The ecclesiastical propaganda machine created for last October’s Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church is still grinding away, and it’s getting both tiresome and worrisome.
As for tiresome: Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, the General Rapporteur of Synods 2023 and 2024, informed us in a June 14 “news” release from the Vatican’s Synod office that “the Holy People of God has been set in motion for mission thanks to the synodal experience.” Well, no, Your Eminence, that’s not quite right.
God’s holy people were set in motion for mission by the Lord Jesus two millennia ago, when the apostolic band was instructed to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19). The apostles were confirmed in that mission by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit recorded in Acts 3, and the Church has continued in mission ever since. The character and scope of the Church’s 21st-century mission were identified by Pope St. John Paul II in the 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), which taught that every Catholic is baptized into a missionary vocation and that everywhere is mission territory. The living and vibrant parts of the world Church have embraced that teaching and are living it today.
The notion that the “synodal experience” has set the Church in motion for mission is thus preposterous historically. It is also propaganda for an exercise that has thus far been bogged down in the ecclesiastical navel-gazing against which Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, warned in the pre-conclave address to the General Congregation of Cardinals that helped bring him to the Office of Peter. Pope Francis repeated that admonition against ecclesial self-referentiality in a homily the day after his election.
As for Synod 2023, it bore no resemblance to the first Christian Pentecost. For after the descent of the Holy Spirit, the first Christians did not sit around as a small group in the Upper Room, saying, “Wow. That was something. Let’s talk about it.” No, they went straight out into the streets on mission, “and there were added that day about three thousand souls” (Acts 3:41). Nothing quite like that followed the tedious and manipulated small group “Conversations in the Spirit” at Synod 2024.
Will things change in October at Synod 2024? There are reasons to be skeptical.
From June 4-14, a group of theologians worked – my clumsy fingers almost typed “woked!” – to help prepare Synod 2024’s working document, based on post-Synod-2023 reports the Synod General Secretariat had received. The theologians invited seemed to reflect the Synod office’s DEI concerns, although their diversity was not notably theological. Catholic theology in the United States and American theologians working abroad (in some instances, a ten-minute cab ride from the Synod office) are among the Church’s most creative thinkers today. Yet you would look hard (and unsuccessfully) to find members of the U.S.-based Academy of Catholic Theology or the U.S.-based Sacra Doctrina Project prominent among those called to Rome for this ten-day consultation – and this despite the fact that members of those organizations tick all the seemingly-requisite ethnic, racial, and “gender” boxes. Is there an implicit bias at the Synod office, according to which the dynamically orthodox need not apply?
Cardinal Hollerich is not the only member of the College of Cardinals who is spinning tales of the “synodal process” that raise concerns about Synod 2024. The General Secretary of the Synod, Cardinal Mario Grech, has been traveling the world extensively since Synod 2023, on what some churchmen take to be a campaign for the papacy, or at the very least a campaign to be a Great Elector in the next conclave. Be that as it may, the cardinal’s interview last March with a Swiss newspaper set off several alarm bells.
First, the cardinal allowed as how, “when we speak of unity, of communion, we are not referring to unity of thought.” Really? Are we not in the communion of unified conviction when we recite together the Nicene Creed? The Apostles’ Creed? Is local-option Catholicism – the kind of Catholicism in which a grave sin in Poland is a source of grace ten miles away, on the other side of the Polish-German border – really Catholic (which, after all, means “universal”)?
Then the cardinal said that he imagines the Church “as a rainbow.” An interesting image, that. Grech is Maltese, which means that English is entirely familiar to him. So it is impossible for him not to grasp what referring to a “rainbow Church” signals in today’s globalized culture.
It promises to be an interesting October in Rome.
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I’ve had just enough of this Synoidal talk. I’ve had just enough of Jesuits in the Church. I’ve had just enough of this papacy. It’s time for regime change..
And I had enough of priests who start Mass with:
“Hello everyone, welcome to Mass, how good to see you all here”,
who then say during their homilies:
“I am so happy to be here among us, you are so valuable, thank you so much for coming, thank you so much for sparing thirty minutes of your life for being here”
and then finish with:
“Thank you for coming, everyone, have a nice day!”
They seem to be oblivious to the fact that people come to God, not to them. It is people who should be grateful that they can receive Christ. Hence those priests devalue Holy Communion and Mass.
This is not a parody; I faithfully wrote down what one of our new priests does on a regular basis. The result for me: I do not want to go to church because he “kills” the Scriptures. I still go (albeit not as often) but I feel sick. There is so much of that “niceness” around that I stopped talking to priests (before I would tell them if I perceived they did something very wrong).
What I described is the real and the most important fruit of that “synodal whatever” spreading like poison. Basically, it is pampering people for the price of losing Christ and true discipleship, a true purpose.
Galatians 1:10 – “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of GOD?
Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of CHRIST.”
True Catholics are starving for priests, bishops, cardinals, and a pope who genuinely fear & respect GOD in CHRIST.
Anna;
Understood.
May I suggest you go to a Latin Mass? If you have to get up much earlier and then travel many miles to reach it – so much the better because you’ll appreciate it that much more. I’ve been there, so you can take my word for it.
If you don’t go to mass as often because a priest is overly welcome then you lose and Satan wins. I go not for the priest but for what that priest can give .. the body and blood of Christ. The stuff that gets on my nerves I offer up in reparations for sins I have committed against the immaculate heart of Mary & the sacred heart of Jesus. Please go more often.
The whole process seems to be loosing steam and heading for the scrapyard of irrelevancy just waiting for the next pontificate to kick it under the rug. It’s like putting vinyl siding on Saint Peter’s in Vatican City. In time it will fall off and once again reveal the true beauty of the church. We need to do nothing about it as it will destroy itself.
James;
Your phrase “the scrapyard of irrelevancy” – I like it. Would you mind if I used it some time in the future?
“Vinyl siding on St. Peter’s” – that too has a nice ring to it.
Weigel writes: “…a group of theologians worked – my clumsy fingers almost typed ‘woked!’ – to help prepare Synod 2024’s working document…”, AND, of (“toady,” some say) Cardinal Grech: “it is impossible for him not to grasp what referring to a ‘rainbow Church signals in today’s globalized culture.”
Weigel asks earlier: “Is there an implicit bias at the ‘Synod office,’ according to which the dynamically orthodox need not apply?” WOW, almost another typo! Of the openness of the synodal process to the rainbow subculture, Weigel might easily have mis-typed “Synod orofice…”
My blessed brothers and sisters in Jesus, and to Mr. Weigel,
Just as St. Athanasius was excommunicated and later canonized by Holy Mother Church, so, too, in the future will Archbishop Vigano be held by Holy Mother Church as “a voice crying out in the wilderness of holy vestment fraud.” And this synod crap is just that, crap, and the source of this stinkin synod crap is from Satan! St. Peter in his 2nd Letter (1:16-19) begins by saying: “Beloved: We did not follow CLEVERLY DESIGNED myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ ….” And that’s exactly what this synod stuff truly qualifies as, just cleverly designed myth crap. And the men who are wearing these holy vestments, and who have swallowed this synod crap hook, line and sinker, are truly lost souls, very much in need of our prayers for their conversion.
As far as I am concerned, (in my little humble opinion) they are the blind leading the blind. And Archbishop Vigano has been blessed by our Savior Jesus Christ with the holy gift of Prophecy. That is right, he is a prophet and that’s why the evil powers inside the Vatican had to silence him, just as King Herod did to St. John the Baptist. Come Lord Jesus!
When you get to be pope, then you can make saints. Until then you are just another guy overly enamored of a nutcase breakaway cleric who tempts you like the devil tempts you.
Thank you for your criticism.
909, should I become Pope by the grace of God I would have the following lived considerations and I would follow through with decisions after seeking the assistance and meditating in prayer.
Where I live they make a peanut bar snack, lightly cooked peanuts encased in caramel. Simple recipe peanuts and flavoured sugar. That is what came to my mind as I read “enamoured of a nutcase breakway”; and since it plainspoken is not a temptation as neither is Vigano who has a lot of pluck, the rest of your sentence lost its intended slam.
Hitting one of his supporters when he’s down, well, I won’t say.
What it is for Vigano is the mounted up tendentiousness and turbidity swamping-tsunami he has had to live with from his generation. You try taking it on and see how you feel, how much it will bring disquiet and disruption upon you. You mustn’t speak out of context.
Vigano maybe too much harangues the Council on the one hand and likewise too much fosters Trump. But I wouldn’t necessarily go and excommunicate him. On Trump, may I suggest that what Vigano has to factor is that Trump should be left to be himself. Don’t let him hang his hat on Catholics allowing him thereby to keep testing what he can get away with; otherwise you thereby unravel what should be a real true challenge he must meet with his own substance if he had it.
Besides, Catholics are not there to be harnessed in that manner! What is it with the ones who threw their lot in with the Republican failure!
By which you would have helped him and others encumber the progress of the cause for life and nobility associated in the cause.
Readers, there is a development, so I must say something about it.
Archbishop Vigano at LIFESITE News is digging in heels about the affair surrounding his excommunication; which latest unfolding I didn’t intend to provoke. I want to express my kind regard of him and offer my advice to avoid churning up the problems. He can not at this time prove that the election is invalid and his idea that the Papacy was split by the resignation of Benedict XVI is novel and does not void the valid votes.
Daniel in the lion’s den, was meek and undisturbed and patient in awaiting the outcome from God. This is my prayer for all including him. I make my prayer in fear of God also with some trepidation. I would prefer that the Spirit will not yank me by the hair to carry me over the seas to Vigano, as the way to animate His will for us in this or make a big impression for a slight thing.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archbishop-vigano-bergoglio-is-an-anti-pope-benedicts-resignation-was-certainly-invalid/?utm_source=most_recent&utm_campaign=usa
Yes, a voice crying out, but not quite a prophet or future saint. Archbishop Vigano still could have listed his grievances, but refrained from explicitly charging that the pope is not a pope and that the Second Vatican Council was not a council. For possible consideration, instead, two longer-range perspectives from Pope Benedict, plus an observation:
FIRST, about the need for the council, Cardinal Ratzinger pointed to causes well before 1962:
“According to religion statistics, old Europe is still an almost completely Christian part of the Earth. But there is not better case than this to prove what everyone knows, that statistics lie. The appearance of the church in the modern era shows that in a completely new way it has become a church of heathens [!], and increasingly so; no longer, as it once was, a church made up of heathens who have become Christians, but a church of heathens, who still call themselves Christians, but have really become heathens (Ratzinger, in the October 1958 issue of “Hochland,” quoted by Peter Seewald, in “Benedict XVI: A Life,” Bloomsbury Press, 2020, p. 296).
SECOND, are we too myopia to pin the meltdown on the Council? So, this about Benedict as a student of St. Bonaventure:
“…with Bonaventure, as with all thirteenth-century theologians, the concept of ‘revelation’ did not match the way in which it was later understood. In the course of time, the concept came to be used as an umbrella term for Scripture. However, in the language of the Middle Ages, Bonaventure spoke of revelation as the ‘disclosure of what was hidden’. God’s already given revelation was to be regarded as final, but however final it might be, it was also inexhaustible, because it kept on offering new depths of insight [….]
Said Ratzinger about what was revealed: “’[it was] always greater than what was merely written down’, just as every event was not identical with the telling of it, which tried to pin down what happened” (ibid. pp. 279-80).
OBSERVATION:
The deficiency and deception of the current synodal process (a goulash of governance, doctrine, pastoral practice, zeitgeist, expert study groups, etc.)—and which Vigano almost exposed less schismatically, yes?—is that it dismisses and contradicts [!], as a “backwardist” and written-down obsolescence, the “inexhaustible,” living, and definitive Deposit of Faith.
A proceduralist synod-ISM which now would claim itself to BE the ‘inexhaustible” revelation! And, would transubstantiate the very Body of Christ—by upending moral and sexual theology, and by grooming a post-apostolic/unisex, and invalid ecclesiology. No longer the age of Protestantism, but the age of Prostitution?
In better hands a consultation and synod could have been all that it pretends to be. Building on Ratzinger/Benedict, above, and the Council’s 20-year pulse-check at the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops.
Many thanks, dear Peter D. Beaulieu for this insightful analysis of our fraught situation.
You highlight the shocking disjunction between the Scripturally-authentic faithfulness of Pope Benedict 16 and the worldly promiscuity of the current papacy, it’s prostitution subtly concealed by a snow storm of media-savvy, insincere Catholicities. We used to have cheese, now we have chalk!
A big question: “How have the taste buds of so many Catholics been re-engineered to relish calcium carbonate as if it were cheddar?”
Ever seeking to hear & lovingly obey King Jesus Christ; blessings from Marty
Certainly, it is myopic to correlate the post VII decline on the Council itself, but there were enough secular sentiments sprinkled within the Catholic wisdom of the documents that validated a trajectory of a Catholicism that seemed to value personal affirmation displacing submission to God’s will. “Conscience” has become as much of a frivolously abused word as “listening” or “dialogue” because they all lead to no-fault sinfulness on demand. Tolerating massive dissent on Humanae Vitae over 56 years has been exponentially more damaging than the few flaws of VII documents.
Mr. James Connor,
I love the vinyl siding analogy. Very apt! That said, my gut instinct tells me that something evil with a robust persistence factor (much like a pernicious chemical agent) will come of the upchucking, I’m sorry, upcoming sin-nod. Without apology I state that I do not trust it. Not at all. Come to think of it, maybe they are going to employ a vomiting agent to provide the true upchucking experience. Time and events will tell.
Synodally, we Synodal together as we also yodel together. A synodal church will synodally yodel, creating overtones of the Holy Spirit within our synodality. Oh, and Father Rupnik is the very model of a synodal gentleman.
Alarms have levels of significance. Weigel’s alarm is on the level of sun blinded British Sudan expeditionary force Captain John Durrance in the movie The Four Feathers crying out Alarm! alarm! Warning that the fanatical Mahdi army was about to descend upon his small company.
Analogously, many are blinded to the looming assault on doctrinal orthodoxy implied in Cardinal Grech’s envisioned Rainbow Church. Not simply a colorful allusion to unity, rather to togetherness of a different kind. A new mission contrary to the ancient Apostolic. The Synod’s instrumentum laboris a response equivalent to “Wow. That’s something. Let’s talk about it.”
Just reread the 7/28 piece on the answer to the question “Do you believe that synodality as a path of conversion & reform can enhance the mission & participation of all the baptized?” which is a question posed by the folks in Rome and the 88-12 NO response which was quickly deleted.
“The ecclesiastical propaganda machine created for last October’s Synod on Synodality is still grinding away, and it’s getting both tiresome and worrisome.”
That statement by Mr. Weigel is frightening – and right on point.
These modernist synodalists are waiting for Godot.
True Catholics must wait for the next Benedict of Nursia
Many thanks to dear George Weigel for such a concise, lucid and cogent article.
Surely we can see the hand of GOD putting all Catholics to the test.
Are we good & faithful servants of The Word of GOD? Is Jesus Christ really our LORD?
Or, are we wokey, moral relativist panderers to the pseudo-synodal world spirit that has infected so many in our current devious hierarchy?
As always, Holy GOD sets before us Life & Death, exhorting us: “So, chose Life!”
For any good Catholic who asks: “Why?”, we answer in the words of Luke 2:35 – “. . so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.”
Let’s pray for each other that we will be given strength by The Holy Spirit to withstand this & every test, so as to show the world what a true Catholic is.
Always seeking to hear & lovingly obey King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
I would like to add my thanks to George Weigel for another excellent and informative piece.
Like Mr Weigel, I find all this synodal nonsense tiresome and completely irrelevant to the Church’s true mission. But I also worry that the Lavender Mafia will do everything they can to keep it “grinding away.”
Orthodoxy was once explained to me as “remaining in step with Rome”. I later learned that the traditionalist definition was “remaining faithful to revealed Catholic Truth, resisting innovations that oppose it.”
Along with Mr Weigle, I guess we are all Traditionalists now?
Synodaling uses the authority of the hierarchy to destroy the authority of the hierarchy. The goal of Synodaling is to dismiss God’s moral laws. Synodaling is an all-inclusive boondoggle for unbelievers. Eventually, the money will run out, and God will speak again from the crucifix: “Go, rebuild my Church which is falling down.”
“Personnel is policy,” they say, and the next Pope is going to have to do a thorough flush of the Curia — the job Bergoglio was elected for and failed to do — to remove the likely fawning admirers of Francis that will persist in maintaining this self-defeating ideology in the Church: Grech, Hollenrich, Fernandez, Paglia, Roche, et al.
Dear John, one deeply sympathises with your disgust for the PF panderers.
However, the corruption of our clergy is revealing itself to be very catholic.
Maybe the way forward is still the same as Jesus showed us: disdainful respect for misfeasant & malfeasant priests, theologians, & other position-lovers, whilst humbly & lovingly obeying GOD’s commandments & witnessing to Jesus’ Good News.
Unfaithful, immoral, ungodly, pretender priests – at every hierarchical altitude – are surely a major reality of the cross that sincere Catholics must pick up each day, so as to follow Ths Lamb of GOD, our LORD Jesus Christ.
Yet, joyfully acknowledging those few faithful, moral, godly, genuine clergy who inspire us by their loving obedience & unswerving loyalty to GOD in Christ Jesus.
In short, am asking if trying to change things from the top down is possible. Asking if working to change things from the ground up might be the only sure Way?
Ever in the grace & mercy of King Jesus Christ; love & blessings from marty