VATICAN (CNS): The Vatican announced on February 24 that Pope Francis will issue a document on Young people, faith and vocational discernment, five months after the world Synod of Bishops gathered to discuss the topic.
 
The pope will present his post-synodal apostolic exhortation on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, during a visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Loreto, near Italy’s central Adriatic coast.
 

VATICAN (CNS): At the end of the Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith and vocational discernment, the synod fathers writing to the world’s young people, said, “Our frailties and sins must not be an obstacle for your trust. The Church is your mother; she does not abandon you; she is ready to accompany you on new roads, on higher paths where the winds of the Spirit blow stronger—sweeping away the mists of indifference, superficiality and discouragement.”
 

VATICAN (CNS): The Catholic Church and all its members must get better at listening to young people, taking their questions seriously, recognising them as full members of the Church, patiently walking with them and offering guidance as they discern the best way to live their faith, the Synod of Bishops said.
 
The synod’s final document, released on October 27, spoke of friendship, affection, sexuality and “sexual inclinations,” but those issues were not the centre of concern in the lengthy, 167 paragraph document.
 

SYDNEY (CNS): In a letter, more than 200 Australian Catholic university students and alumni told the Synod of Bishops on young people and vocations that young Catholics cannot be well formed in their faith when bishops create confusion by using “ambiguous language” on key issues “despite Christ’s clear teaching, the Church fathers and the clear dogma of the Church.”
 

VATICAN (CNS): Bishop Paul Donoghue of Rarotonga, in the far-off Cook Islands, said  that even there a young person asked him what the Church is doing to prevent clerical sexual abuse.
 
“You would think in our isolation we would not hear about this topic,” the bishop said describving diocese as one of the “dots in the Pacific Ocean. Many dots.”
 

VATICAN (CNS): In their first formal reports to the entire Synod of Bishops, many of the gathering’s working groups reported that they had discussed the clerical sexual abuse crisis and—especially—its impact on young Catholics.
 

VATICAN (CNS): “It is wrong to judge the Church for the acts of certain people within the Church,” Percival Holt, a 25-year-old observer at the Synod of Bishops on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment, told reporters on October 11, during a daily briefin.
 
Holt, president of the Indian Catholic Youth Movement and member of the National Youth Commission of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, said he wanted to make it clear that the Church has “immense love and concern” for young people.

VATICAN CITY (CNS): Young people should have a right to migrate but should never be forced to do so, said an Italian cardinal at the Synod of Bishops.
 
Giuseppe Cardinal Versaldi of Italy, prefect of Congregation for Catholic Education, told reporters at a briefing on October 6, “The Church in Italy and other countries has opened its doors” to migrants.