Posted on 08/24/2023 3:11:12 PM PDT by ebb tide
Diane Montagna’s recent article presenting the ground-breaking book “The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box”, complete with a foreword by Cardinal Burke, was rightly disturbing. In it we are all presented with the challenging call of Burke to the Church to resist the processes of Synodality that he and the authors claim are intended to change our Faith.
The authors José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue claim that they are trying to wake the Church up to the scale of the emergency both in the West and in the Catholic Church. They are warning the Church that both that secular culture is in imminent danger of being de-Christianised, and worse, that this movement will also dechristianise the Church itself if it is introduced by the Trojan horse of Synodality.
They have written with simplicity and clarity because they have discovered to their great alarm that “not even the bishops we have spoken to are aware of all that is at stake”.
If the bishops are really not aware, then it follows that it is unlikely that the laity are either. So the authors are trying to write in a way that “alerts the hierarchy, the circles of Catholic intelligentsia and the common faithful about the heterodox serpents and lizards inside the Pandora’s box that is being opened”.
This kind of language might strike some as unreasonably alarmist at first sight. And so to make their case as accessibly as possible they have written in the form of questions and answers, in a familiar catechetical style to help Catholics work it out for themselves.
In their book they explore what the strategy that lay behind the Synodal process represents and intends.
What may be lacking from the book is an overall conceptual analysis of what is happening to secular society and what may happen to the Church.
For the process behind what Cardinal Burke describes as a revolution uses a heady mixture of sex, Marxism and Orwellian doublethink confusingly wrapped together, to turn the traditional ethics of Catholicism upside down.
Readers of the book will obviously want to examine these claims carefully. What for example is “doublethink”? Why is it being used?
George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, which has so accurately foretold much of what we now experience, gives us the key. Doublethink is “the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. Doublethink requires using logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction”.
In this novel, the Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. The three slogans of the party are after all “War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength”.
The contemporary Diversity, Inclusion and Equality agenda reflects the same contradictions. In contemporary terms Diversity really means non-Christian uniformity, Inclusion means excluding Christian and traditional values, and Equality means taking revenge on those who hold Christian views by cancellation or worse. Every day the news tells us of Christians who have been fired or cancelled for having views that “do not align with the values of” etc, etc.
Orwell warned his readers that the aim of the madness of doublethink is intended to ensure that an increasingly brainwashed populace is no longer capable of recognising contradiction.
In the present political and cultural fog where politicians are too scared to rely on biology when asked what a woman is, and where trans-activists launch violent attacks on ordinary feminists, our secular culture appears to have reached that same paralysed place were contradiction can’t be either managed or articulated.
The present philosophical struggle across the Western world involves cultural or new Marxism replacing the ethics of what was Christendom. The foundations of the integrity of the individual and the compassion that Jesus embodied are being replaced with collectivism and hierarchies of power-relations. We might observe that politicised power-relations have replaced compassion by smuggling themselves into public favour by pretending to compose of a heady and attractive mixture of niceness and justice. The public have largely bought into the idea that to be woke is to be in favour of a refreshed social justice and that this is a good and worthy thing.
Social justice, now defined as a restitution of the so-called alienated and marginalised, rather bizarrely now works through a prism which sees sex as all-important.
The challenge for the Church which this new book warn us of is not only that we are losing the battle for Christian values in the secular state, but that the Amazonian Synod and the Synodal Way are replicating the secular goals of undermining and redefining Christian ethics; but this time within the Church as well as without it.
The irony is that the Church itself tried this once before and might have been thought to have learned from it.
In the 1960s and 70s an earlier economic version of this was attempted in what we called “Liberation Theolog”. Strangely this is all happening just at the moment when parts of the Church that tried the experiment have woken up to the realisation that Liberation Theology destroyed the Church wherever it was practiced in South America.
Leonardo Boff’s brother Clodovis, like his brother, a former liberation theologian, has recently written a heartfelt analysis of the way in which this adoption of Marxist categories favouring the alienated turned out to be wholly destructive of Catholic integrity and ethics.
So how is it that we discern within Synodality an assault on the Church’s ethics and beliefs?
We see the use Orwellian double speak represented in the values of D.I.E. inflicted on us. We discover too the replacement of the integrity of the individual with a preference for the “collective”. We find that sin is less important than inclusion; that compassion and forgiveness give way to the dominance of power relations. But there is also and perhaps puzzlingly the further element of the centrality of sex at the heart of the agenda.
Why has the classic focus of alienation shifted from economics to sex?
Is it just part of the louche degeneration of culture? Or perhaps part of the growing pandemic of an addiction to sex that pornography has unleashed behind the privacy of the computer screen? Or is part of a strategy?
It has become impossible not to notice that the consequences of the secular project that Synodality is copying has been the diminution of what is scornfully called the “heteronormative”. And as the value of heterosexuality is questioned so too inevitably is the status and functioning of the family.
Catholic spirituality of the last century has been rightly alerted to the warnings that flowed from the Marian apparition at Fatima. And whatever we make of them, it is increasingly hard not to acknowledge that Sr Lucia’s summary that “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family” has a profound and growing contemporary resonance and relevance for the Church in the present moment.
This is made even more poignant and alarming as having watched the ferocity with which Marxist regimes attacked the integrity of the family during their years of dominance in Communist states in the twentieth century, we find ourselves asking, “is it really possible that the Church is preparing to sign up to a project that appears to be trying to achieve the same goals by stealth, which were once attempted so ruthlessly by force”?
Cardinal Burke in his foreword to this new book insists that is exactly what is happening:
“Synodality and its adjective, synodal, have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding, in accord with a contemporary ideology which denies much of what the Church has always taught and practiced.”
If it is true that both our bishops, thinking Catholics and the Church in general have yet to grasp the character and the alleged strategy of the present turbulence, then reading “The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box” may be as important a task as the authors believe it to be.
‘The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box’ can be read here
Ping
If the people who disagree with Catholic beliefs were honest they would just leave.
But, like their idol, the father of lies, they are liars and the truth is that they stay in order to destroy.
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