.
We, as Filipino educators and parents, must allow our people to “shout,” not necessarily in the literal sense. One of the most powerful “speeches” delivered in the March for Our Lives mobilization was that of Emma González, 17, who named schoolmates who had died, then kept quiet for some six minutes to dramatize the time it took for the gunman to kill 17 people.
I have always told my students: You cannot just keep protesting and walking out; you must have your alternatives. Those alternatives must come from being in touch with what is happening in the world, and not just on social media. I remember how upset some activists were when I first became chancellor and I asked if they knew what it was like even among the urban poor communities within UP Diliman: “Nakaapak na ba kayo sa putik?” (Have you stepped in the mud?)
We, educators and parents, can’t preach to our young. Neither can we claim to have all the answers. What we do have are more experiences and, I hope, more discernment, but we must be ready as well to be silent and to listen to their views. Even more importantly, there will be times when we need to go out and meet their friends, see their worlds, online as well as bricks-and-mortar.
Surely, we need to be able to say more than: study hard, and leave the country.
Vulnerability
Surely, too, we should be comforted by the Catholic youth document noting how “a credible Church is one which is not afraid to allow itself [to] be seen as vulnerable.” Let the young know, too, about our anxieties and fears, and how we sometimes do despair as well, and need to be able to find strength and hope in the young.
I wanted to return to the Pope’s homily, where he did decry the “many ways” to “anesthetize” the young, so they “ask nothing, question nothing.” (I thought of the malls, which we parents use to fill time over weekends.) I squirmed reading the Pope’s wise observation on how we adults “make [the youth’s] dreams flat and dreary, petty and plaintive.”
That line got me thinking about the many psychosocial challenges we have with our students, so ironic because the world seems so much more colorful and adventurous today. The Pope’s appeal to the youth seems to be not just for them, but for all of humanity, a terribly heavy responsibility: Even if others keep quiet, if we older people and leaders keep quiet, if the whole world keeps quiet and loses its joy, I ask you: Will you cry out?
mtan@inquirer.com.ph