The Catholic Response to a (Synodal) Church in Crisis

When one is invited to speak to a large gathering of traditional Catholics about “the crisis in the Church,” there is at least one advantage: I do not have to spend very much time convincing the audience that there is a crisis.

Indeed, if I were to begin by saying, “My dear friends, everything is going splendidly,” I suspect some of you would immediately check whether I had been replaced by an employee from the communications department.

And perhaps that is already our first little difficulty. Catholics today seem to fall into two groups. There are those who think the Church is experiencing an unprecedented springtime – and those who have actually looked at the statistics.

Still, we must be careful. Traditional Catholics have their temptations too. We can occasionally give the impression that the Faith was perfect until approximately 1962, that every priest then spoke Latin like Cicero, every child knew the catechism by heart, and every parish choir sounded like Solesmes.

The Church has never had a golden age in which everybody behaved themselves. The Apostles themselves managed, within a remarkably short period, to quarrel about precedence, misunderstand Our Lord, fall asleep during His agony, run away at His arrest, and – at the highest level of ecclesiastical leadership – deny Him three times before breakfast.

The subject before us is serious. There is confusion about doctrine. There is uncertainty about authority. There are pastoral practices which sometimes appear to contradict what the Church continues formally to teach. There is liturgical impoverishment. There is the temptation to govern by ambiguity because clarity might prove inconvenient.

But I do not want to speak this afternoon as though we were attending the funeral of Catholicism.

Christ did not say to Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my Church – provided the bishops make sensible appointments, the Roman Curia never produces an incomprehensible document, and everybody behaves themselves.”

Notice that Our Lord did not promise that the gates of hell would never make an impressive amount of noise. They frequently do. The question therefore is not whether the Church can survive this crisis. She will. The more important question is whether we shall remain faithful Catholics while she passes through the crises.

And for that, oddly enough, we need neither panic nor nostalgia. We need faith, doctrine, courage, humour, prayer – and perhaps the rediscovery of the very old Catholic habit of calling things by their proper names.

So this afternoon I would like to consider not merely what has gone wrong, but something much more important: What does Catholic Tradition itself tell us to do when the Church enters a period of confusion? Because the answer to a Catholic crisis cannot be less Catholicism. It must be more.

The Church in Crisis — and how NOT to save her

I have good news for you and bad news. The bad news is that the Catholic Church is in a crisis. The good news is that she has been there before. In fact, anyone with even a modest knowledge of Church history sometimes gets the impression that crisis is one of the few genuinely enduring Catholic traditions.

We have had corrupt popes, worldly bishops, heresies, schisms, revolutions, persecutions, and liturgical commissions. And yet we are still here.

That last fact seems to me above all an argument for the divine origin of the Church. A purely human organisation governed the way the Church has occasionally been governed would probably have gone bankrupt sometime around the fourth century.

And yet the situation is serious. Not because the Church is insufficiently popular. Not because her market share is declining. Not because she fails to appeal to the modern consumer.

The crisis is serious because within the Church there is uncertainty about precisely those things on which she ought to provide certainty: What is truth? What is sin? What is marriage? What is priesthood? What is liturgy? What is obedience? What does mercy mean? What, exactly, did Christ entrust to His Church?

And perhaps even more fundamentally: Do we still truly believe that the Church has received something from Christ which she herself has no authority to change? That is the heart of the matter.

We live in a culture in which change is almost automatically regarded as improvement. A phone from 2019 is old. A computer from 2012 is ancient. And so, almost unconsciously, we sometimes begin to think that a doctrine formulated in the year 325 must surely be in urgent need of a software update.

Christianity is not a product that requires a new model every year. The task of the Church is not continually to manufacture a new religion. Her task is to receive, preserve, deepen, and proclaim what she has received from Christ.

That does not mean that nothing may ever change. Pastoral methods can change. Canonical disciplines can change. Forms of governance can change. Liturgical disciplines can change.

Whenever some new ecclesial reform is proposed, a bishop should ask himself one simple question:

There is nothing un-Catholic about synods. The Church has known them for centuries. The danger begins when synodality changes from a method into an almost autonomous theological ideal.

Christianity, after all, did not begin with the maxim: “Where two or three are gathered in a discussion circle, truth will somehow emerge.”

The Apostles were entrusted with a faith. Afterwards, they were allowed to hold meetings about it. The order matters.

Listening is excellent, but Catholics must sometimes dare to ask the impolite question: Listening to whom? To the culture? To opinion polls? To interest groups? To ourselves? Or to Christ?

Because when the outcome of an ecclesial listening process predictably turns out to be identical to the wishes of modern secular culture, one may at least ask whether we have really been listening to the Holy Spirit—or perhaps mainly to the spirit of the age.

The Holy Spirit has one rather curious characteristic: He speaks with remarkable frequency in continuity with what He has been saying for the previous twenty centuries.

Christ was infinitely merciful. But His mercy never consisted in pretending that conversion was unnecessary.

The pastoral temptation sometimes goes like this: We do not want to hurt anyone, so perhaps it is better not to speak about sin anymore.The problem is that forgiveness then becomes meaningless as well.

The liturgy is one of the most sensitive issues in the Church. Understandably so.

As we pray, so we learn to believe. That is why battles over the liturgy are never merely aesthetic. Ultimately, they are about God. A Catholic Mass is not primarily a gathering at which the community celebrates its sense of belonging. It is the sacrifice of Christ made sacramentally present. It is not a meal celebrated in the form of a sacrifice, but a sacrifice celebrated in the form of a meal. That changes everything.

If we truly believe this, certain things follow almost naturally: reverence, kneeling, silence, beauty, care, sacred music—and a priest who does not imagine that the liturgy is improved when he spontaneously throws in an amusing anecdote.

A little advice for my brother bishops: do not automatically regard attachment to the traditional liturgy as a psychiatric problem. Not every young Catholic who likes Latin is a secret agent from 1957. When young people are attracted to Gregorian chant, silence, incense, kneeling, ad orientem, and classical spirituality, do not immediately ask: “What went wrong here?” Perhaps ask instead: “What are they finding here that they are missing elsewhere?”

According to certain pastoral models, what young people chiefly need is: low thresholds, few demands, short services, easily understandable texts, plenty of participation, and above all nothing that sounds remotely like an obligation.

There is only one problem. That model does not seem to be working terribly well. Many young people who discover the faith are looking for precisely the opposite: truth, order, asceticism, identity, confession, adoration, the sacraments, intellectual depth, and a community that actually asks something of them.

We have underestimated young people. We offered them lemonade when they were looking for wine. We gave them slogans when they wanted to read Thomas Aquinas. We thought Gregorian chant would frighten them away. Some of them are now voluntarily downloading it on Spotify.

We talk a great deal about the shortage of priests. Understandably. But remarkably quickly the discussion then turns to mergers, administrative structures, lay leadership, restructuring, and, of course, celibacy. All legitimate subjects for discussion. But perhaps we should first ask something simpler: Why would a young man want to become a priest?

If what he hears is: You will become the administrator of eight parishes, your diary will be filled with meetings, above all you must avoid offending anyone, and after twenty years someone may present you with a strategic plan on sustainable property management—it is astonishing that anyone turns up at all.

But say to him: Give your life to Christ. Offer the sacrifice of the Mass every day. Forgive sins. Baptise children. Stand beside the dying. Proclaim the Gospel. Become a spiritual father. Lead souls towards eternity. Suddenly it sounds rather different.

A priest does not have to be the most popular man in the parish. Fortunately. Otherwise the Catholic Church would face even more serious staffing problems. Nor does he need constantly to be “relevant.” His relevance does not come from his personality. It comes from Christ. When a priest anoints the sick, he is relevant. When he gives absolution, he is relevant. When he celebrates the Eucharist, he is relevant. When he accompanies a dying person, he is more relevant than all the television talk shows being broadcast that evening.

There are real conflicts between Catholic morality and modern culture. We should not deny them. But traditional Catholics face a danger of their own: the struggle against error can gradually become more important than love of truth. The difference is subtle, but crucial. One can end up spending so much time fighting modernism that Christ almost becomes a secondary issue. One can read every day about everything that is going wrong in Rome while scarcely opening the Gospel.

A practical rule: Read more Augustine than ecclesiastical Twitter. Read more Chesterton than angry blogs. Spend more time praying for your bishop than complaining about him. That last one is particularly difficult. Which is probably why it is good for the soul.

Where Does Real Reform Begin?

Because the future of the Church does not ultimately depend upon the competence of her bureaucracy.

“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My five-year strategic plan.”

Nor do we have to save her as though, after His Ascension, Christ somehow forgot how His own Church works.

But Catholics once again taking the Gospel so seriously that other people begin to wonder:

When that question is asked again, the new evangelisation will truly have begun.

And perhaps the Church will then rediscover something she has always known in her best moments:

The Deepest Crisis Is Not Administrative

The temptation among conservatives is to think: if only Rome replaced the progressive bishops with orthodox bishops, corrected some documents and stopped certain processes, the crisis would be over. That would certainly change a great deal. But it would not be enough.

The Western Church faces something deeper: the collapse of the Christian understanding of God, man, sin, grace, nature, sacrifice, authority, sexuality, death and eternal life.

For decades Catholic institutions have frequently attempted to answer secularisation by becoming more intelligible to secular culture. But if the medicine increasingly resembles the disease, people eventually ask why they need the medicine.

The fascinating phenomenon now is that many younger Christians appear attracted not primarily by accommodation but by difference: serious doctrine, demanding moral teaching, beautiful liturgy, silence, confession, fasting, intellectual coherence, strong Catholic identity and an unapologetic supernatural worldview.

Christianity becomes missionary not when it becomes indistinguishable from contemporary society, but when contemporary society encounters something it cannot manufacture for itself.

What Should Happen to the Synodal Project?

Traditional Catholic ecclesiology does not reject synods. Quite the contrary: the ancient Church was intensely synodal. Councils and synods belong to Catholic tradition. But the Apostles at Jerusalem did not ask, “What kind of Church would we like to construct?” They asked, in effect, “What has God revealed, and what does obedience to that revelation require of us now?” That difference is enormous.

A catholic synod may ask how persons in difficult moral situations can better be accompanied. It cannot declare morally good what revelation and the natural law identify as sinful.

It may ask how women can exercise their baptismal gifts more fruitfully. It cannot give the Church an authority over sacramental constitution that the Church believes Christ did not give her.

It may discuss better pastoral care for divorced Catholics. It cannot redefine indissolubility.

It may reform structures of consultation. It cannot transform the episcopate into a mandate derived from democratic representation.

And I should know, for I am Dutch. We started – in the sixties already, mind you – something we called we ‘pastoral Council of Noordwijkerhout, which looked very simularar to what we now call ‘synodality’. I have a few questions that are as simple as they are devastating: Has synodality strengthened the faith, led people to Christ, filled the churches, and produced new vocations? The fact that these questions come precisely from a Dutch bishop is particularly significant: scarcely any local Church has paid a higher price for a radically interpreted aggiornamento.

These are questions of disarming simplicity. Questions that really ought to stand at the beginning of every reform of the Church—and yet, after years of discussion about synodality, they almost seem like a breach of taboo: “Has the faith been strengthened? Has Christ been proclaimed more clearly? Has Catholic identity been deepened? Have more people converted? Has attendance at Sunday Mass increased? Are there more priestly and religious vocations? Has catechesis become more effective? Is there greater reverence for the Holy Eucharist? Has the Church’s moral teaching become clearer? Has missionary courage increased?”

I do not ask about moods and sensitivities, nor about new committees, formats for dialogue, or models of participation. All I ask is: show me the fruits. I simply appeal to a standard older than all synodal documents and debates about ecclesial structures: “By their fruits you will know them” (Mt 7:16).

For years, the Catholic Church has been talking about synodality. Questionnaires have been distributed, discussion groups established, working groups formed, reports written, continental assemblies held, and finally deliberations conducted in Rome. There is talk of listening, participation and involvement, of new forms of ecclesial decision-making, and of becoming a “synodal Church.” What is all this for?!

You know the classical principle of canon law: Salus animarum suprema lex—the salvation of souls is the supreme law. This establishes the decisive criterion. Nothing else does. The Church does not exist for the sake of its structures. Nor is she a religious non-governmental organisation whose success is measured by the number of people involved in consultation processes. Her mission is to proclaim Christ, to call people to conversion, to sanctify them through Baptism and the sacraments, and to lead them to eternal salvation. It is a simple request to look beyond the language of ecclesiastical bureaucracy and ask what truly matters.

Have the churches become fuller? Are there more young men who want to become priests? Do Catholic children and young people know their faith better? Do Catholics once again understand what takes place upon the altar during Holy Mass? Has reverence for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist increased? Has the Church regained the courage to tell people that Jesus Christ is not simply one religious possibility among many, but “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6)? Mutsaerts himself draws an unmistakable conclusion: “If you ask questions like these, it is impossible to describe the Synod as a success.”

The fact that these words come from a Dutch bishop says something. Hardly any local Church in Europe has experienced the bitter consequences of a radically interpreted aggiornamento as thoroughly as the Church in the Netherlands. The method in those days was very simular of the synod on synodality in these days.

As recently as the 1950s, the Netherlands was among the most impressive examples of a deeply rooted Catholic culture. Parishes, religious orders, schools, associations, and Catholic institutions shaped social life. The country produced priests, religious, and missionaries in large numbers. The Dutch Church possessed an impressive religious infrastructure and a strong Catholic self-awareness.

Then, within only a few years, the Netherlands became a laboratory for ecclesiastical experimentation. What began as an opening to the modern world developed in many places into an abandonment of things that had previously been taken for granted as Catholic. Truths of the faith suddenly appeared open to debate, traditional sexual morality seemed in need of revision, inherited forms of liturgy were regarded as burdensome, and authority and obedience as relics of a bygone age. The “Dutch Catechism” of 1966 became a symbol of this development and ultimately required corrections from Rome.

Much of what is presented today as a daring new departure is therefore by no means new. The Dutch tried some of it over half a century ago. And therein lies the tragedy. The hoped-for new flourishing never came. Instead, the Dutch Church experienced a dramatic decline in religious practice, the dissolution of Catholic social structures, a collapse in priestly and religious vocations, the disappearance of monasteries and convents, and the closure of churches on a massive scale. Within a few decades, one of the most vibrant Catholic countries in Europe became one of the most highly secularised societies on the continent.

Of course, this development also had profound external social causes (the sixties). But it would be historically blind to use that fact to ignore the internal ecclesial dimension. Precisely during the period in which Catholic identity was being weakened in order supposedly to reach modern people more effectively, people did not leave the churches more slowly—they left them more quickly.

I am not talking from an ecclesiastically or historically neutral setting. As a Dutch catholic growing up in de sixties and seventies, I know where a Church can end up when it speaks incessantly about reforming itself while becoming increasingly reluctant to speak about conversion, sin, grace, sacrifice, redemption, and eternal life. The history of my Church is therefore not merely something from the past for the universal Church. It is a warning.

I am by no means demanding that the Church should cease listening. Rather, I would remind the Church whom she must listen to first. It is not the prevailing spirit of the age that has the final word, but Christ. Social acceptance does not determine truth and error. Majorities do not decide the content of the Depositum fidei. And the success of an ecclesial process is not determined by the number of meetings, working groups, and final documents.

The Church has received a mission she did not give herself and which, therefore, no synod can alter: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation” (Mk 16:15).

These questions cannot be answered with yet another working document. Anyone who has spoken for years about “mission” must eventually be allowed to be asked whether any actual mission has taken place. Anyone who speaks of “renewal” must be asked what exactly has been renewed. Anyone who promises a “more vibrant Church” must be able to explain why churches are becoming emptier and vocations are failing to materialise. And anyone who constantly invokes the “signs of the times” should also be willing to notice those signs that do not fit his own programme of reform.

It all comes to a single question. When the synods have ended, the documents have been written, the commissions have disappeared, and the names of those involved have long since been forgotten, only one thing will ultimately matter:

That’s is a simple Catholic question. Anyone who asks it seriously must be prepared for the possibility that much of what has been celebrated in recent years as a great ecclesial renewal will suddenly appear considerably less impressive.

The Dutch Church once believed that through adaptation, experimentation, and the relativisation of supposedly outdated certainties, it could win modern people for Christianity. The result of that experiment is visible today for all to see in the form of closed churches and the disappearance of Catholic social life.

As a Dutch bishop, I am urging Pope Leo to judge not by procedures but by fruits.

That is the standard by which every genuine renewal of the Church must ultimately be judged.

And Rome?

There is an uncomfortable but necessary Catholic answer here to the question: and Rome?

Gregory VII knew it. Bernard of Clairvaux knew it. Catherine of Siena knew it. The Council of Trent knew it. Cardinal Ratzinger knew it.

The Curia is not the Mystical Body of Christ. Vatican diplomacy is not divine revelation. A dicastery is not protected by the charism of infallibility in every decision. Ecclesiastical appointments can be foolish. Bishops can be cowardly. Pastoral strategies can fail.

Catholic loyalty therefore does not require pretending that every decision made in Rome is wise.

But Catholic fidelity equally rejects the opposite error: Rome has disappointed me; therefore Rome has ceased to matter.

Peter remains Peter even when Peter needs Paul to withstand him “to his face” (Galatians 2:11).

That small passage contains almost an entire Catholic theology of ecclesiastical crisis: Paul resisted Peter without ceasing to recognise Peter.

A New Catholic Reformation?

The historical analogy that best fits the solution is not primarily Vatican I or even the pontificate of Pius XII. It is Trent and the Catholic Reformation.

The answer to Protestantism and internal Catholic corruption was not merely a series of condemnations. Trent did something much more substantial.

It defined doctrine. It reformed seminaries. It disciplined clergy. It reformed episcopal residence. It purified liturgical life. It improved catechesis. It produced a Roman Catechism. It strengthened preaching. It clarified sacramental theology. And then saints embodied the reform.

Not another long ecclesiastical conversation about what Catholic identity might mean, but a generation of bishops willing to say quite simply:

The quiet revolution that is going on right now should not be answered by a counter-revolution of anger. Anger easily creates another ideology and eventually another faction.

The authentically Catholic counter-revolution is much more dangerous to secularisation: orthodox bishops, holy priests, strong families, serious catechesis, flourishing monasteries, beautiful liturgy, intellectual confidence, confessionals with queues, seminaries with vocations, fearless preaching – and Catholics who actually believe eternal life is real.

If those return, much of the present ecclesiastical crisis will begin to lose its power.

The Church has recovered from periods considerably darker than ours. She did so not by discovering a different Catholicism, but by rediscovering the one she had received.

There is a peculiar mistake among modern men: when they discover that the Church is full of sinners, they conclude that Christianity has failed.

That is rather like discovering that a hospital is full of sick people and concluding that medicine does not work.

The Church has never claimed to be a society of perfect people. She has claimed something far stranger: that God decided to entrust His perfect truth to exceedingly imperfect men.

That’s very biblical. Here is a list of problematic people. God could use everyone of them. Noah was a drink. Abraham was too old. Joseph was a dreamer. Jacob a liar. Moses had a stuttering problem. Gideon was afraid. Samson had long hair. Rayan was a prostitute. Jeremiah and Timothy were too young. David was an adulterer and killer. The profet Eliah was suicidel. Jona ran away from God. Job went bankrupt and ended up a manure heap. Martha worried about everything except about the most essential. The Samarian woman was divorced several times. And Lazarus was dead. God could use all of them. So there is still hope for you and me.

And how about the Apostles. Peter denied Christ. Thomas did not believe his friends. James and John quarrelled over who should have the best seat in the Kingdom. They all fell asleep at the most crucial moment. And worse, they all ran away. (By the way this was the first synodal act in the historische of the church). Judas was put in charge of the money, which in retrospect may not have been the happiest appointment.

That is probably the first reason why I should not become too alarmed when someone tells me that a bishop has lost his mind. The Catholic Church has survived worse.

The revolution in the Church is peculiar because it is usually carried out by people who insist that no revolution is taking place at all. The old revolutionary at least climbed onto a barricade. The modern revolutionary joins a committee.

He does not say, “We shall change the doctrine.” He says, “Of course the doctrine does not change; we shall merely apply it in an entirely different way.”

It is a particularly sophisticated form of logic. One does not change what one believes; one merely changes everything one does because of what one believes.

A man may, for example, continue to declare that marriage is indissoluble while behaving as though it were remarkably easy to dissolve. That is rather like insisting some one to dive in the swimmingpool while forbidding HIM to get wet.

The problem is not that Catholic teaching is too strict. The problem is that modern Catholics have sometimes become so polite that they are embarrassed whenever Catholicism turns out to be Catholic.

The Great Misunderstanding About Progress

Every heresy has one great advantage over orthodoxy: it is simpler. It takes one truth and enlarges it until all the other truths disappear.

Orthodoxy is more difficult because it must hold two apparently opposite truths at the same time. The Church must be both unchanging and alive. She must both obey authority and resist abuses of authority.

She must both defend Peter and permit Paul to withstand Peter “to his face.”

That is precisely why orthodoxy is not boring. It is not a straight line. It is the balance of a man riding a horse.

What, Then, Are We to Do?

The modern answer is always: we must invent something new. The Catholic answer is usually: we must rediscover something we have forgotten.

If bishops forget that they are successors of the Apostles, remind them that nearly all the Apostles died as martyrs and not as chairmen of consultation bodies.

If young people no longer have anything worth dying for, finally give them something worth living for.

And What About Rome?

A Catholic has two particularly comic ways of behaving toward Rome. The first is to believe that every thought of a pope has fallen directly from heaven. The second is to believe that the Church ceases to be Catholic the moment the pope does something imprudent.

Both views have one thing in common: they know very little Church history. The pope is not God. But neither is he a decoration. (And by the way, pope Leo is not the successor of Francis, he is the successor of Peter. That makes things a lot easier if he is aware of that).

The Catholic position is much stranger: we believe that a divine institution can be governed by men who sometimes make exceedingly human decisions. That is not an argument against Catholicism. It is almost an argument for it. For only an institution that truly comes from God could survive two thousand years of clergy.

The Church will not be saved by angry men who constantly shout that all is lost. Nor will she be saved by smiling bureaucrats who assure us that everything is going splendidly as long as we hold hands singing Kumbaja. She will be renewed in the same way she has always been renewed: by saints.

People sometimes forget that Francis of Assisi did not reform the Church by writing a document on ecclesial renewal. He became holy.

Teresa of Ávila did not organize a conference on contemplative participation. She prayed.

Thomas Aquinas did not make the Faith relevant by making it simpler. He thought more deeply about it.

And Philip Neri knew something we sometimes forget: a man can be thoroughly orthodox and still laugh. Perhaps that is even a sign of orthodoxy.

Christ said that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. He did not say that the gates of hell would make no noise. On the contrary, gates tend to make a considerable racket when people slam them. And sometimes it seems that the devil has exceptionally good public relations.

But the Catholic knows something the devil continually forgets: the Church does not belong to us. She belongs to Christ. That is extremely good news, especially for bishops.

We do not have to build a new Christianity. We simply have to become Catholic again.

And if I were asked whether I have hope for the future of the Church, I would answer: Of course. Not because I place my confidence in ecclesiastical committees, sociological predictions, or strategic policy documents. But because on Easter morning the tomb was empty. And as far as I know, that remains the most important news report ever published.

The Tomb Is Empty

After an afternoon discussing doctrinal confusion, episcopal failures, Roman diplomacy, synodality, liturgical decline and ecclesiastical bureaucracy, it would be understandable if some of you were now considering becoming Carthusians.

There is no need for that. Catholic hope is not optimism. Optimism says: “Everything will probably work out.” Christian hope says something much stronger: Christ is Lord even when everything does not appear to be working out.

The Church has known terrible periods before.She has endured persecution, corruption, schism, incompetent bishops, immoral clergy, theological confusion and popes whose administrative decisions one would not necessarily wish to imitate.

And yet, mysteriously, whenever the obituary was being prepared, somebody appeared.

An Athanasius. A Benedict. A Francis. A Dominic. A Catherine of Siena. A Teresa of Avila. A Charles Borromeo. A John Henry Newman.

The Holy Spirit has an irritating habit of ruining the plans of those who have already declared the Church finished. And perhaps that should make us cheerful. So many in the past predicted the funeral of christianity, of the Catholic Church. But they forget one thing: He did not stay in the grave; that is why He keeps coming back.

And the deepest reality is this: Christ has risen. The Eucharist is real. Grace is real. Sin can be forgiven. Truth does not change because a committee votes against it.

And the Church belongs finally neither to progressives nor traditionalists, neither to bishops nor theologians, neither to Rome nor to us. She belongs to Jesus Christ.

So let us not spend so much time worrying about whether we shall save the Church that we forget the rather more Catholic truth: Christ is saving us through the Church.

And if we remain faithful to Him, then however turbulent the present moment may be, we already know how the story ends. Not with a synodal report. Not with a press conference. But with the words: “Behold, I make all things new.”

And when people ask me whether I have hope for the future of the Church, I would answer: of course.But because on Easter morning the tomb was empty. And that is, as far as I know, still the most important news story of all time.

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The subject before us is serious. There is confusion about doctrine. There is uncertainty about authority. There are pastoral practices which sometimes appear to contradict what the Church continues formally to teach. There is liturgical impoverishment. There is the temptation to govern by ambiguity because clarity might prove inconvenient.

“There is confusion about doctrine. There is uncertainty about authority.” Really? fired strickland, excommunicated vig, and the excommunicated sspx (and its adherents - ebby), have found that just isn’t true, ebby.

Your Church’s issue isn’t management architecture or service type. It’s birth and attrition rates which are some of the worst of any religion. Even if the minute percentage of Catholics that attend Latin services stays the same going forward forever, it won’t make a difference. Religion everywhere is dying. But yours is ahead of the curve.

As Bishops Strickland and Vigano, and the SSPX had nothing to do with this article, I counter you with this.

Probably, eye candy for you, oystir.

Fr Steven Grunow, CEO of Word on Fire Catholic Ministry

Bishop Robert Barron’s Disturbing Musclemen Fetish is a Scandal by Itself

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The Catholic Response to a (Synodal) Church in Crisis | Bishop Mutsaerts CIC 2026

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