On the first day of the youth synod, Archbishop Chaput gave two excellent, incisive interventions (i.e., brief speeches to start the ball rolling, as it were). Here are two articles about them, with the full text at the bottom of each article.
One, on how using secular terminology already gives away too much of what is in dispute.
Two, on the "moral adolensence" of Western materialist culture.
This is what leadership looks like.
UPDATE - 10/18 - Excellent interview with Abp. Chaput. An excerpt:
"Augusto Del Noce, the late Italian philosopher, described our situation best in his essay, “Technological Civilization and Christianity.” It’s worth reading. As “postmoderns,” we’ve tried to overcome our despair with science and technology, and they produce many good things. But they also focus us radically on this world and away from the supernatural. As a result, man’s religious dimension, our sense of the transcendent, slowly dries up and disappears. Technological civilization doesn’t persecute religion, at least not directly. It doesn’t need to. It makes God irrelevant.
"The Church will survive and continue her mission. But to do that, she first needs to acknowledge that the culture she helped create now has no use for her — and why. As a Church, we don’t yet see our reality clearly and critically enough. For example, the current synod’s instrumentum laboris (IL) talks about young people and the effects of social media and the “digital continent.” But it has no grasp of the deeper dynamics of technology that Del Noce names.
"The IL, in its original form, is a collection of dense social science data with very little evangelical zeal. It speaks constantly about accompaniment, which is important, but it contains almost no confident teaching. It can’t and won’t convert anybody. Hopefully, the synod fathers will fix this."