An image on the website of the Diocese of Raleigh encourages Catholics in eastern North Carolina to take part in an online survey.(CNS photo/Diocese of Raleigh)
Posted on 09/02/2023 4:17:21 PM PDT by ebb tide
An image on the website of the Diocese of Raleigh encourages Catholics in eastern North Carolina to take part in an online survey.(CNS photo/Diocese of Raleigh)
The Synod on Synodality is just around the corner in October and already one can feel the excitement building among rank-and-file Catholics for what promises to be the first time the Church has ever really listened to them. At least, that is what synodal cheerleaders like Austen Ivereigh and Massimo Faggioli are breathlessly announcing, claiming that the Holy Spirit has finally broken through the cracks in the ecclesial sidewalk and is ushering in a new era of “being Church”.
Never mind that only 1-2% of Catholics worldwide participated in the listening sessions. Never mind that the potted-questions they were handed were not the result of the scientific, well-established protocols for poll taking or opinion gathering. Instead, they were the product of ecclesiastics out of their depth and who thus framed leading questions such as: “What is your experience of exclusion and inclusion in the Church?”
Besides, contrary to my sarcastic opening line, the vast majority of Catholics probably do not even know that such a Synod on Synods is even taking place.
Never mind all of that because there is an ongoing effort among the promoters of the Synod to create an image of the event as straightforward and unproblematic, with definitional specificity and a clearly articulated set of safely orthodox goals. That this is—finally!—the implementation of Vatican II and its ecclesiology (apparently, ahem, after a long interruption by two papacies), that nothing doctrinally untoward is going on here, and that all claims to the contrary are hyperbolic hyperventilations from the loony right-wing of the American Church. The image is being presented of a Synod that represents a true “listening” to the “people of God” with the latter being misconstrued, as I have pointed out elsewhere, as a kind of mysticism of proletarian egalitarianism.
But none of this is true. We are being presented with a Potemkin Synod, the true goals of which remain hidden in mystery behind the outward façade of an almost conservative sense of ecclesial respectability. Even Pope Francis now admits that the upcoming Synod probably holds little interest to most Catholics owing to its self-referential and rather technical nature and therefore, on its face, has only a small bearing on the real lives of people in the pews.
However, the Pope insists, it is still an event of enormous importance for the Church. But why?
Pope Francis goes on to explain the why and thereby adds to the Potemkin façade of a Synod that is, apparently, about nothing more nefarious than listening in mutual dialogue and harmony while we all walk together in togetherness. And he further underscores that the Synod’s “reality” is a call for a Church of inclusion for everyone. So the Synod is, as he says, an exercise in “listening together” and he emphasizes over and over the need for synodality as a means for universal inclusion of all voices in the Church. This is as close as we have come to a papal explanation of what he considers to be the deep essence of the Synod, and that essence is a listening to everyone in a manner that will lead to a Church that is universally inclusive of everyone, with apostolic office walking hand in hand with all of the baptized. He states:
We have opened our doors; we have offered everyone the opportunity to participate; we have taken into account everyone’s needs and suggestions. We want to contribute together to build the Church where everyone feels at home, where no one is excluded. That word of the Gospel that is so important: everyone. Everyone, everyone: there are no first-, second-, or third-class Catholics, no. All together. Everyone. It is the Lord’s invitation.
Those are nice words—and who could possibly object to them? But what do they really mean? What do they truly signal? Because, in fact, the Church is already inclusive of everyone; everyone that is willing to submit to the Church’s moral, spiritual, and sacramental discipline. And no matter how often we might stumble, fall, and backslide into sin, we are only a Confession away from reconciliation and beginning anew. But the Pope’s words seem to imply that the Church is not now truly inclusive of everyone and that “synodality” means that we are now rectifying the situation by opening new doors that have, apparently, been closed.
Perhaps the Pope is just doubling down on the traditional sense of inclusion and simply wants to place even greater emphasis upon it. However, who can take seriously the Pope’s call for the inclusion of “everyone” when his papacy has been marked by a singular refusal to dialogue and listen to his more conservative critics? Who can take seriously his call for free and open-ended discussion (parrhesia as he calls it) when he himself only seems to want to dialogue with those who agree with him? Indeed, rather than listen to his critics and reach out to them “inclusively” he has instead excluded those who desire to worship in the older forms, scolded them for their pharisaical “rigidity” and “backwardism”, and refused to give them a hearing.
And I am not talking here about the small but vicious wing of the traditionalist movement—and it is vicious—but of those more conservative Catholics who simply long for a liturgical experience of transcendence and who are not finding it in their parishes which are quite often boring and uninspiring. I am talking about Catholics who desire a Catholicism that requires something of us, that has “bite”, and provokes us by way of a challenge to holiness.
In a recent interview I conducted with Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, the bishop referred to these sorts of Catholics as “glad trads”, a term I happily embrace. He described a typical glad trad as someone like a young woman who comes to Mass dressed in sweat pants, a hoodie, and a Mantilla. And what his description meant to capture was the thoroughly comfortable manner in which such young people have embraced the tradition, but without rancor, ideology, or puritanical rigidity. And with a joyous yearning for Christ.
Many of these Catholics feel thrown under the bus by this papacy as they struggle to raise their children in the pornified cultural septic tank, seeking to live by the Church’s moral and liturgical traditions—only to be scolded for their alleged “nostalgia” and rigidity. And, quite frankly, this angers me deeply since it is so manifestly inaccurate and unfair, and therefore lacking in charity.
But this should not be surprising since a Potemkin Synod requires a Potemkin villain as its putative foil. And so the call has gone out for a more inclusive Church in order to overcome the dragon of judgmental, finger-wagging, moralizing Catholicism which, apparently, has morality bouncers in the vestibule making people feel bad about themselves. However, this is certainly not the pastoral reality in the vast majority of parishes. The truth is actually the opposite, with empty Confession lines while the Communion lines are full.
Where is this “rigid” Catholicism of which the Pope speaks so often? Answer: it exists only in small and insignificant pockets, and therefore the bogeyman of moralistic Catholicism is just that: a fiction. But it is a useful Potemkin fiction meant to deflect from the deeper reality of the aims of the Synod by its most ardent supporters.
Meanwhile, so-called “Pride” Masses proliferate without the same kinds of punitive sanctions levied against traditionalists. And some European bishops are now beginning the liturgical blessing of same-sex “unions” without a peep from Rome. The Pope has made James Martin, SJ, a voting member of the synod and made Cardinal Hollerich—a prelate who has openly called the Church’s teaching on homosexuality to be wrong—the Relator General of the Synod.
Allowing such folks to have their say and even elevating them to positions of authority is already telling enough. But when one also sanctions more conservative voices at the same time the clear impression is given that this is a strange form of “inclusion” indeed. And when one couples this strangeness with the message of prelates like Cardinal McElroy—a papal favorite—a clear picture begins to emerge as to what is really meant by the “inclusion of everyone” mantra. Cardinal McElroy wants total open table fellowship at the Eucharistic liturgy, a downplaying of the Church’s traditional sexual morality, a greater openness to the LGBTQ+IA “community”, and a radically inclusive Church that overcomes our ongoing “structures of exclusion”.
Thus, we are seeing what is truly meant by a Church that is open to everyone. We now see what the meaning of the Synod is for many of its proponents beyond the Potemkin façade. It means the elimination, or radical alteration, of these structures of exclusion. And it is now clear what these structures are, chief among them the Church’s traditional natural law moral theology as exemplified in Veritatis Splendor. The new head of the DDF, Cardinal designate Victor Manuel Fernández, has already stated that Veritatis was a fine encyclical as far as it went, but since it was mainly a document meant to discipline certain errors, it did not engender a true reform of moral theology, which is a task which the Pope has given to him. But this is a wildly inaccurate assessment of the theological depth of that encyclical and is also an empirically false statement about the nonexistence of moral theologies inspired by it.
Thus, the “favored words” like inclusion and “welcoming everyone” and “listening to everyone” are Potemkin words because they come across as ever so reasonable even as they gloss over what appears to be a deeper agenda of change in a particular ecclesial direction. Here it is instructive to recall the Pope’s statements, similar in tonality but not in complete content to Cardinal McElroy, to the effect that a priest should never deny absolution to a penitent (even if manifestly unrepentant one can only assume) and that he (the Pope) has never, ever denied anyone Communion. By implication, one can only assume therefore that the Pope made these references in order to make a point about the need for the emergence of this revamped Church of endless inclusion in a register not radically different from that of Cardinal McElroy. And at the very least, it definitely signals a departure from the traditional sacramental discipline of the Church in both the Confessional and in the Communion line.
The game’s afoot and the progressive wing of the Church—rightly or wrongly remains to be determined—clearly think that their time has come. They have waited out the previous two papacies, have kept their powder dry, and they now think that they have “their Pope” and that this is the moment to be seized. I do not think that Pope Francis is entirely on board with the entirety of their agenda. Nevertheless, his words about inclusion bear at least a family resemblance to their words and it is he, Pope Francis, who at every turn has empowered them.
To be fair, even under John Paul II these Synods have been micromanaged affairs from the Vatican. And, also to be fair, this time around the process does seem on its face to be less micromanaged and a broader participatory net has been cast out. But is that necessarily better? I know in our democratic era that it goes without saying that it is better. But given the forces at play is it too cynical of me to point out that democratic processes are also open to manipulation from the Catholic Left who are experts at just this sort of Potemkin subterfuge? After all, we have seen all of this before. Many of us older folks did not just fall off of the ecclesial turnip truck yesterday, and even if things are not exactly the same as they were in the Seventies there are enough indications that the similarities are greater than the dissimilarities.
From the primitivist art designed to promote the Synod to the misuse of the “people of God” metaphor mentioned above, this looks for all the world like a simple recrudescence of the stale bromides of the past. And just as then, so now. There will be endless calls for “dialogue” and “listening” until they get their way. And then all such dialogue and listening will cease, the door will be closed, and the page will be turned. Sadly, this is a case that none of us wanted to see relitigated, since in our view the previous two papacies have already rendered a negative magisterial verdict on the progressive Catholic project, especially in matters of sexual morality. But apparently, in the synodal Church, the legal principle of double jeopardy does not seem to apply.
Ping
Too many Catholics believe that if the “Pope” says something that was once a ticket to Hell in Doctrine is now okay then it is obviously true and it is just fine if a man gets divorced and starts taking up with men instead of women.
Progressive Catholics believe in neither Heaven nor Hell nor even God but in the god that is their own emotional “needs.”
Bergoglio’s recent escalation of anti-American, anti-conservative, anti-trad rhetoric is very likely not just his usual off-the-cuff vitriol but rather part of a larger strategy to preemptively discredit those like Larry Chapp who will cry foul at whatever heresies and poison that Bergoglio and his minions cook up at his Synod.
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