Youth Synod - a new survey

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Good afternoon, all!

I’m a young Catholic who has been rather disheartened by the whole process of the Synod of Bishops on the subject of Young People, the Church, and Vocational Discernment. It seems that the process is quite opaque, the methods being used to compile young people’s responses are haphazard, and the final results may be skewed in favor of people whose outlooks are not in line with Church teaching.

Since Pope Francis has encouraged young people to speak out and be heard, I thought I might try my hand at conducting my own, semi-formal survey of young Catholics to learn what their experience of the Church is like and to compile their responses in a more open and transparent way. I’ve written an open letter to young Catholics in the hopes that people may share it with one another and express an interest in participating. I can’t post a link yet, because I haven’t been a member of the forums before. But if you respond to the thread or message me, I hope to start a conversation going so that I can share a link to the open letter.

I would really appreciate it if any young people on this forum would express an interest in contributing to my survey, and if all participants of the forum would share the open letter (once I’ve linked it) with people in their communities. I’m not a social media guru of any kind, so I don’t have an audience of “followers” that I can blast this out to. So I’m hoping that people will share and respond if they are able and willing and interested.

Let me know if you have any questions!
 
Yes, my biggest fear is that this Synod is going to be used to put forward a “democratic” vision of the Church’s future, one where everyone gets an “equal voice” even if that voice is one clamoring for dissent, immorality, heterodoxy, etc. I feel like many older prelates and Church leaders have been disappointed that young Catholics actually stand for tradition and orthodoxy and virtue, so there will be an attempt to mix faithful, active young Catholics’ voices with “young people” generally to dilute what we have to say. So I appreciate that you’d be willing to take my survey. I’ll be sharing a link to the open letter, which has a link to a form for your personal information, and then I’ll share the survey. It’s kind of a complicated process, but I wanted to make sure that the people who take the survey are serious about the results and not just putting the bare minimum of effort into responding.
 
I’ve shared the link to my open letter for my Synod survey under my user profile in the “website” field.
 
As a young Catholic, I do agree that it feels some traditional voices have been stifled. Especially on the pre-synod Facebook group, where the vast majority of youths all shouted “extraordinary form” and “tradition” and other similar words, yet it’s hardly to be seen in the final document. I don’t necessarily blame the young writers, but I do sort of blame whoever picked them to write it. Fortunately for those who wanted things to go this way, many of the writers had never even heard of the Latin mass before.
 
I will read the letter tonight but a cursory look and your post have me interested.
 
I’m curious why y’all are afraid of it?

I skipped the survey because I didn’t care for old people’s questions.
 
I am not surprised that the traditional Mass was ignored because youth love it.

The youth synod will be a more modernist outlook and sad to say I have very little hope anything will change
 
I would love to contribute to your survey as well. I feel like I get where you’re coming from. I feel almost like the Pope is letting young people down.

Never mind. I wont, because I don’t live in the United States.
 
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That’s all?

I was thinking about how the world is more smaller due to modern technology & the exchange of knowledge is more easier than ever… Pandora’s Box.
 
Yeah, I’m sorry about limiting to the US, but I figured if I share the document I want to be able to share it with people who are the proper pastors of the people who take it, and I don’t have any connection to bishops in other countries to speak of.
 
When you say you don’t care for the “old people’s” questions, what do you mean? If you mean the renewal of baptismal promises, they are used in lieu of the profession of faith at certain masses or other liturgies. It’s just the Apostle’s creed in question format, essentially, so if you’re not willing to answer those you’re probably not in the target audience.

Also, the link to the form isn’t a link to the survey itself, but to an ‘expression of interest’ form. I have to pay for a subscription to a form-creating service, so I want to make sure that the responses I receive are substantive. I’ll invite people to complete the survey who complete the expression of interest form, but I don’t want to share the survey link in public for fear of having to pay for a million two or three word responses to the survey questions.
 
It’s not tremendously expensive but yes, I wanted to take it seriously and not just put some survey monkey link out there for people to vent on. I have done social science research before in undergrad and I’ve copy-edited other people’s doctoral dissertations and master’s theses, so I have a minimum of experience to actually conduct a semi-formal survey. A large part of my problem with the Youth Synod’s methodology is that it’s basically: 1) Let everybody discuss things willy-nilly on social media. 2) Take all those comments back into a dark secret room and pick out the ones we want to share with everyone. 3) Share the cherry-picked statements like it’s a rigorous, scientific study.

I actually want to conduct a survey, release the dataset, and then produce an analysis of the responses.
 
The process is opaque. I know I responded to a survey for my diocese almost a year ago and the responses aren’t being compiled and released until this coming September. The Synod leaders have had language-based Facebook groups where people could share their thoughts, but apparently each language group had as many as 15,000 individual comments, but those comments were boiled down to one-page to three-page summaries that were then taken to Rome. It’s not entirely clear how those summaries were prepared. Those summaries were then discussed by groups of young people to create a pre-synodal document that many have complained is unrepresentative of the comments of the original Facebook groups.

I just want to introduce a more transparent set of responses in order to demonstrate what real-world Catholic young people have to say about certain topics related to the Church and society. I also feel it’s important to limit the scope of participants so that reasonable conclusions can be drawn about the sample of the population, which is why I’ve asked people who aren’t practicing Catholics who live in the US not to participate.
 
You may not be aware but I’m deaf so my worldview is uniquely different.
 
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Well, for one thing, tatoos are not forbidden by the Church. And what His Holiness actually said was: “Do not be scared of tatoos.” And that young people should be asked "Tattoos often signify membership in a community. You, young man, that you’re tattooed like that, what are you looking for? In this tattoo, which community membership are you expressing?”

Discussing and “embracing” are two different things. Being open to dialogue is not a bad thing.
 
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