Posted on 05/15/2026 2:24:42 PM PDT by ebb tide
A Catholic convert and former Anglican chaplain to the Queen said the Vatican Synod on Synodality’s recent pro-LGBT final report mirrors the Anglican Church’s descent into relativism and “schism.”
Gavin Ashenden on Tuesday published a piercing critique of the Vatican’s Study Group 9 report on “doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues” that scandalously gave the impression of condoning the grave sin of homosexual acts.
Referencing the testimony of an actively homosexual man, the report said that his “account bears witness to the discovery that sin, at its root, does not consist in the (same-sex) couple relationship, but in a lack of faith in a God who desires our fulfillment.” The report has been denounced as heretical by Church prelates such as Bishop Athanasisus Schneider and Bishop Joseph Strickland.
In a Substack post, Ashenden pointed to the report’s reference to a “paradigm shift,” pointing out that in the 20th century, this phrase was associated with an embrace of relativism that underpinned the sexual revolution. This very “paradigm shift” is the root of the Synod report’s error, he said: The rejection of the Catholic idea that truth is confirmed by divine revelation, and its replacement as the “source of moral knowledge” with human experience.
In the synod report, “The Church is not being asked to lead. It is being asked to follow,” Ashenden wrote. “It is being asked to arrive late to a revolution that has already happened and to bless the rubble.”
It is “because the West has … replac(ed) logos with experience as the criterion of moral truth” that “it now finds itself unable to give a coherent account of the human person, the family, the meaning of sexuality, or the purpose of life,” he continued. “The post-paradigm-shift West is not a place of new human flourishing … It is a place of disorientation, dissolution and deepening nihilism. The Church is being asked to trade a cathedral for quicksand, and to call it progress.”
The rejection of Church teaching on homosexuality is just one facet of a greater attack on God’s design for human sexuality, he noted.
“Because the paradigm-shift strategy is not merely about homosexuality – that is the presenting case, the thin end of a very large wedge. At its heart, it is about whether sexual difference, and the co-creative agency of man and woman in bringing new life into the world, is a given-by-God, inscribed in nature and confirmed in revelation, or a historical construction, a paradigm, available for revision,” Ashenden observed.
“This is why the Church’s teaching on contraception, homosexuality, and the indissolubility of marriage form a single, coherent whole – and why every pressure to revise any one element of that teaching is, in the end, pressure to revise all of it. You cannot detach the teaching on homosexuality from the teaching on the nature of sexual complementarity, and you cannot detach that from the teaching on co-agency in procreation, without the entire anthropology collapsing.”
The result, in the broader culture and now in the Church hierarchy’s heterodox philosophy, is that “the deep connection between eros, commitment, fertility and transcendence has been severed, leaving sexuality as pure self-expression with no inherent meaning beyond the subjective experience of the participants."
Ashenden went on to draw parallels between the Anglican Church’s process of schism and that of the Synod on Synodality’s Study Group 9 report.
“I have watched this strategy operate for 40 years, from the inside, in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. I watched it in real time. I know how it ends,” he wrote. “And I want to say clearly: what Study Group 9 is proposing to the Catholic Church is not a new idea. It is a well-documented process with a well-documented outcome. The outcome is theological sterility, schism, and the quicksand of relativism.”
Both processes “began with the claim that existing teaching was pastorally inadequate – that the Church was failing to accompany people in difficult situations, and that a more attentive, experience-sensitive approach was required.”
This claim opened up the doors for a fundamentally different “pastoral” approach that rejected Church doctrine as unchanging, essential and foundational to this approach. Tradition was now “one voice among many in an ongoing conversation,” and “discernment was communal.”
Scripture remained, supposedly, “‘formally authoritative,’ but its plain sense was increasingly subjected to ‘contextual’ re-readings that found in it not what it said but what the new framework required it to mean,” Ashenden pointed out.
The next steps were “presented as modest, provisional, non-binding and pastorally loving,” but nevertheless had the effect of dispensing with Church doctrine.
“The destination was not renewal … The destination was a Church that no longer knew what it believed, could no longer speak with authority on the questions that matter most to human beings, and had lost the capacity to form the kind of disciples who could resist the spirit of the age,” Ashenden said.
“The theological sterility is measurable,” he continued, pointing out that in the case of the Church of England, “almost no significant theological work that is recognisably orthodox” is produced. Instead, “Its intellectual energy goes into managing diversity, navigating competing truth-claims, and finding language capacious enough to hold together people who disagree on everything fundamental.”
“This is not theology. It is conflict management costume-playing in vestments,” he remarked.
He then highlighted a “visible” schism in the Anglican Communion, alluding to a comparable resulting schism in the Catholic Church.
“The Anglican Communion has fractured irreparably over precisely these questions … The unity that was supposedly being served by pastoral accommodation and paradigm flexibility has been destroyed by it. You cannot hold together a communion of faith by dissolving the faith that grounds the communion,” he wrote.
“The relativism is total. Once the methodology is installed – once experience becomes the criterion of truth and the tradition becomes one voice among many – there is no non-arbitrary stopping point,” he pointed out. If experience is the foundation for discernment, the door is opened to permitting virtually any behavior.
“The logic that justified the blessing of same-sex unions justifies the ordination of practising homosexuals, which justifies the blessing of polyamorous relationships, which – as we are now beginning to see in some Anglican provinces – justifies whatever the next generation of experience-sensitive discernment produces. The quicksand has no floor.”
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Ping
People disagreeing with the current Pope had better think twice. While attacking Trump and is supporters as having “bloody hands” the papacy (with the torture and execution in the Inquisition and Crusades ere-—never the actual Popes but their boards doing it)
“The first person formally condemned to death by the papacy was Arnold of Brescia (c. 1090 – June 1155), an Italian canon regular from Lombardy. He called on the Church to renounce property ownership and participated in the failed Commune of Rome.
Exiled at least three times and eventually arrested, Arnold was hanged by the papacy, then was burned posthumously and (his ashes) thrown into the River Tiber.”
Giovanni Battista Bugatti (6 March 1779 – 18 June 1869) was the official executioner for the Papal States from 1796 to 1865, during which he carried out 516 executions under six popes and the French government before being succeeded by his assistant Vincenzo Balducci. The list of people he executed ranged from thieves to assassins using methods such as beating, beheading, or hanging.
— Wikipedia.
Let a king get a divorce, and the next thing you know ...
Haven’t you heard, frank?
The synodal popes have determined the death penalty to be always and everwhere never justified.
It’s a new church: a synodal church!
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