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Section III:
The Upper Room
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Support for the family: Office of Youth and Young Adults
Notwithstanding their essential vocation as first teachers and primary youth ministers, parents themselves often ask for help, especially as their children reach middle school and high school. The next level of support often comes from our dedicated Catholic school teachers and faith formation catechists.
As you know, “Forming youth and young adults in and for a Church that is always young” was one of the three Focus Areas of our Synod. It is for this reason that I am happy to announce the creation of a new Office of Youth and Young Adults, which will be separate from the Office of Marriage, Family and Life. This was specifically requested at the Synod Assembly and is reflected in the voting: Proposition 33 (Vibrant Youth Ministry) and Proposition 39 (Regional/Deanery Cooperation in young adult ministry) were both in the top ten in the voting results.
It has become increasingly clear through the years that it is difficult, if not impossible, for each individual parish to have robust and sustainable ministries in these areas, which can create frustration at the parish level. My hope is that this Office will help the various youth and young adult ministry groups to “walk together” in the ways of evangelization and thereby create greater regional alignment and parish cooperation in these critical ministry areas. In this way, I hope the Archdiocese can help parents in their task of washing the feet of the young people God entrusted to them.
Our encounter with the loving service of Jesus in the foot-washing leads us to the next mystery of the Upper Room: the Holy Eucharist.
B. The Mystery of the Eucharist
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This is my body given for you
What a precious gift we have received from Jesus in the washing of the feet: “a model to follow” (Jn 13:15). What would our lives be like if he had not given us this model? What would our marriages be like? What would our parishes be like? The whole of Christian life has been marked by Jesus’s act of humble service.
And yet, are we not sometimes frustrated by Jesus’s command? As we try to do for others what Jesus has done for us – washing the feet of our spouses, our children, our sisters and brothers in the parish, our co-workers and friends day in and day out – we encounter our limits and at times even lose our patience. Perhaps we even feel we cannot go on and want to cry out to the Lord with St. Augustine: “Give what you command.”
And that – giving what he had commanded – is precisely what Jesus did in the Upper Room on the very evening of the Passover Feast when he said to his Apostles, “This is my body, which will be given for you” (Lk 22:19). Indeed, when Jesus took the bread, he poured all his divine love into it, saying, “This is my body”. When he took the chalice, he poured all his compassion for sinners into it, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you” (Lk 22:20)
(Source: archspmmainsite/Synod_Pastoral+Letter)
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