Joan Didion’s 2005 bestseller, The year of magical thinking, left its readers a little shaken. The heartbreaking tale of her husband’s death unfolded in a half-world of eerie shadows. For a time, this plunged her into a twilight existence of strange disconnections and fantastical expectations. Hence its enticing title. His grief bore no resemblance to reality, only a vague pastiche of half-crazed concoctions.
Didion’s book immediately came to mind when reviewing the results of last October’s Synod on Synodality. It was a moment of magical thinking, which bore no resemblance to historical Christianity. Even reviews have become difficult, like trying to spot snowflakes. But this has been the project of modernism for over a century. His shooting star is a carefully crafted ambiguity, expressed in slang that is both confusing and malleable.
Read this extract from their document carefully “Synodal Church on mission”:
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Synodality can be understood as the walk of Christians with Christ and towards the Kingdom, with all humanity, oriented towards the mission, it involves meeting in assembly at the different ecclesial levels of life, mutual listening, dialogue , community discernment, consensus building. as an expression of the presence of Christ living in the Spirit and of decision-making in differentiated co-responsibility.
Any educated person would find this hallucinatory. Normal human beings don’t speak with this kind of disconnected speech. This is the kind of degraded speech that would make Orwell blush. It is a language locked in a specialized Gnostic world and foreign to normal men. Attempting to analyze is futile, because it in no way corresponds to a reality familiar to most rational men.
Any Catholic would be hard-pressed to find any resemblance to Christ’s mandate: “Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).
Where are the thundering certainties of the Creed? Where is the call to heroic holiness? Where is the mention of the saints who alone change the world and perfect the Church? Where is the desire to ignite the world with the love of Christ? Where is the command to embrace the Cross and die to self? These are the badges of an authentic Catholic identity.
No Roman gathering in two thousand years has reveled in the meaningless jargon on display at the 2023 Synod.
But this was carefully diagnosed by Pope Saint Pius feat of strength Encyclical of 1907 Pascendi Dominici Gregis. In an encyclical of encyclopedic scope, he exposes all the facets of the modernist heresy. In one part, he calls modernism the “synthesis of all heresies.” At the beginning of the encyclical, he explains the reason for this damning epithet:
(their) danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, the harm of which is the more certain, the more intimate their knowledge of it. Moreover, they do not lay the ax on the branches and shoots, but on the root itself, that is, on faith in its deepest fires. And having struck this root of immortality, they spread poison all over the tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth that they hold their hand, none that they strive for to corrupt.
Because Pascendi identified the disease of modernism with such penetration and surgical precision that the document was vilified as a fossil. Its mere mention serves as derision, if we remember it at all.
The modernist is bathed in the shadow of indeterminacy. This better meets their design goals. They are pushing for a reinvented Church, existing solely to imitate the antinomies of secularism. They covet the political, while making the supernatural seem eccentric. Ask your priest to comment Pascendi and prepare yourself for a condescending smirk or, more likely, a blank stare of ignorance.
Everything that is definite, definite and certain is suspected by the guests of the Synod. More to their taste were the inanities of magical thinking such as:
- In this time of deep encounter and dialogue, we invite you to journey together, creating spaces for everyone so that we can experience unity in diversity.
- Catholics must experience the Synod, must do the Synod; Speaking in spirit is a new way of being church, so expand your tent space.
- The synodal mothers demand kenotic decentralization because listening and dialogue inspire decision-making processes in an authentically synodal manner.
- The lived experience shared through a listening Church respects the primary role of the spirit in God’s surprises.
Convincing this as an attack on the Gospel would be confusing, due to its gaseous interpretation. The ambiguity studied does not concern the language used by ordinary men. He occupies a world totally different from that of ordinary men. Mentioning adherence to dogma or moral law would raise eyebrows. It is much worse than heresy, because heresy consists of denying the truth.
The Synodal Way considers truth as an intrusion.
These synodal pioneers succeeded in erecting a new Tower of Babel. Their light devaluation of language and the words that hold it together is ultimately a provocative mockery of the Word.
This is where the deepest problem lies. If the truth is rejected, there is nothing to discuss. Aristotle states in his Metaphysical that trying to talk to a man who has renounced the laws of good reason is like talking to a vegetable. There is no receptivity on the part of the listener because he has abandoned the hallmark of man: rationality.
This is how the Church, since the Council of Trent, has insisted that its candidates for the priesthood devote as much time to the study of philosophy as to theology. For any failure think correctly guarantees screaming errors in believe correctly.
This is what Cardinal Hollerich, general rapporteur of the Synod, proves. The cardinal explained that the Synod is “the experience of the journey together of the people of God…to bring the synodal Church into focus as a global vision.”
Is this the “global vision” which allowed the same Cardinal Hollerich to affirm in an interview that “the teaching of the Catholic Church must change with regard to homosexual acts, keeping it more in line with the discoveries of contemporary science”? One suspects that the “global synodal vision” does not give much space to the eternal teachings of Christ on the nature of man and his actions. “Big picture” must mean having better ideas than God.
Of course, we are already seeing the results of the Synod’s magical thinking. The recent document from the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, Supplicans Fiduciain the typical patois of Synodality (saying Nothing, SO Nothing can be said) states that blessings can be given for sin (excuse the graphic language). After reading through Synodal Newspeak, this is exactly what a blessing means for those in irregular unions. Despite the dances and handstands attempted by many bishops, priests and even lay people to show their best face, blessing is for sin. It is impossible to square the circle.
Catholics of valiant spirit and soul will welcome the Synod of 2023 with an appropriate response: laughter. But these types of sensible Catholics are tiny in number. The large number of faithful will fall to the siren song of the Synodal Path. Why not? It is a flawless Catholicism.
Just recently, a Catholic presidential candidate said he had changed his views on same-sex marriage due to the Vatican’s drastic shift on the issue. Such incidents will proliferate, portending catastrophic consequences.
Henry VIII’s oath of supremacy is child’s play compared to what Synod 2023 has put in place.
Ah, for the good old days of the Church behind the Iron Curtain. These heroic Catholics had the luxury of suffering an obvious enemy out the thick walls of the Mother Church. We dont do.
Woe to the shepherds who treat this synodality and its fruits with distinguished and calculated silence.
Will they ever have their John Fisher moment?
Otherwise, aren’t they afraid of millstones?
