Posted on 08/24/2026 8:47:26 PM PDT by ebb tide
In an exclusive interview with Advaticanum published on Saturday, Auxiliary Bishop Rob Mutsaerts of the Diocese of ’s-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) in the Netherlands offered a candid assessment of the Synod on Synodality.
Drawing on his recent open letter to Pope Leo XIV, the Dutch prelate insisted that the Church’s ultimate measure of any process must be the salvation of souls, not institutional procedures or feelings of inclusion.
Bishop Mutsaerts, who has served as auxiliary bishop since 2010 and is known for his outspoken defense of traditional Catholic teaching, grounded his critique in the final canon of the Code of Canon Law.
“The final canon of the Code of Canon Law ends with the famous principle that ‘the salvation of souls … must always be the supreme law in the Church,’” he recalled.
If one evaluates the synodal process, the decisive question is not whether consultations were extensive, people felt heard, committees functioned well, or documents were produced. The question is: has all this made it more likely that men and women will believe in Jesus Christ, repent, receive the sacraments, persevere in grace, and attain eternal life? On that criterion, there are serious grounds for criticism.
This principle shaped the open letter Bishop Mutsaerts published on August 13. In it, he asked whether years of listening sessions, continental assemblies, and synodal documents had produced stronger faith, clearer proclamation of Christ, deeper Catholic identity, more conversions, higher Sunday Mass attendance, increased priestly vocations, or greater reverence for the Eucharist. When measured against these fruits, he concluded, the Synod could not be judged a success.
For the bishop appointed by Pope Benedict XVI, the problem is not consultation itself, but an inversion of means and ends.
“‘Walking together’ is valuable only if the Church knows where she is walking,” he explained. “The destination is not increased participation but Christ; not ecclesiastical dialogue but holiness; not inclusion as an abstract principle but incorporation into Christ and, ultimately, eternal salvation.”
Consultation and synodal methods have their place, the bishop acknowledged, yet “once the means start occupying more attention than the end, something has become inverted.”
Bishop Mutsaerts returned repeatedly to a foundational biblical and historical claim. “Christ did not found a discussion group. He called Apostles. He gave them authority.”
The Catholic faith, he affirmed, does not arise from first taking an inventory of what people already believe and then distilling a common conviction from these perspectives, but instead, Divine Revelation is received by the Church, and thus is not invented by man, nor can it be rewritten:
A physician listens carefully to the patient, but listening is not the cure. And the Church possesses something unusual among institutions: she has received a Revelation which she did not invent and cannot rewrite. Consequently, there must always come a moment when listening gives way to proclamation of the Gospel. The missing words in the Synod are repentance and conversion.
And yet the absence of conversion language suggests a lack of conviction from Church leaders with regards to the dramatic fundamentals of what God has revealed, including the realities of sin, forgiveness, death, judgement, heaven and hell.
“A Church concerned with salvation inevitably wants to know whether more people are going to confession. A bureaucracy concerned with process wants to know whether more people participated in the consultation,” he naturally observed.
The Gospel’s first public words from Jesus were not an invitation to share feelings about structures but a command: “Repent and believe in the Good News.” Saints throughout history listened, yet listening was never the endpoint. “The endpoint was conversion to Christ.”
Bishop Mutsaerts applied the simple biblical test given by Jesus Christ the Son of God: “By their fruits you shall know them” (Mt 7:20). “Apply it without malice and without ideological prejudice,” he urged. “Above all: are people willing to become saints?” That question, he maintained, “is considerably more important than asking whether people experienced the synodal process positively.”
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