Pope Passes Over Patriarch – “But one appointment … seems like an especially Francis move — the elevation of a 44-year-old Australian, the Ukrainian Catholic Bishop Mykola Bychok of Melbourne — who is not the major archbishop of his sui iuris Eastern Catholic Church…” “The ‘red hat challenge’ for Ukrainian synodality” (The Pillar)
25 Synod Jesuits – “[G]iven the rather modest proportion of religious brothers, priests, and bishops in the world Church who are members of the Society of Jesus, one would expect, at least statistically, perhaps two or three members, experts, or facilitators at Synod-2024 to be Jesuits. There are twenty-five. ” Synod Diary #4 in First Things (Gaudium et Spes 22)
Defining Synodality Theologically – “Since Pope Francis’ 2015 speech, synodality has grown from a theological concept into a guiding principle of Church governance.” 9 Years Ago, This Papal Speech Set the ‘Synodality’ Machine in Motion (National Catholic Register)
Inferno – “Hell exists. The threat of condemnation for unrepented mortal sins is real. But we rely on the musings of theologians and poets for metaphors for the punishments of hell that comport with the terrors of the Lord’s warnings.” Priests in Hell (Catholic Culture)
The Church and Scandal – With every scandal coming through the men who hold offices in the existential Church of history, as well as the laity who betray Christ, the woes accumulate and study of the Church (ecclesiology) grows more and more complex. A Primer on the Church for Healing Divisions (Part I) – The Essential Nature of the Church: Communio and Mystery (Adoremus)
The Shia Community – “Unlike many movements that adopt the mantle of liberation for political gain, Hezbollah’s portrayal as a liberating force is tied to a long-standing cultural memory of foreign oppression, from the Ottoman Empire to the French Mandate. ” Hezbollah’s Role as a “Liberator” (RealClear Defense)
The Orthodox and Marriage – “Representatives of the Orthodox churches and the Oriental Orthodox churches met to discuss the cause of Christian unity. A causal reader might ask: So what?” An extraordinary statement from the world’s Orthodox leaders (Catholic Culture)
A Cultural Phenomenon – “As with Borges’s mythical and mythically infinite library, the potential answers to the question What is Catholic culture? multiply in a riot of possibility nearly beyond all telling. ” What Is Catholic Culture? (Church Life Journal)
Beijing Crackdown on Religion – “The sudden order to remove the symbol of the cross from the roof and entrance of a village church in China’s Anhui province cited unspecified ‘safety’ hazards.” Xi and Mao replace Jesus and Mary in Chinese churches (The Telegraph)
The Soul of Literature – “The boring parts are generally an imitation of some aspect of the world that the writer finds inexplicably mysterious and wonderful, like a shady grove of trees, a child’s steadfast gaze, or a woman’s face.” Don’t Skip the Boring Parts (Intellectual Takeout)
Minimum National Standard – “The abortion industry, Democrats, and their fellow travelers in the media, have continually conflated the 15-week protection with a “national abortion ban” — and all-too-frequently, Republicans have let them get away with it.” What Vance said right about abortion at VP debate (American Family News)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, being passed over by Bergoglio in favor of an Australian bishop. It says nothing about Major Archbishop Shevchuk, but it screams about the pettiness of Bergoglio. The meaning of Bergoglio’s form of synodality is certainly not about listening, but about finding a willing rubber stamp to approve his heresy.
He is a man that others should always look first to his actions and ignore his words. He speaks with a forked tongue almost always. What scares me is how well he has learned this ability and for how long he must have practiced it.
“The meaning of Bergoglio’s form of synodality is certainly not about listening, but about finding a willing rubber stamp to approve his heresy.” Well said, Michael B. I find myself approaching the conclusion that the Catholic Christianity into which I was baptized eighty-six years ago is about to self-destruct in its current efforts to orchestrate a strange new aura of infallibility for our current pope’s vision of a globalist “Synod-on-Synodality” type of Church in which the timeless truths of the Catholic Faith are scrapped in favor of heretical Modernist drivel: i.e., times-conscious, trendy untruths, created in the chaos of fickle human social, political, and religious preferences—turning God into an image and likeness of Us!
Two points emerged from The Catholic Thing’s podcast on the synod with R. Royal in Rome:
1) Coalescing of African hierarchs with a scattering of orthodox Western hierarchs (European, Australian, American) inclined to espouse ‘Catholicity’ against progressive ideological bents.
2) The pope’s creation of expert ‘study groups’ who will continue to study and release a report on the synodal church in June 2025.
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2024/10/08/early-stirrings-at-the-synod-in-rome-with-fr-gerald-murray/
I wonder what it is that any Francis appointed “study group” actually “studies,” and what it is that would require so much time to generate a report since all they’re doing is ratifying the silly ideas of Francis in the first place.
#2 – 25 Synod Jesuits.
Not a good sign, IMO.
A transforming decision for any priest is to offer himself for the salvation of others, realizing every act of kindness, endurance of discomfort, patience, his own resistance to sensual pleasure will save souls from eternal fire. This form of intercession emulates Christ’s passion and fulfills what the Apostle says is our completing the suffering absent in Christ.
“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24). That lacking then is our participation in Christ’s suffering within the Mystical Body, since as members of Christ’s body we realize his presence in the world by that participation.
@ Inferno references my comment.
Fr Jerry Pokorski usually doesn’t mince words and certainly doesn’t painting fearful images of Hell drawn from Dante. He likely doesn’t ascribe to all Dante’s poetic imagery, although the shock does have value for all, especially priests because of our immense responsibility as Alter Christi.
What I seek to say in my comment is the best way to avoid entering Hell’s portal above which Dante inscribes Lasciate Ogni Speranza, Voi Ch’Intrate. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter. Saint Teresa of Avila in an alleged experience of condemnation cites this hopelessness to change this eternal sentence as perhaps the greatest suffering.
Fear indeed has value for us mortals, although confident love is better. Reason for this is found in our trust in Christ’s words, which are forgotten, allayed with skepticism because we don’t really believe. We discard consecrated hosts, pour precious blood into the sink. For the number of priests who believe in the real presence they’re more who disbelieve. Evidence of this is the creation of the Synod on Synodality, its actual direction toward naturalism, that only natural forces contrary to an interior natural law, operate within the universe. Also known as antisupernaturalism.
Humor during the suffocating mist of ambiguous morality, the superficiality of a liberating spiritual voice known through personal enlightenment known as discernment, a bastardization of the methodology of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, more Rosicrucian than Catholic – a moment of humor as Peter Beaulieu frequently offers us has therapeutic merit. Though we know how deadly serious a moment we are in, how salvation has become more elusive due to sophisticated moral doctrine that leaves us the inopportune permission to avoid compliance, and assure our entrance into that dreaded Portal. Our task as priests both presbyter, cardinal, and pontiff is to proclaim the truth at all costs to ourselves to redeem ourselves as well as Christ’s sheep.
@ Defining Synodality Theologically
We read: “Following Francis’ speech, which was described as a ‘landmark’ address by voices across the ecclesial spectrum, usage of the previously little-used term ‘synodality’ skyrocketed.”
The thing about fluid synodality is that there are NO “landmarks,” not even itself.
The International Theological Institute’s 2018 work on synods is referenced (“Synodality in the life and mission of the Church”), a suppressed landmark in which reads:
“…It is essential that, taken as a whole, the participants give a meaningful and balanced image of the local Church, reflecting different vocations, ministries, charisms, competencies, social status and geographical origin. [AND!] The bishop, the successor of the apostles and shepherd of his flock who convokes and presides over the local Church synod, is called to exercise there the ministry of unity and leadership with the authority which belongs to him” (n. 79).
Brother Edward Baker wonders (above at 10:33 a.m.) what the synodal “study groups” are actually studying? Wonder no further! Here, four responses:
FIRST, the first ten (10) such expert groups were actually identified. About each of which, these questions from the back bleachers:
About “the East,” how to restore credibility and eventual union with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, estranged by Fiducia Supplicans? Sacrificed to LGBTQ religion as a sort of church-within-a-Church?
About the “cry of the poor,” how to not exclude those impoverished spiritually and culturally (Centesimus Annus, n. 57)? [and] “…the right of the faithful to receive Catholic doctrine in its purity and integrity must always be respected” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 113)?
About the “digital environment,” how to preserve analogue reality and the gifted Logos and the sacramental Real Presence versus a nominalist, digital, and virtual cosmos?
About a “missionary perspective,” how to also assure faithful guardianship of the received Deposit of Faith?
About “ministerial forms,” how to respect all of the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium)? Like civil unions and gay marriage, would non-ordained deaconesses be only a gradualist stepping stone, this time toward (invalid) ordinations?
About “ecclesial organizations,” how to not displace the institutional and personal accountability of each successor of the Apostles (Lumen Gentium, 1964, and Apostolos Suos,1998)?
About the selection, judicial role and meaning of “ad limina visits for bishops,” how to transcend zeitgeist intrusions into the particular Churches within the universal Church?
About conforming a missionary style of “listening,” how to also uphold the universal and inborn natural law and moral absolutes—of which the Church is neither the author nor the arbiter, (Veritatis Splendor, n. 95)?
About “theological criteria” (etc.), how to restrain theologians themselves from eclipsing the Magisterium?
SECOND, as to the additional five (5) study groups, yours truly predicts (a lay prophecy!) that they will attempt to tailor five draft “constitutions,” one for each of the synodal Continental Assemblies: North America, South and Central America, Europe, Asia and Micronesia, and Africa (that “special case”).
In this way the personal and institutional responsibilities of each of the successors of the Apostles will be rendered intact and yet unified, or submerged and upstaged—even as national bishops conferences are synodally “assembled, compiled and synthesized” (the vademecum!)—and likewise eclipsed?
THIRD, the 99% of Catholics who did not participate in synodality at any level might still appreciate the real difficulty of maintaining for the Church a place at the table of post-Christian radical Secularism and expansive Islam and communist China: the big stuff like destruction of the family, authentic interreligious relations, global ecological and economic dislocations, spheres of power, international crime rings and sex trafficking, runaway technocracy, and even the increasingly overwhelmed format of secular nation-states (in Europe and now a post-colonial world, a political idiom stemming from the Peace of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War, A.D. 1648).
FOURTH, while the Church’s synodal gatherings spotlighted these global evangelization horizons, why does synodality sidetrack itself into eviscerating the Church? And why the curious finesse of linking even Dignitas Infinita more to the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights than to the equally historical—and infinitely more historic—Incarnation of the Triune God into universal human history?
In their hypothesized continental constitutions, will the five added “study groups” at least include (inclusivity!) a few patronizing footnotes for the Second Vatican Council’s four Constitutions (!), the unifying 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, the follow-up Catechism, Veritatis Splendor, and Fide et Ratio? Or, will the several recent “synods” now give birth to polyhedral quintuplets, with not much more in common than Fiducia Supplicans’ unquestioned blessing irregular couples?
SUMMARY: Continental Quintuplets? All praise to the fertility of Pachamama!
I love a wry sense of humor.