In March 2013, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio gave a short speech to the assembled Cardinals before the conclave wherein he described his vision for a Church that was far less “self-referential”. He instead sought a Church serious about reading the signs of the times and responding to them with pastoral creativity and fervor.
But what has become of this vision over eleven years later?
The Synod on Synodality, one of the capstone projects of this papacy, is a very self-referential set of processes now three years in the making. Furthermore, this exercise is not only an exercise in self-referentiality, but it is also a distraction from the true pastoral needs of our time. It is a wasted moment when there are so few moments that can afford to be so wasted in the current cultural crisis.
And what is that crisis? In a word, it is the crisis of unbelief, which is the proprietary watermark of all modern, Western cultures.
One of the most obvious aspects of modern disbelief is that it is, shockingly, real disbelief. In other words, we need to take seriously the reason why more and more of our contemporaries in Western culture do not accept the Christian Gospel is because they do not intellectually agree with its fundamental narrative about reality. Which is really important because it should be the most obvious of facts—that disbelief is actually disbelief—but apparently isn’t.
Whether in an explicit intellectual manner or more unthematic and implied ways, modern people have developed a sense of what constitutes the “really real” that runs directly counter to the intellectual content of the Christian description of the really real. The brute fact is that most modern people in our culture do not think the Christian narrative of existence is true, and that its thought world seems antiquated insofar as it is a set of answers to questions that nobody is even asking anymore. Categories fundamental to even a rudimentary understanding of Christianity now seem to most of our Western contemporaries as the faint radio echoes of a long-dead star. Sin and redemption, vicarious atonement, salvation and damnation, and the necessity of a highly particular set of sacraments for “proper” reconciliation with an aggrieved God, all run counter to the therapeutic deism and religious egalitarianism of our era.
It just all seems so foreign and alien, if not utterly alienating.
But at its root, what is fundamentally incommensurate with the Christian Faith is our culture’s reductionistic, mechanistic, and naturalistic materialism, which stands in direct opposition to the Christian message of the reality and importance of the supernatural. As a dear priest friend of mine (a highly intelligent pastor of 35 years) recently told me: “Nobody seems to really believe anything anymore. And that includes the clergy.”
This inattention to the obvious elephant in the living room has led to the almost comical spectacle of a self-referential Church spending time and treasure on the completely irrelevant topic of ecclesial structures. Our culture is in the midst of reorganizing the social ordo around the downstream effects of two centuries of an atheistic and nihilistic “death of God” set of principles—once merely implicit and now increasingly explicit—and the Catholic Church has decided that the most pressing issue is her internal bureaucratic apparatus. Apparently, if we can reform the curia, establish new “ministries” housed in ersatz diocesan “offices of accompaniment”, and “listen” better to the secular, liberal wing of the Church (those poor neglected “peripheries” who have endured such horrible oppression) then we can reverse our cultural descent into the abyss of meaninglessness. That we can staunch the ecclesial bleeding from the severed artery of belief with the external compress called “synodality”.
In reality, I am giving the current ecclesial leaders who are responsible for this turn to the ecclesial navel too much credit. Because, in order to be able to appreciate the true nature of the cultural crisis at hand, one has to first be an intellectually serious person who actually thinks about such things on a deep level. But these folks are not intellectually serious people, as evidenced by the fact that they never get around to asking truly foundational questions about the constitutive cultural nature of modern disbelief. They never get around to wondering as well if this same cultural crisis has infected the Church and whether, therefore, if our “synodal listening” is sufficiently equipped to adjudicate between tissue and tumor.
For example, look no further for evidence of such incredible superficiality than the head of the German bishop’s conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, who, in response to statistics showing that 1.7 million German Catholics have officially left the Church since 2019, stated this only proves the answer to this crisis is to double down on the liberal reforms of the “synodal way”. Never mind that the Protestant denominations in Germany–all of which have already had all of these “reforms” for decades now–are also hemorrhaging members by the hundreds of thousands every year. Never mind any of this. For Bishop Bätzing, the reason why people are leaving the Church is that the Church is not sufficiently conformed to the dominant values of modern German secularity.
But it isn’t just the German Church as we see this same intellectual obtuseness among the loudest cheerleaders for the Synod on Synodality. We have spent years now on this self-referential ecclesial Edsel which, when over, will go down as one of the most historically paradigmatic examples of fiddling while Rome burns. Very few ordinary Catholics care about it, if they even know about it, and even fewer understand what it is in the first place. Even the leading liberal Catholics who are its biggest champions would walk away from it in a heartbeat if the Pope simply ruled via papal fiat tomorrow morning that we will now ordain women, bless gay marriages, and add the rainbow flag officially as a new liturgical color.
Therefore, all the linguistic legerdemain surrounding the various synodal publications put out over the past few years is simply a smokescreen to mask the fact that what is at stake is a clash of incommensurate worldviews. This explosion of vacuous ecclesial verbiage about “listening” and “inclusion” and “dialogue” is another sign of a putrefied and stupefied Church incapable of truly understanding the ocean of disbelief and practical atheism that is the true environment in which we are swimming, both inside of and outside of the Church.
Nor is this something new that has caught us somehow unawares. As early as the 1830s, a still Anglican John Henry Newman was warning how modernity represents an entirely new challenge since it presents a constitutively different symbology of the really real, which has created a fundamental change in human consciousness as such away from belief in the supernatural and toward reductive materialism. Even a literary figure such as George Bernanos, in 1936, could place on the lips of the young Cure of Abricourt in The Diary of a Country Priest the following statement: “My parish is bored stiff; no other word for it. … We can see them eaten up by boredom, and we can’t do anything about it.”
No less a light than a young Joseph Ratzinger wrote, in a 1958 bombshell article, that the modern Church is a Church made up of pagans who still think themselves Christian. Henri de Lubac, in The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944), made the claim that the modern world and the Church are in a clash of anthropologies leading to a clash of competing forms of humanism–one secular and nihilistic, and the other Christocentric and Catholic–which the Church needs to recognize as the true “sign of our times” and to respond with a strong prophetic voice.
This is the only proper hermeneutic for understanding the prophetic purposes behind Vatican II and the deeply Christocentric theological anthropology guiding its most important deliberations. Not without reason did one of the Council’s bishops, the young Karol Wojtyla, once he became pope, devote his first encyclical (Redemptor Hominis) to this very challenge of proposing the Church’s Christocentric theological anthropology as the sign of contradiction to the world’s anthropology of materialistic unbelief.
Something is fundamentally wrong and contrary to Vatican II about a “synodal process” that is self-referentially focused on the bureaucratic and external apparatus of the Church as, apparently, the most pressing and important issue of our time. There is something fundamentally out of focus about a set of meetings the main point of which is about how to have even more meetings, or about committees designed to show how to design proper committees, or flowcharts showing us how to make flowcharts, and about listening sessions that are about how to organize even more listening sessions.
Anyone who has ever worked at a real job in the real world knows such “processes” are the stuff of office nightmares. Moreover, they are deceptively totalitarian, with little bearing on real conversation. They are, in fact, a simulacrum of a real dialogue designed to create the illusion of discourse, with curated chatter while sitting at round tables with a “facilitator” commissar.
Yet, we are now told that all of this self-referential synodal chatter is the true meaning of Vatican II. People ask why I am writing so much on this topic of late. This is why. Because there is an attempt afoot, analogous to what happened in the years 1965-78, to take control of the ecclesial narrative and to propose a revisionist account of the past 60 years, wherein Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were the enemies of Vatican II and Pope Francis is (finally!) implementing the Council in his synodal way.
But the reality is the opposite and that, it seems to me, should matter. The previous two popes understood the crisis of unbelief that has the Western world in its grips. They understood this de facto atheism had invaded the marrow of the Church as well. They understood that what is at stake is not arcane theological points of interest only to specialists, but the deep truth about God, reality, history, and what it means to be a human being. They understood that we live in a cultural hegemony of meaninglessness that teeters over the abyss of anomic randomness that sees only power and the pleasure principle in play.
And they understood (since they were there) what it was that Vatican II was proposing, as an antidote, in its theological anthropology. Along these lines, the many travels of John Paul were not exercises, as his critics claim, of a celebrity papacy basking in the glow of ultramontane adulation. They were the missionary efforts of an evangelizing pope who sought to use his office to further the message that, “In reality, it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear” (Gaudium et Spes 22).
Pope Benedict XVI, though traveling less, left us with a body of theological writings making the same claim. A Church that has lost sight of the fact of who Christ is—and that only he can save us—is a Church that has lost her nerve and its purpose. The Church exists to make saints and to thereby breathe fire into her sacramental equations. Only such a Church—a Christologically grounded missionary Church of evangelical fire—can reignite the passion of the prophets, who alone can “see” what others do not and who alone therefore re-propose the Christ once again into our unbelieving world.
Indeed, even to those in the Church who are unbelieving. And such an enterprise is the exact opposite of the self-referential Church of an alleged synodal listening, which is a listening apparently geared toward a hearing that does not hear and a seeing that does not see.
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Thank you, Dr. Chapp, for a timely and extraordinarily insightful and prophetic piece.
Mr. Chapp should be one of the synod writers, who write papers with many words to mute the Truth.
Has Synod 2024 become only one move in a larger shell game?
Too many “hot-button themes” made their way onto the table, surely not by design! But, now, these have been removed to expert Study Groups scheduled to report six months after the October Synod. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/07/09/these-are-the-members-of-the-synod-on-synodality-study-groups/ Without presuming any conclusions, and hoping for the best, here again are a few questions from the back bleachers:
1.About “the East,” how to restore credibility with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, estranged by Fiducia Supplicans—Or, just more “special cases” and expendable for making peace with LGBTQ religion?
2. About the “cry of the poor,” how to not exclude those who are impoverished spiritually and culturally (Centesimus Annus, n. 57)? “…the right of the faithful [italics] to receive Catholic doctrine in its purity and integrity must always be respected” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 113).
3. About the “digital environment,” how to preserve analogue reality—i.e., the reality of history vs amnesia, and the reality of the incarnate Jesus Christ vs a Nominalist digital cosmos?
4. About a “missionary perspective,” how to not displace guardianship of the received/missionary Deposit of Faith, with plebiscite or clericalist sociology?
5. About “ministerial forms,” how to respect all of the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium)? Would non-ordained deaconesses be only a gradualist stepping stone toward an Anglican-style (c)hurch—just as in secular society, civil unions were only a stepping stone toward the oxymoron “gay marriage”?
6. About “ecclesial organizations,” how to not dilute the institutional/personal accountability of each Successor of the Apostles, a foundation already clarified in Apostolos Suos (1998)?
7. On the selection, judicial role and meaning of “ad limina visits for bishops,” how to transcend zeitgeist intrusions into the particular Churches—not devolving into an overly polyhedral Church of conferences of bishops (or even continentally), and eclipsing catholic unity and the center?
8. On “papal representatives” in a missionary synodal perspective, how to conform a missionary “style” of “listening” to the inborn natural law (!) about which the Church is neither the “author” nor the “arbiter,” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 95)?
9. About “theological criteria” (etc.), how to restrain the criterion of self-anointed theologians, themselves, possibly severing a congregational (c)hurch of tomorrow from the bishops and the living Magisterium?
10.About the “ecumenical journey/ecclesial practices,” how to not obscure the Church as sacramental Mystical Body of Christ through, for example, intercommunion with ecclesial communities?
SUMMARY: The October Synod is one thing, and now the longer-term Study Groups are another.
No doubt it is a synod to foster the anti Christ ideology that sin done in private, is not ,in essence ,sinful.
No doubt, the “spirit of Vatican II “ is confusion, which is not of The Holy Ghost, and a denial of authentic Love, whenever the claim was made that the “spirit of Vatican II”, did away with The Charitable Anathema , for “who am I to judge”.
The week after Jorge Bergoglio was elected to the Papacy, I picked up his book, “On Heaven and Earth”, and when I opened it , there was page 117, and the infamous quote from Jorge Bergoglio, “if there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected…”, and I knew immediately the apostates, those who deny Baptized Catholics are Called to be, “Temples of The Holy Ghost”, had taken control of The Papacy.
The unforgivable sin, is blasphemy of The Holy Ghost, making it appear as if it is Loving and Merciful to desire that we or our Beloved remain in our sin, and not desire to overcome our sinful inclinations and become transformed by accepting Salvational Love, God’s Gift of Grace and Mercy. If it were true that it is Loving and Merciful that we desire that we or our beloved remain in our sin and not desire to overcome our disordered inclination , and become transformed through Salvational Love, God’s Gift of Grace and Mercy, we would have no need for our only Savior, Jesus The Christ.
You can only have a Great Apostasy from The True Church of Christ, Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, Through The Unity of The Holy Ghost(Filioque). “For The Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by His revelation they might make known new doctrine, but that by His assistance they might inviolably keep and faithfully expound the Revelation, the Deposit of Faith, delivered through the Apostles. ”
“Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. (Mystici Coporis 22)”
For those who claim that Jorge Bergoglio is the Pope of The True Church of Christ, why is he creating a magisterium that serves as a contradiction to Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and The Teaching of every previous Magisterium, Grounded in The Deposit Of Faith, Entrusted To His Church By The Word Of God Who Has Revealed Himself to His Church?
Our Call to Holiness, Is a Call from God to be chaste in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.
It is blasphemy of The Holy Ghost to deny God’s Call to be “Temples Of The Holy Ghost”, and thus reside Through, With, And In Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque). Disunity is not of The Holy Ghost.
Let no one continue to deceive you, it is a lie to claim that private morality and public morality can serve in opposition to each other, as the counterfeit church , with its counterfeit magisterium , and its counterfeit pope claim, which is clearly anti Christ; all that is Moral, “The True, The Good, And The Beautiful “, comes from God, The Ordered Communion Of Perfect Love , The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost ( Filioque), for There Is Only One Way, One Truth, One Life Of Perfect Life Affirming And Life Sustaining Salvational, Love, Our Savior, Jesus The Christ, thus you can only have A Great Apostasy from The True Church Of Christ.
Perfect Love does not divide, it multiplies, as in The Miracle Of The Loaves And Fishes.
A Council must be Called to restore The Papacy. Although The Office Of The MUNUS, grounded in The Deposit Of Faith, remains with us “forever”, currently the ministerial office is being occupied by a usurper who, in denying that all Catholics are Called to be “ Temples For The Holy Ghost”, denies The Filioque, and thus denies The Divinity Of The Most Holy Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, And Holy Ghost.
“Canon 188 §4 states that among the actions which automatically (ipso facto) cause any cleric to lose his office, even without any declaration on the part of a superior, is that of “defect[ing] publicly from the Catholic faith” (” A fide catholica publice defecerit“).
The argument that Jorge Bergoglio cannot be judged because he is Pope is a nonsequitur, as he defected from The Catholic Faith prior to his election to The Papacy, and the election is thus null and void.
The Truth is true even if a multitude of people do not believe it to be true, a lie , is a lie, is a lie, even if a multitude of people believe that lie to be true.
To not call for a Council is to cooperate with the lie that a Baptized Catholic who is no longer in communion with Christ and His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church , having defected from The Catholic Faith, could be validly elected to The Papacy.
“…if there is a union of a private nature”…I had not heard of this quote from Pope Francis. So if a person is having sex in private with a nine year old, it is not a sin and wider society need not be concerned? Do I hear a huge roar of approval from certain gentlemen currently serving long prison sentences?
ND: Good observations. There are many ways to drift into atheism without self-awareness, including a denial of a social ethos, and Francis has discovered many. Even evil thoughts corrupt the whole of civilization as it weakens our resolve to do good as Jesus taught us.
I’m bending over in charity to call Francis by his ecclesial name. I ascertained he was not a man of real faith within three months of his papacy and got myself banned from two “orthodox” sites for suggesting his thought was atheistic.
Peter: You outline a better plan for a truly renewed Church. When I’m elected pope, I want you on my inner council.
Thank you Larry for this enlightening article. Your broad perspective on the situation of the Church over the past sixty years is very valuable.
A thoughtful and worthwhile article, except for its central flaw: Vatican II is the cause, not the cure, of the crisis.
Well said, Paul.
J.M.J.
True, as the claim that Vatican II, did not create New Dogma, is not true.
By doing away with The Charitable Anathema, Vatican II, denied The Dogma instituted by Christ Himself, for The Salvation Of Souls, “You cannot be My Disciples if you do not abide in My Word”
It is , “Through, With, And In Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), that Holy Mother Church, outside of which there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, (Filioque) exists.
Pray for those who will come to believe, Pray for all our prodigal sons and daughters, that they will soon return to The One Body Of Christ. Pray that there will be a multitude, who like The Good Thief, at the moment of his death, recognized Christ, In All His Glory, and came late to The Fold, and Pray for the members of The Body Of Christ, The Faithful.
“Penance, Penance, Penance” At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved.
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
“Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.”
“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”
“Behold your Mother.” – Christ On The Cross
“By doing away with The Charitable Anathema…” (1) I haven’t been able to find which document of Vatican 11 did away with the anathema. (2) By putting three words in capitals, The Charitable Anathema, you imply that this is a technical/theological term. It isn’t, is it? (3) The phrase “let him be anathema” was used by Councils to indicate that a dogma was being defined. Vatican 11 did not define any new dogmas. (4) The penalty of anathema was declared at a ceremony involving the Pope himself, was never automatic, and on most reports was very very rarely used. (5) The penalty of anathema is left out of the 1983 Code of Canon Law – that is two decades after the Council. SO HOW CAN a penalty that was rarely used have any importance in the Church’s current difficulties?
Various concerns and even strong apprehensions have been expressed regarding the outcomes of this synod, which an Italian historian compared to the French Constituent Assembly of 1789, leading to the French Revolution, and which the author of this article likened to “an attempt afoot, analogous to what happened in the years 1965-78, to take control of the ecclesial narrative and to propose a revisionist account of the past 60 years, wherein Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were the enemies of Vatican II and Pope Francis is (finally!) implementing the Council in his synodal way.”
However, it is a serious mistake to confuse the Church with the ancien régime and the group of modernists with the authors of the Revolution, or those attempting to control ecclesiastical historiography, claiming that Pope Francis’ predecessors were the enemies of Vatican II! Imagining such things shows a lack of understanding of the power of the Church against the forces of Satan. Jesus said, “non praevalebunt” (they will not prevail).
I am happy to popesplain the 2013 statement of “Eminence” Jorge Bergoglio, when he suggested a church “less self-referential.”
What he meant is a church that referred to Jorge Bergoglio.
“Eminence” Bergoglio didn’t cotton so much to the Church with “the mind of Christ.” He envisioned a church “with the mind of Jorge Bergoglio.”
Hence last week, the royal court of the Pontiff Francis officially ceased referencing time as “BC” and “AD,” and has opted for “BCE.”
You can find the link to that story over at TCT, and I will post it here in my next comment.
There was no indication of whether or not this was an interim step toward the more explicit time signatures: “BJB” and “AJB.”
I am happy that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI were holy fathers who helped my family and our children. Perhaps such a day may dawn again. Whether in my lifetime I think that is not clear to see.
Link – Pontiff Francis’ new time signature: BCE.
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2024/09/03/outrage-vatican-drops-before-christ-for-before-common-era/
Why enter a secular debate with BCE? Synodaling should seek a more appropriate self-referential solution like BF and AF.
I am reminded of this:
“But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven.”
Matthew 10:33
There comes a point when certain actors in the Catholic Church herself becomes complicit in the dechristianization of the culture.
“In reality, it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear” (Gaudium et Spes 22). And yet we have a Cardinal of the Church (Cupich) who can’t even mention the name of Jesus Christ in a prayer given at the Democratic Convention.
I’ve mentioned it recently in these pages and I’ll repeat it because I think it’s worth stating: There are 53 million Catholics in the USA alone. Does anyone with some degree of practical sense not think that 53 million Catholics who took seriously the mandate to proclaim the Gospel and evangelize the culture wouldn’t be able to significantly impact the dominant atheistic, materialistic culture? Of course this would be possible if Catholics acted like Catholics. But what do we hear instead? Endless discussions about who Catholics ought or ought not to vote for in November. As if our messiah is now to be found among the governing class. Perhaps when the pollsters in and outside the Church want to count Catholics, they ought to include only those who are actively involved in the Church’s evangelizing mandate (that is, if they can be found).
This is one of the best summaries of today’s problem I’ve ever read. It is really, really insightful and reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s talks on the BBC during WWII, which were later published as “Mere Christianity.” Thank You.
We see it every Sunday. Last week we prayed for the end of Global Warming, and the end of fossil fuels. Are you kidding me? The devil is strong in the Catholic church and their committees that are designed to conform to this broken world. We are the disciples of Christ. We need to Repent, be Baptized, and proclaim to the world, that Jesus Christ, is the Son of God, who was crucified, died. And was buried for our sins. On the 3rd day he rose again and defeated death for all of us. He will come again and judge the living and the dead. Amen
Dr. Chapp has put his finger on the core issue. I do not have his background or experience, but all of this rings true. The homilies and general interactions around the Mass seem to be based on fear that some parishioners could be offended and no longer attend.
If the “faithful” are offended at the truth we have failed in formation of the laity. It has taken ~60 years to get to this state, it may take longer to recover.
I have come to appreciate Dr. Chapp and his articles and commentary. He consistently to truth and the path to Jesus. God bless him.
The story of Jesus Christ has never been one that is focused on listening; rather has always been focused on shouting from the roof tops about the Good News. We live in a era of disbelief and hopelessness. We have forgotten how to witness to others that are hurting, confused, and screaming for assistance. Yes, there is a need for a Synodal Way, but it has nothing to do about listening to the empty pews; it needs to be about teaching a viable evangelical message for the world. The Savior has bled for you, knows your pain, and his arms are wide open to welcome each and every sinner into his Church. Come and find peace in abundance.
I have come to appreciate Dr. Chapp and his articles and commentary. He consistently points to truth and the path to Jesus. God bless him.
The story of Jesus Christ has never been one that is focused on listening; rather has always been focused on shouting from the roof tops about the Good News. We live in a era of disbelief and hopelessness. We have forgotten how to witness to others that are hurting, confused, and screaming for assistance. Yes, there is a need for a Synodal Way, but it has nothing to do about listening to the empty pews; it needs to be about teaching a viable evangelical message for the world. The Savior has bled for you, knows your pain, and his arms are wide open to welcome each and every sinner into his Church. Come and find peace in abundance.
Chapp, ever aware of the collapse, asks, “And what is that crisis? In a word, it is the crisis of unbelief, which is the proprietary watermark of all modern, Western cultures”.
Our issue is whether Synodality is a distraction from addressing unbelief, or whether Synodality is intended to increase unbelief in revealed truth? “Really real disbelief” speaks to a paradigmatic mindset of modern Man’s thought processes that find no relevance to reality in the revealed Word. A revelation that runs counter to an intellect conditioned to the logic of positivism. Its appeal is to sentiment absent of intellectual verification. Whereas knowledge of truth is always, whether a sentiment such as apprehension of the absolute truth of the revelation of the Word, is an act of intellect.
What’s become clear is a paradigmatic inversion of truth in which moral absolutes dissolve, the sensual the informative voice of conscience. As such Francis I moves ecclesiology from commands and restrictions to diminishing barriers. And congruence with all religions and secularism. Whereas the Christocentric anthropology of John Paul II, the passionate evangelism of Benedict XVI lose their contradiction to the world. We, missionaries of appeasement.
Our response to this is abundantly evident. We, clerics and those believing voices in academia now become prophets. As was Jeremiah. As was Elijah, the prophetic voice that convicted Ahab and Jezebel’s fake emissaries.
Larry Chapp’s allusion to Nero Fiddling while Rome burned is an interesting analogy. The actual burning of Rome has several accounts, some blaming Nero most others the tinderbox slums of Rome susceptible to fiery holocaust. Although a steady accusation among scholars is that however the fire happened Nero was quick to fault the Christians. And rebuild Rome to his liking.
To complete the analogy, could the Synodal fiddling of our Roman emperor, the pontifex maximus, engaged in a project doomed for failure be the rationale to fault the Christians, that is, those rigid, unyielding Traditionalists who actually take the Word seriously? The emperor, now free to rebuild as he pleases. But then how will he be rid of us? Will it be crucifixion? Or will it be a more insidious, lengthy death by asphyxiation caused by continued duplicitous, preposterous, unholy words and written documents?
As though citing De Lubac isn’t boringly self referential at this point too. You had almost a half century in power to make your ideas stick. What are the fruits of the Communio school? It shocks me that someone still defends JPII’s globetrotting with everything we know now (and then) about the stunning lack of discipline in the Church during his reign. Will Chapp and his ilk ever acknowledge it has TARNISHED our reputation in the modern world? If you want to be heard as a prophet the world needs to see that you have enough self discipline to not appoint someone like Thedore Mccarick to higher positions in the Church, or take no definitive action against the truly monstrous Maciel. Instead of doing anything about the obvious apostasy, JPII went on apology tours for Catholicism’s apparent past sins to Muslims and never seemed to miss a chance at some cringeworthy ecumencial photo op.
Will they ever apologize for the many wounds inflicted between 1979 to 2005?
This is a very interesting article, and I cannot disagree with much of it. It’s just the overall framework behind it that I am a bit wary of. For example, what you say here is spot on: “There is something fundamentally out of focus about a set of meetings the main point of which is about how to have even more meetings, or about committees designed to show how to design proper committees, or flowcharts showing us how to make flowcharts, and about listening sessions that are about how to organize even more listening sessions.”
It is more than out of focus. It’s a sickness! And what you describe is a symptom of the sickness that Francis has pointed to from the get go, a “self-referential” Church, lacking in a missionary spirit. The Catholic Church is in many ways sick. So many of the clergy, especially bishops, would rather have meetings, more meetings, especially in foreign countries so they can spend more time at the airport, dinners, luncheons, and more meetings, etc., and Francis has addressed this very early on. John XXIII’s vision of the Church as an “Open Society” has not been fully appropriated in the Church. In many places, we still have the old non-historical orthodoxy, clerical elitism, pontificating from on high, no need to listen to the laity–after all, they are laity, etc. So the Church is still battling an illness, and when Francis puts in place a strategy that he thinks will help move the Church forward (Synodality), these very same clerics just end up contaminating the process with the same sickness–they’re not interested in getting out into the world and witnessing to the crucified and risen Christ, getting involved in people’s lives, smelling like the sheep, etc. They would rather just “talk about it” in the context of meetings, followed by dinners, cocktails, etc. Indeed, there are some great priests and probably some great bishops, but most of them are the types that you describe, who like the interior, who like to stay inside, who like meetings with an agenda, and the sanctuary nicely decorated with lilies and candles, and nice renovated rectories and executive chefs. Synodality is not going to change these people, rather, these people are going to change synodality, turning the whole thing into an expensive and bureaucratic nightmare, an image of the illness that plagues them.
And you said it: “Anyone who has ever worked at a real job in the real world knows such “processes” are the stuff of office nightmares.” THAT’S THE PROBLEM! A good percentage of them have NOT held a real job. In our diocese, the young clergy live lives that are comparable to a 65 year old who is semi-retired. They live a semi-retired life. They’re not busy, and they certainly love their exotic vacations. I know that’s not the case everywhere, but it is here.
You say: “But these folks are not intellectually serious people, as evidenced by the fact that they never get around to asking truly foundational questions about the constitutive cultural nature of modern disbelief.” Of course that is true! They are not intellectually serious people, which is why their preaching is terrible, irrelevant. They can’t give what they don’t have. Many of the Deacons can preach, and they are very relevant and down to earth, but then the “jealous clergy” who think it is “all about them” relegate these better preachers to once every 8 weeks or so. They don’t want to talk about Christ, salvation, the faithful and their struggles and how we can best help them, how we can best direct our preaching to help them in these very difficult times. No, they want to talk about which hired cook makes the best ribs or steaks or pasta, or which priest is getting moved where and why that might be (gossip), etc.
Francis is a genuine pastor, but most clerics today are not genuine pastors. I can get into lots of details, but I really shouldn’t. But you should be able to see why the modern world has no use for such a Church. It’s an irrelevant Church that refuses to move forward. They can’t move forward. They don’t know how, and they don’t want to listen to anyone who will show them how, because that hurts their clerical pride–many of them have been brought up with the notion that they are the clerical elite.
The problem is not Synodality. There is no Synodality at the archdiocesan level where I am, nor at the parish level, there is no attempt to listen to the faithful, only the ‘yeasayers’ that the pastor befriends, because they fawn all over him. The problem is the sickness in the Church. It is naive indeed to think that the Synod on Synodality is going to solve this, and I don’t think Francis believes such a thing. There really is no simple solution to this. When you say “Anyone who has ever worked at a real job in the real world knows ….”, you’ve hit the nail on the head, because there is quite a bit that clergy just don’t know, very basic things like conflict resolution, how to listen, how to collaborate, how to draw the best out of people, how to tap into their talents and gifts, etc. I’m beginning to think a big problem is clerical celibacy. It makes a big difference when you have a woman in your life, challenging you, correcting things that you can’t see, helping you see things from another angle, learning to make sacrifices for others, etc. Living alone as a bachelor is not a good thing. And yet there are some really good priests out there that this does not really apply to. But I think I can safely say the majority of clergy are a problem. I think we are working with an outdated model, one that might have worked 100 years ago, but not anymore. It’s a different world, and we are attracting the wrong people to the seminary.
Mr. James, you seem to miss entirely the point that celebacy is because they are supposed to love God more than anyone or anything and are wedded to God….of course, seminaries seem to miss that point, too, as do the priests they produce.
I have complete faith in the Church as put forth in scripture and all the various councils.
I have zero faith in the current utterly dysfunctional hierarchy in Rome, and the majority of clergy from cardinal on down.
Very very few of them have ever sought to be true disciples of the Christ and are purely functionaries at local/national/international sacrament dispensing station offices and otherwise absorbed totally in clergy business with seminaries creating managers and not disciples.
Self referential would seem to be just another term for self-centered, or, narcissistic. Now the narcissist is a person who has excessive self-love, at the expense of neglecting, ignoring, manipulating, or otherwise hurting other people. A narcissist isn’t born that way, but acquires this bad trait by indulging in any number of very bad habits. One must surmise that a large number of our senior churchmen must have some very bad habits.; the scandals of the early 2000s might give us some idea of what these are. At any rate, it is difficult to convince a narcissist that he has a problem, because he is deaf and blind to the rottenness of his own condition, and to the pathway to repentance; barring a miracle of grace, there is no hope for them. The narcissist is spiritually incompetent. It’s impossible to imagine any of the popes in the last 150 years, save one, being afflicted with narcissism. It’s not impossible to imagine that our current pontiff, and many of his allies, may be afflicted. “Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive.” Acts28:26. It would seem that we are witnessing an attempt to move the Church into a framework of spiritual narcissism that would afflict the world with systemic spiritual blindness. Only God can prevent this.
Superb.
A really good first step in ironing out some kinks in the behavior of the Roman Catholic Church might be to stop referring to any organization of men who reject women and prefer to cling to other men in their “old boy’s club” with the pronouns SHE HER etc. First get your pronouns straight, fellas, then I will be able to hear whatever else you have to say. 🙂
Ah, what a cute drive-by comment, low on knowledge but high on itself. Next.
Really excellent article that strikes at the root of the matter: “And what is that crisis? In a word, it is the crisis of unbelief, which is the proprietary watermark of all modern, Western cultures.”
The other day, in my local train station, an Asian woman handed me a pamphlet from the Shin Kwang Church of New York. The first four bullet points of the pamphlet read: 1. God Loves You, 2. This is because people have sinned and turned away from God, 3. All will face the judgement of God, 4. Jesus Christ is the only solution to the problem of sin.
I know it’s not the fullness of truth, but when was the last time we got such unambiguous, and in the current climate courageous, statements from our Vatican?
Excellent, Larry!
Organizationally and administratively, the Synod on Synodality looks like a giant muddle without a clearly defined purpose or identity. For all the talk of synodality, it doesn’t look enough like the synods that a layperson like me would be familiar with. My understanding of a synod is that it is a mode of governance particularly adapted to churches and church-related organizations, where the decision-making process incorporates discernment as it would be understood by members of that church. The result of a synodal meeting would include some level of decision about a significant question, even if the synod only agreed to postpone making a final decision.
So far, the Synod on Synodality has operated more like an advisory committee, which doesn’t make decisions, but instead produces advice and guidance for the actual decision-makers, typically in the form of recommendations. That is akin to what the Synod on Synodality’s small groups are doing, because their discussions become the basis of recommendations that go further upline. However, that means the Synod’s small groups are different from a synod; in fact, if you were to remove decision-making authority from a synod, what would be left is a discussion group that could offer advice and recommendations.
The Synod leaders have attached intangible values to the small-group discussions, such as the value of “walking together,” “listening to others” or “being heard.” This may appeal to some people but feels dodgy to me, given the advisory-group format. Anyone who has been part of an advisory group probably knows that the true value for most participants is the chance to have influence by contributing to a recommendation that goes to the decision-maker. Not the feeling of being “heard,” which is certainly nice but not as substantive.
On the other hand, if the intent of the Synod on Synodality is eventually to give all of the participants, including laypeople, some degree of decision-making authority (and there have been moves toward that, especially in the “Instrumentum laboris” for the upcoming session), then that make it more “synodal” but also feels like a bait-and-switch. I hope that never happens because it will cause significant dissension in the ranks, more than has been seen so far. I’m confident that there are other laypeople like me who do not want the lay participants at the Synod involved in decision-making, because however worthy they may be as individuals, they were hand-picked, often by bishops. There was no attempt to select them in a representative manner, so those lay participants should not be regarded as “representing” Catholic laypeople and thus able to make decisions on their behalf. They represent themselves, period.
This is why I see the Synod on Synodality as a giant muddle that will likely remain as clear as mud.
I have noticed that most religious (monks, nuns, friars, etc) see no problem with synodality. That it because they understand it as being what is laid down in their various Rules, for example :-
” Chapter 3 of the Rule of St. Benedict.
summoning the brothers for counsel
1/ As often as anything important is to be done in the monastery, the abbot shall call the whole community together and himself explain what the business is; 2/ and after hearing the advice of the brothers, let him ponder it and follow what he judges the wiser course. 3/… ”
I am sure that is what Pope Francis has in mind. However I cannot see how the idea can best be extended from a defined group, such as a convent, where the membership is stable and the members are bound by promises of obedience and fraternity, to a diocese, or even to a parish.
“I am sure that is what Pope Francis has in mind.”
If only he had a forum in which to tell us, right? Sigh.
“If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage, there could be children affected. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help shape their identity.”-Jorge Bergoglio’s manifest heresy in his own published words, denying The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and the fact that God, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, Through The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, Is The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, while denying sin done in private is sin.
From The Catechism Of The Catholic Church: 1849 Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been defined as “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.”121
The purpose of the synod is to affirm the teaching of the counterfeit church that sin done in private does not affect those persons who are sinning in private, nor does it affect society. Jorge Bergoglio , at least since he was a cardinal, has not kept, held, or taught The Catholic Faith and the synod is merely another attempt by the counterfeit church to try to take over The True Church of Christ, because they desire to render onto Caesar or themselves, what belongs to God, The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, and thus The Author of our Unalienable Right to Life, to Liberty, and to The Pursuit Of Happiness, the purpose of which is what God intended.
Pornography is what pornography does, it sexually objectifies the human person and denies the inherent Dignity of every beloved son and daughter, and thus denies the Sanctity of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage.
Under no circumstances can demeaning sexual acts be approved, nor can demeaning sexual relationships be Blessed. Our Call to Holiness is a Call to be chaste in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds. The counterfeit church, with its counterfeit magisterium will not prevail, but it is doing, and will continue to do some serious damage if this accommodation of sin is allowed to continue , for it serves in opposition to The Salvation of Souls and The Sacrament Most Holy.
Thank you for your reply. If that model, where an abbott periodically convenes the community to gather insights and advice, then decides on a course, it is close to the “advisory group” I described above. That isn’t hard to understand, and shouldn’t be too hard for the Synod on Synodality’s organizers to communicate.
But even if they did that, it would only be a start, because the organizers also need to convey how that community-based model will be adapted to the vastly larger scale of the Synod, which involves groups on multiple, hierarchical levels, along with highly ambitious hopes for the results. The type of discussion and decision-making that works on an immediate community level will not work the same when more levels of consulting are added, beginning with the parish, then up through diocesan channels and beyond, to the actual Synodal discussion groups, ending at the Vatican and finally, with the Pope. Also, the fact that the final decisions are far removed from the parish and diocesan level poses a problem. By the time that responses and recommendations reach the Pope, most of the immediacy will be lost, along with most of the comments made by parishioners. They may never know whether any actual decisions were made based on parish input.
You see this dynamic when large organizations and companies launch ambitious outreach/feedback initiatives among staff members. After one or two rounds of large-scale discussions and consultations followed by unclear results, staff members lose interest in participating because they don’t see where their time and effort resulted in anything worthwhile. The sense of immediacy and involvement is lost. And that is what the Synod on Synodality organizers fail to understand. Or maybe they understand, but they don’t have an answer and are hoping that if they throw enough stuff at the wall, something will stick.
You are right that it ought to be easy to explain, but too many of the organizers of the synod have other agendas. In reality the synod should be about one thing – what synodality is, and how to extend it from closed communities into the wider church (supposing that can be done)
“Beware the false prophets. They will come to you – wolves in sheep’s clothing. By their deeds you will know them’.
“The inattention to the obvious elephant in the living room has led to the almost comical spectacle of a self-referential Church spending time and treasure on the completely irrelevant topic of ecclesial structures.”
The “topic of ecclesial structures” is not irrelevant in my parish. Here’s why:
In my parish, we do not have a parish council. The people seem to be more interested in maintaining liturgical practices rather than participating in a synodal church. However, our numbers are still going down. It seems to me that “ecclesial structures” are contributing to the problem; here is an example:
“A preferential option for the poor” should be maintained in our Catholic Schools. If we find that we cannot afford to keep our schools open to the poor, the Church should be ready to use its resources for something else which can be kept open to the poor. We cannot allow our Church to become a church primarily for the upper classes while allowing the poor to remain in public schools. The priority should be given to the poor even if we have to let the middle-class and rich fend for themselves.
Practically speaking, the Catholic Schools must give up general education in those countries where the State is providing it. The resources of the Church could then be focused on “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine” and other programs which can be kept open to the poor. These resources could then be used to help society become more human in solidarity with the poor. Remember, the Church managed without Catholic Schools for centuries. It can get along without them today. The essential factor from the Christian point of view is to cultivate enough Faith to act in the Gospel Tradition, namely, THE POOR GET PRIORITY. The rich and middle-class are welcome too. But the poor come first.
I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. 5 Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Rev.2.4-5