Synod on Synodality: A New Springtime or Pandora’s Box?

Arlington Latin Mass Society

8th November 2023

Edward Pentin

 

Well where to start? Once again we’ve had a month in Rome with plenty of acrimony and contention, lots of heat and, depending on who you speak with, not a lot of light.

Eagerly awaited by some, thoroughly dreaded by others, the first assembly of the Synod on Synodality on the theme “For a Synodal Church: Communion Participation, Mission,” is over.

It took place October 4-29 behind closed doors under kind of Chatham House rules and so effectively in secret, with carefully selected portions shared with the media. It wrapped up with a lengthy 42-page synthesis report, magically written in the space of three days, in which every paragraph, after amendments, passed with a two-thirds majority or more.

The assembly was plagued by controversy even before it began. There were questions over its legitimacy as a Synod of Bishops — questions which have yet to be properly answered — given that nearly one fifth of the votes were, for the first time, from laypeople, many of whom had distinctly modernist, heterodox perspectives.

There was the synod’s instrumentum laboris, or working document, that gave a fairly good idea of what those in charge had in mind when it comes to synodality. The synod itself, which began in 2021 and concludes next October, was billed as an opportunity for the Catholic Church to reflect on its own life and mission following consultations with the “People of God” at a diocesan, national and continental level.

The overall aim of synodality, we’ve been told, is to foster a more inclusive, participatory, and missionary Church, a chance to listen, walk together as the People of God, and welcome voices who have historically felt marginalized by the Church and, in effect, cast out by the Church’s teaching.

But to its detractors, the synodal process came over as simply a cover to introduce heterodoxy into the Church, whether it be the normalization of homosexuality, women deacons, a radical change in Church governance, and other issues that have long been on favored by dissenters but always blocked by previous pontificates. Coupled with bien-pensant statements that go down well with the world, the late Cardinal George Pell called the instrumentum laboris an “outpouring of New Age goodwill.”

And as we’ve come to clearly see, voices upholding apostolic tradition were not listened to as eagerly as those pushing progressivism, or even not at all.

What I wish to do in this talk is give you a report on what happened, not in great detail as I don’t wish to send you to sleep and you probably know a lot already, but in order to allow you to make up your own mind as to whether this was a noble initiative, carried out with integrity to help evangelization, or one that has been exercise in duplicity and aimed ultimately at subverting the Church, our faith and apostolic tradition. I’ll end by sharing some views from a few expert theologians and professors which I think cut through the sophistry and tell us what’s really happening.

 

Synodality

I’ll begin by taking a brief look at the process itself. Synodality is an ambiguous term – perhaps deliberately so — and it’s hard even now to find someone to properly define it, or just explain it with confidence.

But what we’re told by the synod managers is that it’s a process of fraternal collaboration and discernment, one, they maintain, that bodies like the Synod of Bishops were created to express.

It is a way of living and operating in the Church that makes the communion between God and human beings tangible. Synodality means journeying together as the People of God and, we are told, is a constitutive element of the Church.

We are also informed that Synodality is the process through which all her members can take an active part in her evangelizing mission. It is a way of listening to each individual person as a member of the Church to understand how God might be speaking to all of us. It is also, let’s not forget, about accompaniment, inclusion, and welcome. Synodality, the organizers say, has implications for how the Church leads, lives together in community, serves those in need, and evangelizes. It is the form, the style, and the structure of the Church.

“It’s about enabling people to participate, be protagonists, be a missionary disciple as [the] baptized,” said Sr. Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary of the Synod Secretariat. “It’s about carrying on the mission together. It’s always for the mission.”

The impetus behind synodality, or at least the ostensible reason for it, is the scandals, especially the sex abuse scandal, the falling away of the faith, and other manifold ways in which the Church, or rather her members, have fallen short over the past decades, preventing souls from drawing closer to the Christ through his Church.

Hence this process of synodality, a widespread consultation (though less than one percent of the world’s Catholics were consulted), which is meant as a means to renew the Church, to concretely bring communion with Christ to a broken humanity so desperately seeking it.

That is what we are told. And put that way, it seems fairly harmless and even noble.

But as I said in my introduction, there were widespread and well-founded concerns leading up to the synodal assembly, and these were perhaps best expressed in the book titled The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box by Julio Loredo and José Antonio Ureta of the Tradition, Family and Property movement. Two Latin Americans well versed in that continent’s Church, politics, and liberation theology, they described it as a “revolutionary” process that “takes up old heresies repeatedly condemned by the magisterium.”

They warned that it was the work of radical minorities rather than, as Synod proponents contended, the work of the Holy Spirit, and that they were advancing the same proposals they have put forward since the 1960s.

The central intention, they wrote, is to “question the very structure of the Church” and their proposed change “is so radical that the Synod documents speak of ‘conversion,’ as if the Church has been on the wrong path and needs to make a U-turn.” They also quoted Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who denounced such attempts to upend the Church’s hierarchy — as synodality appears to want to do — as “a delusion” that “would lack all legitimacy,” and that “obedience to it should be decisively and clearly refused.”

In the book’s preface, Cardinal Raymond Burke was similarly forthright, saying that “synodality and its adjective, synodal, have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding, in accord with a contemporary ideology which denies much of what the Church has always taught and practiced.”

He added: “It is not a purely theoretical matter, for the ideology has already, for some years, been put into practice in the Church in Germany, spreading widely confusion and error and their fruit, division — indeed schism — to the grave harm of many souls.”

José Antonio Ureta told me the agenda being presented wasn’t hidden but it was discreet, and not even bishops were aware of what was at stake, hence the need for the book.  The book was therefore aimed at alerting the hierarchy to what Ureta called the “heterodox serpents and lizards inside the Pandora’s Box that is being opened.”

Sr. Nathalie clearly wasn’t amused by any of this, nor prepared to listen to it, and made a point of liking a post on X showing the book in a garbage bin.

 

The Synodal Assembly Begins

So how did the assembly play out? Was it an authentic exercise in listening that genuinely welcomed all voices? Or was it like so many of the synods of this pontificate: a vehicle for introducing heterodoxy?

In his opening address, Pope Francis claimed that the ongoing synod on synodality “is what all the bishops of the world wanted.” But is it?

Let’s first recall that the notion of synodality was imposed on the 2018 Youth Synod – neither the word “synodality” nor the phrase “synodal church” appeared in its Instrumentum Laboris, that Synod’s preparatory document. The youth taking part in the synod had as much idea of synodality as any of us, and yet there it was, inserted into the last chapter of the final report. So the plan for a synod on synodality appeared to have been born then, but it’s a concept that’s been around for a while, and clearly proposed by the late Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in the late 1990s.

Francis also told us in his opening address that a survey among all the world’s bishops after the Amazon Synod showed that synodality was their second preference. I may have missed it, but I don’t recall a survey just of bishops or of seeing such results, but as we know from Traditionis Custodes, sadly survey results during this pontificate are not reliable.

In fact quite a few of the assertions put forward by the synod secretariat, and the Pope himself, have turned out to be simply false.

First of all, as I alluded earlier, it’s not a Synod of Bishops in the way Paul VI intended as, for the first time, laity have a vote — 70 members in total, making up nearly one fifth of the 364 voters. This is significant as, in previous synods, only bishops and some clerical heads of male religious institutes had a vote and a two-thirds majority was required for propositions or other motions to pass.

Now, for example, if less than two-thirds of bishops voted in support of a proposition, the votes of the laity could bring up that support to match or exceed the two-thirds mark and so ensure it would be passed. In other words, although bishops might not support a proposition, laity can make it look as if they did, and that is likely to have happened last month, but it’s not possible to say for sure as the Vatican did not give a breakdown of how participants voted (although the organizers certainly knew who voted as it was electronically recorded).

This is especially concerning when one realizes that many, if not most, of the 70 lay members from all continents supported dissenting positions. And their vote carried the same weight as someone as theologically learned as Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former prefect of the CDF. (Incidentally, I learned that representatives initially put forward to take part from one continent, and who were considered to be orthodox, were rejected by the synod secretariat on grounds they had not taken part in a local synod assembly before. But this was not a stated requirement for choosing candidates. I was told that this “seemed a convenient excuse to exclude those who were nominated but not part of the ‘synodal club’”).

But another problem for the synod is that, now laity have a vote, canonists are arguing that it’s not canonically valid as a Synod of Bishops as there’s been no change to canon law to allow for such lay participation. This, therefore, also threatens the body’s canonical and theological legitimacy — something, I was reliably told, is of considerable concern to Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the synod secretariat, who also snapped at someone who asked him about the issue during one of the general congregations, irritably claiming it was.

And for all the protestations that this was a Synod of Bishops when it clearly isn’t, Eastern rite and Orthodox bishops insisted privately and publicly that it wasn’t due to the voting presence of the laity. Moreover, as Father Gerald Murray has said, by allowing laity to vote, it “ignores the essential distinction between the ordained and the non-ordained in the Church,” and that “Christ’s establishment of a hierarchical Church means that certain roles pertain to the shepherds that do not pertain to the sheep.”

Perhaps partly to make up for this illegitimacy, and in a way that revealed a clear determination to achieve a pre-set end (several bishops during the synod said they thought an agenda was “clearly at work”), great emphasis was placed on the Holy Spirit. “We are not the protagonists of the Synod; it is the Holy Spirit,” the Pope stressed in his opening address, “and if we leave room for the Holy Spirit, the Synod will go well.” His address was filled with references to the Third Person of the Trinity, coupled with the implicit notion that disharmony, disagreement or lack of consensus were not of the Holy Spirit. Not a few bishops and even some cardinals told me they viewed this relentless co-opting of the Holy Spirit as sacrilegious.

Then we’ve been told from the beginning of this three-year process that it is not a parliament. But this, too, appears to be false. One bishop at the synod told me that for the entire month he felt he was in some kind of “debating chamber.” Also synodality is really, when it comes down to it, a byword for democratization of the Church and the decentralization of the Church’s structures, all dependent on a vote of bishops, some religious and laity. And rather like a parliament or debating chamber, there was apparently hearty applause whenever a synod member spoke in favour of a progressive agenda, and little for orthodox statements.

True, the Synod of Bishops has no executive power as it’s supposed to be only a consultative or advisory body and the final decision is always the Pope’s, given in the form of an apostolic exhortation. But like a parliament, it is deliberative and, if the voting is to mean anything at all, then it has to have some influence on the executive. As Professor Stefano Fontana of The New Daily Compass wrote, with this structure, there is “no doubt” that “forms of democratic praxis of a worldly kind will enter into synodal procedures.” They may therefore have said it wasn’t a parliament, but to many, it certainly seemed to resemble one.

The assembly itself was “very controlled” according to many I spoke to, especially regarding time to speak. Each round table had a facilitator who would ensure the delegates stayed on topic and on time. “Every minute is controlled,” one bishop told me early on. “The facilitators are watching everything all the time.” So much so that he said two had been cautioned for controlling too much and not facilitating.

Each delegate got 3 minutes to speak in general congregations – that is, the plenary sessions, so someone like Cardinal Müller just had that amount of time to defend the Church’s teaching to the whole assembly. On the round tables, each delegate had three minutes to make their point, then all the others had a set time to respond to it. They then paused for prayer to reflect on what had just been said.

One bishop estimated to me that only about half of the lay delegates were orthodox-believing Catholics, so 35 in total, meaning one for each table. The rest were pushing a heterodox agenda of some kind. I was also told that the Latin American and Asian delegates were generally all liberal, the latter sentimental and moved by emotion rather than reason, but most of the Africans were solid. The European and US bishops were very divided, and almost all the Anglophone laity at the synod were left leaning.

The tables changed each week, with delegates assigned to different small groups, but it was interesting to note who was seated with whom. In the week that a women’s diaconate was discussed, some of the most vociferous advocates of women’s ordination were put together with other women of the same mind. But it should also be said that some tables had a strong mix of known voices and opinions.

Now before I go on, I should say here that many synod delegates found the assembly to be helpful. Several conservative bishops told me they welcomed the opportunity to hear other people’s views. This isn’t new of course. As always with synods, they offer the chance to benefit from the experiences of the faithful from all corners of the globe.

But surprisingly, many also appreciated the novelty introduced at the synod of “conversation in the spirit,” saying it helped them to listen to the other and even keep at bay activists such as Fr James Martin who was also a synod member. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the USCCB, said how much he valued the opportunity to listen. One bishop told me: “There was a lot of effort to stop any bust ups at the synod, but it also stopped the spirit of activism.” Others, it should be said, felt that “conversation in the spirit” was used to “hijack their arguments,” and it did seem to be a means of shutting down polemics so that heterodoxy could get through effectively unopposed. But perhaps some good came of it, too.

As for the content of the discussions, I was told by one bishop that issues that really matter, such as mission and how to reach non-Catholics – essentially those matters clearly pertaining directly to the salvation of souls, the Church’s chief role – were not covered at the synod. “We’ve preached a worldly salvation,” he told me with tangible sadness, adding: “We’re constantly being told we shouldn’t be self-referential, but that’s what we’re being” And although statements were made upholding apostolic tradition and divine revelation, I was told that doctrine and morality were hardly raised at the assembly, if at all.

By contrast, efforts to introduce heterodoxy and radical reform certainly were. “Very passionate views came to the fore” regarding women deacons and other heterodox views, and what’s been termed a “revolution” was manifested most notably in the set speeches of those in charge as well as a handful of testimonials from specially selected participants. Those were of course published and given to the press.

There isn’t time to go into all of these here, but the statements coming from Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, general relator to the synod, Father Dario Vitali, coordinator of expert theologians, and an assortment of liberal laity and post-conciliar liberal theologians made it clear that a revolution was underway to turn the Church into something clearly apart from apostolic tradition and divine revelation. Archbishop Shane Mackinlay of Sandhurst, Australia, for example, is an ardent supporter of women’s ordination, and he wasted no time in pushing for greater leadership roles for women in the Church.

Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe regularly spoke to the assembly, as well as sharing with the delegates modernist thinking in a series of talks at a retreat held in the days before the synod. Father Radcliffe, who’s long been pushing for homosexual rights within the Church, gave three spiritual talks, more than any other delegate. One synod member joked that he “manipulated us” into his way of thinking, and we knew it.

Father Vitali gave what many considered to be the most significant and revolutionary address, in which he said that “when we reach the consensus that the Church is constitutively synodal, we will have to rethink the whole Church, all the institutions, the whole life of the Church in a synodal sense.”  Note that he said “when,” not if. Upending the Church hierarchy was a key theme of the synod, even going into the event, as was emphasizing the “equal dignity” of the laity and the ordained ministry. The fact that for centuries, the Church has considered the dignity of the priesthood to be the highest of all was conveniently forgotten.

To make a personal observation here, I visited the synod hall on three occasions when they let us in, for morning prayer, and with everyone seated at round tables including the Pope. It struck me as highly egalitarian and not at all in keeping with the Church’s hierarchical nature. Priests and prelates were asked not to wear cassocks or their robes. Only Cardinal Müller made a point of wearing his cardinalatial attire because, he said, he felt it was appropriate for the circumstance.

Like the pre-set speeches, the press conferences, too, were carefully choreographed. Delegates with the same talking points were rolled out, usually emphasizing the importance and value of listening, welcome and accompaniment. One went so far as to call on the faithful to kneel not before God but before the women of Africa. Another, Cardinal Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen, unashamedly called for apostolic tradition to be set aside. You occasionally had some who were willing to voice some orthodox opinions and criticism, but mostly they were progressive, or even a communist activist close to Sant’Egidio, Luca Casarini, who helps illegal migrants in the Mediterranean. Cardinal Müller was never asked to appear.

A few other points to make: the German Synodal Way was seen as certainly a forerunner of the event, and that frightened some but was useful to others, according to at least one delegate I spoke to.

And unlike previous synods, no Adoration chapel was set up for the participants. Also no one seemed to know exactly how the synod was being funded. Certainly bishops’ conferences paid for some of the costs to send their delegates, but other costs remained unclear. Lunch wasn’t provided, perhaps pointing to a lack of funding.

 

The Results

So what of the results of the assembly, and especially the crucial summary or synthesis report, a 42-page document which will act as the lineamenta, or guidance document, for next October’s assembly?

First of all, it’s important to point out that it’s highly unlikely such a lengthy draft text presented in the final week and which was as long as the final report could have been written during the synodal assembly, so the draft was most probably written before, and perhaps based on the reports of the previous stages and the instrumentum laboris.

The authors of the summary report, whom the Vatican adamantly refused to disclose so I had to find them out independently, were the synod’s two special secretaries: Father Giacomo Costa of Italy, who headed the “synthesizing task force” for the continental stage of the synod last year, and Msgr. Riccardo Battocchio, an Italian theologian. Both had taken a public interest in support of homosexual issues.

The other two authors were English Professor Anna Rowlands, an expert in the social doctrine of the Church, politically leftist, and ally of synod facilitator Austen Ivereigh; and Irish priest Father Eamon Conway, a professor of integral human development and systematic theology in Australia. The document was then assessed by a 13-member synthesizing commission comprising, among others, Cardinal Hollerich, Cardinal Grech, and Archbishop Mackinlay. Another example, if needed, of how the deck had been stacked in favor of, if not a specific agenda, then a clear outcome.

I won’t go into all the amendments of course — there were 1,251 of them — but among the most noticeable was the excision of the term “LGBTQ+” despite it being in both the instrumentum laboris and, in a different form, in the initial draft. This was, it turns out, thanks largely to African bishops taking a stand. “In Africa,” Archbishop Andrew Nkea of Cameroon told me, “we understand marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and anything short of that is witchcraft.” Given the sound approach to marriage and family in Africa, he said it would have been impossible to take such a change back to his flock.

However, as the German bishops admitted with some satisfaction, paragraph 15(g) can be read as effectively giving the go ahead for further normalization of homosexuality in the Church. It cleverly obscures the issue by lumping matters relating to sexuality together with “end of life” issues, “complicated marital situations, and ethical issues related to artificial intelligence,” saying they all “raise new questions.” Sometimes, the paragraph says, “the anthropological categories we have developed are not able to grasp the complexity of the elements emerging from experience or knowledge in the sciences and require greater precision and further study.”

It goes on: “It is important to take the time required for this reflection and to invest our best energies in it, without giving in to simplistic judgements that hurt individuals and the Body of the Church. Church teaching already provides a sense of direction on many of these matters, but this teaching evidently still requires translation into pastoral practice.”

Again, we see how those wanting to normalize homosexuality, and other false teachings, know that a change of doctrine isn’t possible, but a change of pastoral practice is, and so that is the goal, just as it was with Amoris Laetitia and communion for civilly remarried divorcees. And there’s no mention of the sin of such activity, of course. In fact sin is mentioned only once in the summary report, in the context of eradicating the “sin of racism.”

No wonder, then, that Bishop Georg Bätzing, head of Germany’s bishops, said the final text was “a big step for the universal Church,” even that it means a revision of Catholic sexual ethics, something he called an “enormous step forward.”

Elsewhere, removed from the draft report was a proposal to establish a permanent synod of bishops, a kind of “super-synod,” elected by bishops’ conferences to support the Petrine ministry. Instead there’s a proposal, not all that different, to make the C9 group of cardinals advising the Pope a “synodal council,” possibly expanding it to include laity.

Also of interest is a proposal to consider “whether it is appropriate to ordain prelates of the Roman Curia as bishops” — possibly another instance of decoupling episcopal ordination from Church governance, a priority of this pontificate. This appears to be one of the main aims of the synod organizers going forward: a complete restructuring of Church governance, in line with what I said about Father Vitali’s comments earlier, because then, of course, it’ll be easier to have all these contentious changes pushed through.

On the issue of a women’s diaconate, the report calls for publication by the next assembly of the results of two commissions on the subject, established by Pope Francis. Also despite a women’s sacramental diaconate being impossible and Pope St. John Paul II effectively closing down the debate on women’s ordination for good, the report calls for research on it to continue. It also speaks of an “urgent” need for canon law to be changed in order to allow more female governance roles.

Hidden in the text and widely overlooked is a call under the heading Eucharistic hospitality for a “broader reflection” on inter-church marriages. This effectively opens the door to the possibility of, for example, a protestant spouse married to a Catholic, receiving Holy Communion – something the German bishops have pushed for years. Indeed, ecumenism figures highly in the document, but like interreligious dialogue, no mention is made of the uniqueness of the Catholic Church as the one, true religion and instrument of salvation, and the need to accept her teaching to receive Holy Communion.

Another paragraph of concern is a call to make liturgical language more embodied in the diversity of cultures, giving bishops’ conferences a greater say. One liturgist told me that “those who have despised the work of the past 20 years of agencies such as ICEL are having their moment” and that he expects they will soon have their “own play book.”

 

Pulling It All Together

So what does all this mean?

Well let’s first say that reports claiming that the synod wasn’t anything to be concerned about and a bit of a “nothing burger” are, I think, highly misleading.

All the controversial issues whether they be homosexuality, women deacons, or reform of Church governance, are still very much on the table. They may not have been presented as forthrightly as some might have expected, but then again, that would have been strategically a mistake. If you’re doing something illicit or underhand, you don’t want to scare the horses and draw attention to your plans. All must be done slowly and quietly so that when people wake up to realise what’s been done, it’s too late.

Indeed, when looking closely at the summary report, one sees a number of timebombs ready to go off at the next assembly or in Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, not only related to the issues I’ve mentioned, but more generally.

To take this paragraph from the report:

Synodal processes enhance the gift [of knowing the truth of the faith], allowing the existence of that consensus of the faithful (consensus fidelium) to be confirmed. This process provides a sure criterion for determining whether a particular doctrine or practice belongs to the Apostolic faith.

In other words, they’re saying if there’s consensus (and let’s recall, the synod members are largely heterodox), then that’s a sure criterion that it belongs to the faith.

Or in another paragraph:

In order to avoid repeating vacuous formulas [could that mean the teaching of the Church?], we need to provide an opportunity for a dialogue involving the human and social sciences, as well as philosophical and theological reflection.

 As Gavin Ashenden pointed out — Gavin is a Catholic convert and former Anglican bishop who’s seen all this before in Church of England synods — both these paragraphs give the green light to take the lead from the world and its secular perspectives rather than from apostolic tradition and the perennial magisterium of the Church. One has seen this approach taken countless times during this pontificate, notably in new statutes, whether they be for the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family, or most recently, new statutes for the Pontifical Academy of Theology.

Also it’s important to point out that it’s the process that’s most significant to the revolutionaries. As a delegate told The Tablet: “The progressives got the process, and the conservatives got the content.”

The process of synodality is a Hegelian concept, Professor Fontana said in Rome last month, geared towards transforming the Church not from without but from within, introducing philosophical categories into theology to revolutionize it, so that it would be Catholic theology that would deform itself.

A Dominican theologian told me that synodality is so important to them because it implies “there’s no such thing as stable doctrine. Instead,” he said, “it’s determined by people’s immediate whim, and the democratization of the Church removes apostolic authority to teach. That’s the embedded meaning of the process,” he said, and he compared it to a factory producing a certain good. “It can’t produce just any material; it produces what it was designed to make in the first place. So the process has only one specific outcome.”

For this reason, he didn’t think it would open a pandora’s box of different heresies, but merely what they always wanted, and what they’ve already effectively announced: the blessings of same-sex unions, women’s ordination, communion for all etc. He said: “It’s not going to lead to more Latin Masses or to deny the Trinity, because it wasn’t designed to do that, but rather achieve a more generalist, modernist, deist Church, one that is ultimately opposed to the Trinitarian, incarnational Church founded by Christ. It’ll have no strict dogmas or morals, but end up looking like the Anglican Church.”

This is very similar to what Cardinal Müller told me shortly before the end of the synod. The process, he contended, is all designed to prepare us to accept homosexuality and the ordination of women. And he added that some speakers had a sociological, naturalistic understanding of the Church rather than a supernatural or theological one.

Of course, much of this was clear early on in this pontificate, When I wrote my book on the 2014 family synod – “The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?” — it was obvious to those with eyes to see that it was set up towards achieving a pre-set agenda. But they made mistakes at that synod by showing their hand too soon, and with each synod under Francis, they have learned how to get their agenda through with less notice.

“It’s been a self-ameliorating process,” a German Church expert told me, who added that the German bishops with their Synodal Path have been key players in it all. “They played it very strategically,” he said, “and got what they wanted, hosting behind the scenes meetings, inviting bishops to dinners, avoiding negative attention. And now they can say: ‘the things they’re now discussing in Rome are the same as what we’ve been discussing.’ So they can portray themselves as being ahead of the game.” He also said they have learned from the mistakes they made in their synodal way, not their doctrinal errors I should stress, but to be quiet and not outspoken, and to build networks ready for the next synodal assembly.

Their way of thinking is: “Let’s opt for an ambivalent statement. If our position is not condemned, then fine, we can live with that,” and they’ll go on to achieve their goal. Also Bätzing and others talk about the importance of science to back up their “new sexual ethics,” but what scientific proof do they ever supply? None, because it doesn’t exist.

Another interesting aspect to all of this is that the process has effectively suspended the bishops’ munera of teaching. One said the priestly role is “being obliterated” — perhaps hyperbole, but one gets the point. It was possible to see this early on in the synod when I asked an African bishop at a synod press conference whether he would accept it as the will of God if the synod supported the blessing of same-sex unions. Cardinal Besungu of Kinshasa demurred, refusing to teach what the Church has always taught and saying instead: “the Lord himself through collective discernment will tell us” what direction the Church needs to take.

In a way, this is reminiscent of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s account of the Arian crisis. He wrote:

There was a temporary suspense of the functions of the ‘Ecclesia docens’ [teaching Church]. The body of Bishops failed in their confession of the faith.  They spoke variously, one against another; there was nothing, after Nicaea, of firm, unvarying, consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years.

The German expert I spoke to put it this way: “Before we trusted bishops to make the right decisions and defend the faith. Now others are telling the bishops what to do. And wherever there’s consensus that comes out of the synodal process, that will now be the faith, that will be what is true, not what the successors of the apostles teach. It’s the approach of Jurgen Habermas,” he said, referring to the German philosopher and social theorist. But such a consensus approach, he added, is a devilish work. “There’s a peaceful resistance, but conveyed as a consensus of opinion. It’s a psychological method of disarming all those who don’t agree with the revolution.”

“The revolution will do immense damage to the Church,” he went on. “We won’t get more people entering seminary, more people getting married, more people catechised, because the Church is in state of suspension,” he added. “And all the time, the process is destroying the Church. The longer it drags on, the more poisonous it becomes. And the more the organ gets increasingly poisoned, the harder it is to cure. It rests in the body and to de-tox the body will take a long time. So humanly speaking, it’s going to get worse, all these things are going to get worse, and the train won’t stop until it hits the wall.”

Cardinal Müller told The New Daily Compass last week that “the criteria of Catholic ecclesiology have been lost, (…) it is not said openly, but the path that has been taken is that of Protestantisation.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that I heard that at least 25 bishops had no wish to come back to the final session next October.

But should we really we be worried? Aren’t we guaranteed that the Church will not be led into error? Won’t the Holy Spirit prevent the Pope, in his post-synodal exhortation, from allowing any of this, just as Francis backed down from allowing women deacons and married clergy after the Amazon synod when most delegates voted in support of them?

The Dominican theologian said we have to define what the term “led into error” means. “We are discovering that God’s promise that the Church cannot be led into error is narrower than we thought,” he said, “seeing as the Pope is clearly making erroneous statements when many thought that was impossible.” He also pointed out that some synods of the past were heretical, and even some councils were condemned by popes. “Could this synod proclaim something heretical?” he asked. “Yes it could, but it wouldn’t undermine God’s promise to the Church.”

I asked him what would happen if the Pope signed off on a post-synodal apostolic exhortation that contained such heresy. His response was that would be a situation like Pope Honorius I or John XXII, both of whom were found guilty of proclaiming or defending heresy. And he firmly expected Francis’ pontificate to end the same way unless there’s some divine intervention in the meantime.

But he stressed that the error or heresy would be confined primarily to Rome and the Roman Curia, and they’re not the totality of the Catholic Church. It’s necessary, he stressed, for the faithful to look beyond those institutions so they retain their faith even if those institutions collapse, which seems increasingly likely. “By excluding apostolic tradition, the progressives are essentially cutting off the branch that they’re sitting on,” he said. “They’re killing their own authority by proclaiming heresy, and pursuing a deeper culture of death than the one John Paul II warned about.”

The German Church expert made a similar point: “The enemy has entered the vineyard to discover it’s totally empty,” he said. “They’ve conquered it but all the life that used to fill it has gone. They’ve conquered the citadel but the people have left. So they’re left by themselves and like a parasite feeding on a living being, they will die when the being dies. And it has to die because the answer is not to rescue something that is rotten. It has to fail, as all liberal institution do — they fail and die because they have no spirit of life within them.”

 

Conclusion

So to conclude, it is perhaps obvious that the Synod on Synodality, by drawing primarily on the world’s thinking than that of the Church and her apostolic tradition, is unlikely to be the source of a new springtime of evangelization. It may help the Church in some areas, and perhaps some good will come of it, and has come from it, but among those I spoke to at the synod and elsewhere in Rome, there was little optimism that this will win more souls to Christ.

On the contrary, what I found was a conviction among learned theologians, bishops, and others such as those I’ve quoted here, that ultimately it poses a great danger to the Church and the integrity of her teaching, perhaps the greatest danger she has ever faced, at least as far as Rome is concerned.

Also one question, speaking as a journalist and observer, that keeps coming back to me about these synods, and indeed this pontificate in general, is this: How can these processes, even if we suppose they’re backed by good intentions, lead to any sustainable and lasting good if the way they’re carried out is largely based on lies, deceit and sophistry? We’ve seen this dynamic throughout this pontificate, and it’s produced the thorny fruit of contention, division, and ultimately destruction. And for all the Pope’s talk about mission and his wish for a Church that looks outward, well the Church seems more self-referential and inward looking than ever.

As well as the call for prayer and penance, perhaps the answer for faithful Catholics is to devise and promote an alternative synodal model and process, one that takes as its starting point apostolic tradition, divine revelation and the magisterium rather than secular thinking, science and subjective experience. Because at the moment those secular values are in the ascendent and, unless resisted, seem likely to fully conquer Rome if they haven’t done so already.