ON IMPROVING THE SYNOD’S INSTRUMENTUM LABORIS: PART TWO In yesterday’s Letter, your editor offered several suggestions for improving Synod-2018’s working document, which will play an important role in shaping the Synod’s final report. Thus it was suggested that the Synod should consider the impact of the 21st-century breakdown of marriage culture on the evangelization of young adults, with an eye to re-affirming the sacramentality of marriage and the Catholic ethic of love as self-gift; that the Synod lift up chastity – the integrity of love – as essential to human maturation, rather than indulging in secular nostrums about “discovering our sexuality;” and that the Synod recognize the failures of dumbed-down Catholicism while proposing the fullness of Catholic truth as the answer to the deepest longings of the human heart. In addition, the Synod fathers and auditors might well address the unhappy fact that its working document, the Instrumentum Laboris, does not contain a single reference to “virtue.” This seems odd at a moment when, as one American theologian put it, contemporary culture is clamoring “for guides to virtuous living,” with “speakers and classes on secular virtue…proliferating” on campuses. This suggests a great opportunity to engage the world in the dialogue for which Vatican II called; and dialogue has, of course, been one of the signature words of the present pontificate. More than mere conversation, however, a genuine dialogue about virtue and the virtues would emphasize, from the Catholic dialogue partner, that the moral life, as the Catholic Church understands it and as John Paul II taught in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor , is not primarily a laundry-list of thou-shalt-not proscriptions, but a summons to beatitude, happiness, and genuine human flourishing. Pope Francis has frequently criticized “legalism,” which the secular world typically identifies with Catholic orthodoxy and its insistence that some things are always and everywhere off-the-board, because these “intrinsically evil” acts radically contradict the dignity of the human person. But there is also a “progressive” legalism, which also misconstrues morality as primarily a matter of rules; the difference is that progressive legalism wants to loosen the rules, to the point where they often disappear into a fog of personal subjectivity and willfulness. Might the Synod remind both the Church and the world that the Catholic understanding of the moral life does not begin with rules (strictly or laxly applied), but with beatitude, and the virtues that make for fulfillment, happiness, and integrity of life – and then proposes “the rules” as guard rails along the journey to beatitude and happiness? Too much of the Synod’s working document remains trapped in a legalistic cast of mind, albeit a progressive sort of legalism. So Synod-2018 would make a real contribution if its final report re-centered Catholic reflection on the virtues and the Magna Carta of the moral life, the Beatitudes of Matthew 5.3-11. In doing so, the Synod would help the world identify some of its present moral confusions and invite it to discover a path beyond them: a path that many are seeking now, however clumsily.The Synod final report should also try to move beyond the Instrumentum Laboris by acknowledging that what is too often construed as a Catholic weakness – the permanence and solidity of the Church’s teaching – is in fact a great strength, especially today. Twenty-first century young adults live in a world of continuing flux, instant communications, and very little rootedness. That can seem exhilarating, for a time. But eventually it becomes exhausting, as the quest for novelty leads down ever more bizarre (and often destructive) pathways. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe this situation of permanent personal and social flux – and a lot of today’s young adults (and, of course, not-so-young adults) are floundering in that liquidity, trying to tread water and sometimes sinking. In this situation, the Church will not successfully evangelize by becoming another institutional expression of liquid modernity; Catholicism will attract precisely because of its stability. Paradigm shifts are far less attractive to today’s young adults, and far less conducive to real vocational discernment, than a winsome presentation of the perennial truths of Catholic faith, centered on a personal encounter with Christ the Lord. The Instrumentum Laboris is also strangely reticent about the importance of beautiful, prayerful liturgy for the mission of evangelization among young adults. This, too, seems myopic. For amidst today’s post-modern social liquidity, belonging to a community that regularly celebrates the Lord’s presence in its midst is a compelling alternative to a world in which autonomous individuals are typically left alone with their (sometimes misconstrued) rights. Moreover, if beauty is indeed the road to rediscovering truth and goodness in a world that confuses “truth” with opinion and “goodness” with willfulness, then the beauty of the liturgy becomes an invitation, not only to belonging, fellowship, and solidarity, but to the virtues. As mentioned here before, the Synod’s working document seems oddly trapped in the mindset of the 1970s. The Synod fathers would do the Church a great service by ensuring that the Synod final report reflects the realities of the twenty-first century, takes seriously the real advances that have been made in young-adult ministry, and thereby identifies the creative, hopeful path into the future for which Pope Francis called in his opening remarks to the Synod on October 3.