The Subversive Nature of Contemporary Synods – “The contemporary form of synods … includes members of the laity who are hostile to magisterial teachings. For some, simply being on the Church’s payroll is a sufficient criterion for inclusion in the meetings. This is unprecedented …” Ecclesiology Today (What We Need Now – Substack)
Ordaining Women – “Tuesday’s ‘women’s ordination’ event, which synod delegates were invited to via mass email, is a good illustration of how side events attempt to influence the process.” How ‘Special Interest Advocacy’ Works at the Synod on Synodality (National Catholic Register)
Rise in Populism – “Both those who oppose populism and those who look at it with favor seem to broadly agree that populism is engendered by rapid and deep changes in a society.” God Bless the Misfits (Law & Liberty)
The Dirty Dozen Hospitals – “The transgender industry has exploded from a trickle of young males seeking transition procedures to thousands upon thousands of minors who have filled the industry’s bank account with more than $100 million … ” ‘Nuclear Bomb’ Study Shows 14,000 Children Have Undergone Trans Procedures (Washington Stand)
The ‘Enlightened and Powerful’ – “Although Whittaker Chambers died in 1961, the way the ensuing decade would rip the country apart would not have surprised the Cold War hero.” The Roots of the Sixties Revolution (Modern Age)
Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome – “While the deepest roots of any culture are religious – and we have seen all around us in recent decades what happens when we human beings are uprooted from our rich Christian cultural soil – there are other elements essential to nourishing a full human life.” The Trinity the Synod Needs (The Catholic Thing)
Poetry in the Midwest – “I’m a native Michigander and Hillsdale represents the best aspects of the Midwestern liberal arts college.” Q&A with James Matthew Wilson (The Collegian)
Hegel’s Raging Torrent – “If John Henry Newman, now canonized, was the hidden father of the Second Vatican Council, then Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is not going to be canonized, may well be the hidden father of recent synodal history.” Letters from the Synod – 2024: #7 (First Things)
Age-Old Sins – “On the occasion of the last phase of the Synod on Synodality, the Vatican has just published a new list of sins to add to the long cohort of human failures in doing God’s will.” A Catalogue of New Sins: A Catholic Self-Criticism Session? (The European Conservative)
Silent and Smiling – “So once again New Ways Ministry has scored a major public-relations victory, with Pope Francis sitting by, smiling quietly.” Silent and smiling, Pope offers an opening to ‘transgender’ advocates (Catholic Culture)
The Portal Masters – “Patients use Internet medical portals to make appointments, ask questions of medical personnel, and check laboratory results. But do the medical portal masters follow the science?” Jesus Does Not Follow the Science (Catholic Culture)
The Agnostic-Existentialist Question – “Thomas Joseph White: Karl Rahner (1904–1984) was undoubtedly one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century and worked alongside figures such as Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac.” Catholic Theology after Rahner (First Things)
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With the disturbing reports coming from the SynodalMania in Rome, it’s very clear now that Pope Francis cannot be trusted. He is Machiavellian in its worst sense.
Deacon Ed, I’m afraid you understate.
Bergoglio’s unholy spiritual heritage has been obvious for many, many years.
And, judging from what he is doing to the Mystical Body of Christ, he is worse than Machiavellian. He’s diabolical.
Brineyman: you’re right on target…I was straining to be charitable by calling his modus operandi machiavellian.
Re: Ecclesiology Today
Ms. Rowland masterfully unpacks the Bergoglian knot that is Synodolatry.
I am neither a theologian nor a Church historian, so I appreciate her explaining exactly what has been very, very wrong in Bergoglio’s Dark Vatican since its inception.
Our poor Savior. His Church is being led by wolves who are not inspired by the Holy Spirit, but by that other, ratfaced one.
@ The ‘Enlightened and Powerful’
From “Modern Age Journal” we read: “Goeglein also indicts Alfred Kinsey, whose fraudulent research in sexuality, underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, inspired Hugh Hefner to launch Playboy in 1953 and in the 1960s prompted Helen Gurley Brown to turn Cosmopolitan into a sex primer for young women.”
Two comments and an update:
FIRST, the “fraudulent” Kinsey Report (1948, 1953) pretended to be a statistically valid survey of sexual practices in the West, and then promoted mainstream casualness and pornography under the cover of scientific respectability. The report was later revealed to be based on non-scientific research of a very non-random [!] survey, including willing prison inmates with a disproportionate share of abnormal personalities (Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel, “Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of People,” 1990).
From Reisman, the Kinsey findings are based on eighteen thousand “sex histories,” all of whom were self-selected volunteers and a quarter to half of whom were prison inmates, and 1,400 of whom were sex offenders, apparently even including nine sex offenders who engaged in direct experimentation on children aged two months to fifteen years. Prostitutes and cohabiting females were classified as married, leading to the claim that a quarter of married women committed adultery.
SECOND, Janice Shaw adds further that Kinsey “was promiscuously bisexual, sado-masochistic, and a decadent voyeur who enjoyed filming his wife having sex with his staff” (see Janice Shaw Crouse, “Kinsey’s Kids,” at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/crouse200311140923.asp).
UPDATE: we now synodally await Cardinal Hollerich’s “sociological-scientific foundation” for overturning natural law and human sexual morality: “I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct.” https://www.newwaysministry.org/2022/02/04/leading-cardinal-in-synod-seeks-change-in-church-teachings-on-homosexuality/
@ Hegel’s Raging Torrent
Everyone’s experience per natura is thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. We don’t require Hegel to understand the underlying principles that psychologically motivate us to assess a scenario, realize what doesn’t correspond with us, and seek to remedy. Response may vary dramatically. Hegel’s genius was to systematize the process as history.
Synodality’s efforts comply with an Hegelian principle that our view of things is modified as we enter new periods, a never ending process of evaluation. How did the Church arrive at so similar a ‘raging torrent’ of relativist words if not precisely by Hegel, then by a dilution of doctrine by the caricature that permanence is old and static? Reflective of Hegel yes, though more likely the modernist trend of reconciliation with the world rather than with God. And precisely God understood exclusively through Christ.
In Christianity divorced from Christianity, counterfeit Christians, having adapted to loathing remorse, cannot help displacing sin with utopian social engineering to eradicate contrived understandings of evil.
@ Silent and Smiling
At first I thought, the opportunity for a smashing expose of a presumed PR victory. Until I read Phil Lawler wrote the article. Lawler wastes no time in revealing the pontiff’s smiling non committal demeanor, that is, despite what our lying eyes tell us is morally neutral. Taking Lawler by his tone here and elsewhere it’s more than nuanced as to what it suggests.
On that score we look around and see what our intelligence refuses to give full assent to. That somehow by hook and literally by crook sexual perversity long held subversive to the faith is taking over. Francis apparently believes the condition that many hold disordered, some even go so far beyond the clime of the day to call it mortal sin – is really a natural condition due to many pre conditions absolving strict guilt. It’s an epochal issue for Church and world that if continued will by inference affect the entire corpus of Catholic doctrine.
Most saddening to me is the inability of many Catholics to grasp the tragedies they help unleash by telling the world that even we refuse to acknowledge that God provides His creation with moral splendor.
Indeed, and about “moral splendor” and “many Catholics” in high places forgetful of “The Splendor of the Truth:”
“The relationship between faith and morality shines forth with all its brilliance in the UNCONDITIONAL RESPECT DUE TO THE INSISTENT DEMANDS OF THE PERSONAL DIGNITY OF EVERY MAN (italics), demands protected by those moral norms which prohibit WITHOUT EXCEPTION (Caps added) actions which are intrinsically evil” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 90).