NAMES GAMES Synods are unique bodies, but the Synod fathers can learn things from the experience of other international gatherings, including the United Nations. This is especially true of Synod-2018, where a lot of agendas are at play within and beneath the formal synodal theme of “Youth, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment.” On this fiftieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, and with the sexual revolution assuming various new forms even as its proponents become more aggressive at the national and international levels, it’s not surprising that one of the agendas at Synod-2018 involves the effort by some to get various neologisms and euphemisms, all supportive of a “liquid” concept of human sexuality, into the Synod’s final report. In dealing with those efforts, Synod fathers who take their cues from a classic Catholic anthropology of the human person and from St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, rather than from the ambient public culture of the West, will want to remember (or learn from) the debate to redefine the family and human sexuality that’s been underway for a long time at the U.N. and in its various affiliated organizations.  That history is not as well-known as it should be; neither is the fact that the Vatican has been a leader in contesting the abuse of language for ideological ends. In the U.N. context, language debates are not all that straightforward. Terms are usually vague and undefined. Discussions often unfold under the imperative of “finding consensus.” And such “consensus,” when it’s achieved, might only mean that the most powerful have insisted upon a neologism or euphemism; on the rare occasion that these things are put to a vote, the neologisms and euphemisms often fail to win the day. All of this puts the alert observer in mind of the great German Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper, who wrote about the connection between the abuse of language and the abuse of power, as did George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In one of the classic political essays of the twentieth century, the Czech human rights activist Václav Havel defined the “power of the powerless” to resist totalitarianism by “living in the truth;” and living in the truth includes using works properly, rather than as euphemistic placeholders for ideological agendas. During and after the Nine Days of John Paul II in June 1979, Poles grasped the profound power of living in the truth. That power led to the Solidarity movement (with its famous slogan, “For Poland to be Poland, 2 + 2 must always =4”) and to the nonviolent collapse of the Soviet external empire. Countless others have quietly lived lives that conform to the truth and to speaking the truth – and if necessary, speaking truth to power, be that political power or cultural pressure.  These are the saints – known and unknown – of every time and place. Ideas have consequences may have become a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It is. And the words used to convey ideas shape our lives because they shape our self-understanding, defining who we are and who we want to become. So the use of a new vocabulary that redefines the “family” goes hand-in-glove with other efforts to fundamentally our understanding of the meaning of human sexuality, and indeed of the human person. Those efforts are based on notions of the plasticity or liquidity of the human condition, in which nothing is “given” and the only thing that counts is what is “asserted.” It’s all willfulness, all the way down, especially in what the academy now knows as gender theory. This global effort to redefine the human includes any number of what we might call “names games.” These names games aren’t all that difficult to identify, notwithstanding the ease with which they’ve slipped into the public conversation and the media. Among the most prominent of the neologisms and euphemisms being deployed in service to the deconstruction of any stable notion of human nature and the family are “various forms of the family;” “sexual orientation;” “gender;” “non-traditional families;” and indeed “sexuality” itself. In the world of international organizations, each of these terms is a freight-carrier for an agenda. Synod fathers should note that each of these words or phrases has appeared in either the Synod’s working document, the Instrumentum Laboris, or in the reports of the Synod’s language-based discussion groups: and therein lies a serious problem. It’s important that the Synod fathers understand how these terms are used in the international organizational world, which ought to raise cautions about their use in an official document claiming to express the mind of the Catholic Church – like the Synod’s final report. Understanding names games and understanding the ideological freight these neologisms and euphemisms carry today is also critical to ensuring that the Synod does not – even unintentionally – promote the very gender ideology and ideological colonization that Pope Francis has clearly and frequently decried. The Synod’s final week of deliberations provides an opportunity for the Synod fathers to bend every effort to craft materials for a Synod final report that speaks Catholic truth with clarity. Young adults are hungry for the truth, even when it is hard; they can rise to the invitation and challenge the truth offers. And the truth does not speak through names games or ideological euphemisms that act as placeholders for an agenda that has nothing to do with the truth of the human person contained in the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Theology of the Body.