The Big Omission at the Synod, Neocatechumenal Families
None of them was brought in to speak. And yet they are the most engaged in putting the model of Catholic marriage into practice. A confidential document from the leadership of the Way, in commentary on the synod.
ROME, November 13, 2014 – In the interval between the two synods convened by Pope Francis on the issue of the family, everyone has been urged to speak.
This also means those who at the first of the two synods, held last October, were not able to speak in the assembly because they were not invited.
What made the biggest uproar was the forced absence from the synod of the pontifical institute that had the greatest qualifications to be called upon:
> Pontificio Istituto Giovanni Paolo II per Studi su Matrimonio e Famiglia
Less well known, instead, is the failure to invite representatives of Catholic groups among the most vigorously engaged in translating the Christian vision of the family into concrete life.
One of these groups is the Neocatechumenal Way, founded in Spain in the 1960’s by the laymen Francisco "Kiko" Argüello and Carmen Hernández and today present with its communities in almost all countries of the world, with many of its own priests formed in a hundred seminaries, with the support of many hundreds of bishops, and made up above all of families, most of them with a large number of children and often ready to go on mission into the most far-flung and sometimes hostile regions of the globe.
The Neocatechumenal Way has made news mostly for the criticisms and intra-ecclesial conflicts provoked by its highly unusual liturgies, by its Baptisms and Masses celebrated with a “creative” ritual that departs on many points from the ordinary usage of the Latin Church:
> That Strange Mass the Pope Doesn't Like (11.4.2012)
In reality, what most distinguishes the Way from other ecclesial movements and from the faithful as a whole is the centrality of the family in it, theorized and lived in perfect obedience to the magisterium of the Church of all times but in particular of the most recent popes, including that encyclical “Humanae Vitae” which is ignored and disobeyed by almost all Catholics with the general complicity of the clergy, but certainly not by the Neocatechumenals, in view of their generous fecundity.
It is no surprise, therefore, that in 2009 the pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family should have awarded Kiko, the founder of the Way, with a doctorate “honoris causa” precisely for his efforts in support of Christian marriage.
Little or nothing, however, is known in public about how the leaders of the Way “raise” the families that are part of their communities.
And nothing had come out until now about what they might think about the questions discussed at the synod.
It is a constant practice of the Way, in fact, to protect what is said within its communities from external observation.
What follows, for example, is not a public document. It is the extract of a catechesis for internal use, developed by Fr. Mario Pezzi - the priest who with Kiko and Carmen is part of the triad at the summit of the Way - in one of the periodic formative “live-ins” for leaders of the movement, held in Porto San Giorgio last September 25-28, a few days before the beginning of the synod.
The complete text of the catechesis by Fr. Pezzi – in both written and oral versions, the latter with spontaneous comments from Kiko - is in the highly detailed account for the internal use of the “live-in.” But this summary is enough to grasp its importance.
It will not be easy for the proponents of innovation in the matter of Catholic marriage to ignore this powerful voice to the contrary.
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