PABLUM ISN’T GOSPEL       Cardinal Luis Antonio (“Chito”) Tagle, the archbishop of Manila, is a supremely friendly, outgoing man who, to all appearances, wears his heart on his sleeve: permanently. In an intervention during the first days of Synod-2018, he broke into tears while telling the story of a young Filipino who had a t-shirt bearing the cardinal’s image; one bishop said, with some asperity, that he’d heard the story three times before and it was getting a bit old.  Cardinal Tagle can do better than this when he puts his mind to it, though: he once wrote a scholarly and insightful chapter on a critical moment during the Third Period of the Second Vatican Council, for the canonical progressive account of Vatican II edited by Giuseppe Alberigo. Tagle’s contribution was more balanced and nuanced than others coming from what’s known in conciliar studies as the “Bologna School” (which is not, I hasten to add, a reference to a delicatessen product). Cardinal Tagle’s thoughts and self-presentation are of particular interest, however, because it’s no secret that he’s the Catholic left’s dream candidate as successor to Pope Francis. So all concerned might want to take a look at a short video the cardinal recently made at the behest of the Vatican communications apparatus: https://youtu.be/6kNYYnKORdE. Of which, perhaps, the best that can be said is….oh, dear. With all due respect to His Eminence, a lovely man, this kind of thing just won’t do. It’s pablum. It’s pandering. It’s saccharine happy talk. And there’s little that’s explicitly Christian about it, save the ecclesiocentrism at the end. The cardinal addresses his putative audience of young adults as if they needed hankies and Kleenex, not conversion much less salvation. There is nothing in the cardinal’s invitation to some vague sort of journey that would attract interest from a seriously inquiring young adult who wants to know what the Catholic Church offers beyond a pledge to walk together for “a better humanity, a better world, a better future…” – which is all fine, except that you can pursue those quite decent aspirations without getting up earlier than usual on a Sunday morning, leading a life of prayer, undertaking the occasional penance, or affirming a single sentence in the Creed. The testimonies from successful young adult ministries that LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD has been privileged to publish for the past two and a half weeks all bear witness to a fact that both the Synod’s managers and some bishops can’t seem to grasp: in today’s cultural environment, at least in the West, young people are looking for the Gospel, for friendship with Jesus Christ, and for communities in which the young and their spiritual mentors challenge each other to lead countercultural lives of integrity. They are not looking for more pandering in a world that already tells them they’re wonderful; they know they’re not, and they sense (and some know) that there are empty spaces in their lives the world cannot fill. That’s why the most vibrant young adult ministries in the 21st-century Church make religious and behavioral demands, even as they offer a hand of friendship, a supportive community, the Word of God in the Bible, and the grace of the sacraments. More than one participant inside the Synod Hall and “Off Broadway” has observed that a lot of what’s been said by those the Synod managers evidently wanted in Rome for Synod-2018 sounds as if the Church had taken a trip back to the Seventies. Cardinal Tagle’s video fits easily within that Seventies model. I don’t doubt for a moment that the archbishop of Manila wants to attract young adults to the Lord Jesus Christ; but might he mention the Name? Grace? Redemption? Cross-free, evangelically anorexic, soothing, Seventies-talk didn’t work in that lost decade. And it isn’t going to work now, when the cultural pressures on the young to conform to self-assertion rather than to embrace self-gift are even greater. On this liturgical memorial of St. John Paul II, let’s remember that he won the hearts of the young by transparent integrity (never asking young people to take any risk he hadn’t taken); by not playing the pander-bear; and by challenging young adults to apply to their spiritual and moral lives a lesson they learned in drivers’ education: “Aim high in steering.”