THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

I'm all for fairness and objectivity in reporting, but what passes for these in accounts about the recent 'youth synod' is like putting lipstick on a pig. The errors of omission and commission in that synod and its final document are so many and appalling that it is really quite disingenuous of intelligent writers like George Weigel and Robert Royal to begin and end their devastating critiques of the synod with sugarcoating that is too cloying to be taken seriously.


Synod 2018: An intermediate reckoning
by Robert Royal

November 1, 2018


A few days ago, I promised one last report on the Synod and its final document, but only after I had taken time to read the whole text – which still only exists in Italian – and to consider it carefully. There were many quick journalistic reactions, useful in themselves, but they tend to focus on the usual controversial points and stir up emotions that are then forgotten within a couple of news cycles.

If we want to be a Church, however, that does more than just try to grab onto a few shreds of truth among the swirling digital and spiritual waters around us, we owe it to ourselves to make a serious effort – even in online forums such as TCT – whenever we can to move more deliberately, dive more deeply.

Still, it’s less than a week since the final document was approved, so this is only an “intermediate-range” assessment. More, much more, will need to be said and done in coming days because the fallout from this synod will probably be with us for decades.

But at least I’ve done a first, penitential slog through all 25,652 words now – which is mercifully about 10,000 fewer than the original Working Document – though partly through the fog of jet lag and despite several mishaps in the course of traveling home. (A New Commandment I give unto you: Do not trust NJ Transit to get you from Manhattan to Newark Airport.)

In particular, I was looking for an answer to the main question, as I formulated it in the previous report, “Which future for the Church?”
- Would the Synod Fathers accept vague language about sexuality and synodality that could lead to anything – and probably will, as the vague formulations of Vatican II did in the 1960s and 1970s; or
- Would they affirm not only Catholic moral teachings in a world that doesn’t understand them, but also the Church’s sense of itself as, of course, engaged with the world, but as possessing a truth and a Spirit that is not of the world.

The crucial points are there in the document, but smothered by committee-speak to the point that – if you read through the entire text without specially looking for such things – you’d hardly notice them. And these, of course, are the main concerns for anyone truly distressed over how to help young people negotiate our troubled time.

The one real strength of the document is the overall realization that young people today live in a much changed and rapidly pluralizing (some might say fragmenting, even self-destructing) world. In a way, that’s a cliché, of course, since the world is always changing. But the pace and scale and nature of change now is something unique. [It's a strength to state something that is so obvious to anyone who carries a smartphone, which is probably 90 percent of all who live in the Western world??? Give me a break!]

So far as I know, only Eamon Martin, who bears the suggestive title Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, spoke cogently about the value the Church’s steady wisdom could have for young people struggling with such forces. [And I am surprised he did, because John Allen's favorite papabile, the cardinal from Manila about whom this Filipino does not feel proud at all, said during the synod that he was thankful for all the young people participating as auditors 'for teaching us', without saying anything about the duty of bishops and priests to teach young people! Cardinal Tagle's mindset and language is soooo nauseatingly Bergogliac.]

Sadly, the notion of sin has almost disappeared from the world of the young – as it also very nearly has from the document. The Devil is nowhere mentioned in those thousands of words, or the age-old struggle between Good and Evil. Is all that too strong a brew – is the whole dynamic of Redemption too overwhelming – now for the young people the Church seeks to help?

Which is why you can’t help wishing the Synod Fathers had gone easier on the repeated calls for dialogue, accompaniment, listening, etc., which, given the urgency of the challenges, sound terribly weak.

Subjects like the environment, immigration, etc., which also came up repeatedly over the past month, are, by comparison and by far, of secondary importance. There was no sense of putting first things first.

I’m reminded of how, at Vatican II, the whole question of Communism – the foremost anti-human ideology of its day, responsible for 100 million deaths in the twentieth century – was excluded from the Council’s deliberations, and on purpose. (At one point, 400 priests at the Council from 86 different countries proposed a formal condemnation of this murderous ideology, but the proposal was rejected.)

Various factors and subsequent explanations have been brought forward to explain how such a thing happened. But the simple fact remains that the bishops of the Catholic Church meeting in a formal ecumenical council could not find a way to express their rejection of the greatest evil of their time.

I wonder how we will look back at the past four weeks. The Bishops at the Youth Synod mention subjects like the sexual revolution, abortion, divorce and the breakup of the family, the digital pseudo-world, the flattening of the human horizon by widespread materialist and scientistic attitudes in modern societies.

But the almost ritualistic repetition of listening, accompanying, discerning [It's a Bergoglian meme he has managed to wash into the brains of his followers - including the cardinals and bishops who took part in the synodal assembly - so that it has become second nature with them!] reminds me of nothing so much as the old Christian-Marxist dialogue. The Church during the Cold War was dealing with a deadly serpent and treated it as if it was merely another dialogue partner. Indeed, lots of Christians went over to the Marxist/socialist side. The reverse was far more rare.

Where is the clear talk about discerning a religious vocation? About marrying? About having children – marriage and children being one of the ways young people often find their way to full adulthood and faith in the modern world?

If you want to dabble in sociology – as the Synod organizers clearly did – social science itself has shown beyond all reasonable question that marriage, family, children constitute the documented pathways to a better life, happiness, health, prosperity, and religious commitment. Was it too judgmental or controversial to say this outright? And to encourage young people to marry and have children if they don’t have a religious vocation? Instead, the text spends much time fretting over social pathologies; social and spiritual remedies are given very gingerly treatment in very general terms.

And as our courageous American Archbishop Charles Chaput has pointed out, the deadly evil of sex abuse received shamefully inadequate treatment in just three flat paragraphs while the text flirts with the sensitivities of young people about homosexual activity and same-sex attraction.

You have to read almost one-third of the way into the text before you come upon some real religious approaches to problems youth face – for example, the hope that the sacrament of Confirmation can become the beginning and not the end (as it more commonly is for most Catholics) of an adult commitment to the Faith.

And despite all the handwringing in the text about the need to understand how young people today are driven by images, feelings, and peers – and often seek a religion of well-being, the bishops are, at one point, forced to acknowledge: “In Christian communities, sometimes we risk proposing, without intending it, an ethical and therapeutic theism that responds to the human need for security and comfort instead of the living encounter with God in light of the Gospel and in the force of the Spirit.”

But on to another large question about both the text and the event. The late introduction of “synodality,” a topic barely discussed by the bishops themselves over three weeks, seems to reflect the intention of Pope Francis to make the whole Church “synodal.” He emphasized that theme in the midst of the 2015 Synod on the Family, and was visibly frustrated and angry at the end of that Synod when the deliberations and voting of the participating bishops did not give him the outcome he desired .

This time, the process was far more tightly managed. Two bishops named by the pope worked out the last quarter or so of the Final Document, which deals with “synodality.” And the pope himself seems to have been involved in the drafting. But this last-minute, and not very carefully thought out proposal for changing the understanding of the whole Church was itself not very “synodal” or polite.

Even quite reasonable requests by the bishops that translations be done in a timely way for those who do not know Italian so that they could give careful attention to what they were being asked to approve (within short time-frames as well) were rather brusquely turned away – a strange thing when the alleged desire of “synodality” is for all to listen and be heard, to “walk together” in an open and respectful and intelligent dialogue.

So in the end, we got a document that was not exactly the result of a consultative process, even among the bishop delegates.
- We have a new conception of a “synodal” Church in which all are part of the conversation and “walking together,” but in different ways – some proper authorities, others their collaborators, still others voices of various experiences who are to be encouraged in their differences, but also expected somehow, by an unspecified process or mechanism, to come together in a symphonic whole.

It took America’s Founding Fathers four months to write a carefully worded Constitution that would both give order to a diverse nation and, as far as humanly possible, avoid the danger of tyranny. It wasn’t until the year after that the people ratified it, and another year until it came into effect.

Synodality – a matter of far greater import for the whole world – received no such serious treatment this past month. One wonders whether it’s really supposed to be treated seriously, or will become just another example of idealistic religious language with no real connection to anything.

And, in the final analysis, this document is addressed to whom?
- Under the old system, the bishops, in consultation with one another, produced a text on some topic and presented their conclusions to the pope for his approval or disapproval. (The rest of us were just incidental observers, so to speak, of the synodal process.)
- In the current dispensation, the pope himself seems to have been involved in the drafting, and it’s quite unusual for anyone to send a message to himself. Especially a message that he says could now become part of the ordinary magisterium.

So is the text – for most people sequestered for now behind the barrier of the Italian language and of a forbidding complexity and length – meant for the pope, the bishops of the world, the Catholic faithful? Does anyone know?

The Synod Fathers proposed, and then actually wrote, an additional brief message directly to young people, which you can read by clicking here. That at least has a definite purpose and audience, a gallant gesture, though I myself wish it had more sheer evangelical fire.

For all its lumbering indecision, the Final Document ends well, indeed very well in its closing, 167thparagraph. On this All Saints Day, it’s good for us to read words reminding us that the whole point of the Faith and of human existence is to become a saint:

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Through the holiness of the young, the Church can renew its spiritual ardor and its apostolic vigor. The balm of holiness generated by the good lives of so many young people can cure the wounds of the Church and the world, recalling us to that fullness of love to which we have always been called; young saints spur us to return to our own first love.

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[Is Mr Royal really taken in by this fancy-schmancy blarney? This is really lipstick on a pig. What 'holiness of the young'? Holiness is not a quality automatically associated with being young, especially when we think of young Catholics today who are baptized but not really bred in the faith, because hardly or poorly catechized. Even to say 'the holiness of the innocent' when referring to the truly innocent (babies and children before the age of reason) is, at worst, inappropriate. The balm of holiness in persons of any age, whatsoever, not just the young, is good for the Church and those around them. The language of that paragraph is pandering. Besides, one must also relate it to the rest of the document to really see it in context.]


Youth Synod document looks like repeat
of past synods that undercut Church teaching
by Lisa Bourne


VATICAN CITY, October 31, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Preliminary reports after the Vatican’s Youth Synod question whether the final document released last weekend portends further undermining of Church teaching.

In an apparent repeat of the 2015 Synod on the Family, Catholic principles on sexuality, and the Church’s governance and apostolic nature may be in for another ambiguous reinterpretation ushered in by dubious processes during the Youth Synod.

The “Synod on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment” ended Saturday, with the entire final document getting the required two-thirds majority for passage.

Sections of the document on sexuality, synodality and the role of women in the Church, and the document’s deference to the working document (Instrumentum laboris) met with notable pushback in the vote from some Synod fathers but passed anyway.

Further adding to concerns over the final document is Pope Francis’s release of an Apostolic Constitution [a few notches more authoritative than a post-synodal exhortation] just before the Youth Synod that aims to augment the magisterial force of the final document generated by a Synod.

The 2015 Synod on the Family and its 2014 predecessor turned into a battle over Communion for Catholics living in objectively sinful situations.

Called with a theme of addressing issues faced by the family today, the Synod on the Family was widely considered to be conducted with a predetermined outcome — the tacit approval of Holy Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics and others living in otherwise non-marital unions.

Irregularities surrounding the Synod processes, ostensible manipulation behind the scenes, and the use of ambiguous language in Synod documents signaled an assailing of the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage. Amoris Laetitia, the pope’s exhortation resulting from the Synod on the Family, has drawn disparate interpretations by episcopal conferences worldwide, bringing about the feared end with regard to Communion.

In the Youth Synod final document,
- there is indistinct language that could open the door for normalization of homosexuality in the Church, and
- it also contains wording suggesting it should be read in light of the Instrumentum laboris, or working document, which contained the term LGBT, the first time for a Vatican document to have the loaded political term.

The concept of Synodality — typically understood to mean a decentralization and democratization of the Church and the magisterium away from the papacy and the Vatican to local churches – was included in the final document, when it hadn’t been widely discussed during the Synod.

This has been a talking point of Pope Francis in his pontificate but was a surprise in the final document, suggesting it was likely slipped in by among synod officials appointed by the pope. [And you think the pope had nothing to do with that?]

Further, language in the final document calling for the “presence of women in ecclesial bodies at all levels” — and that their participation be included in “ecclesial decision-making processes” — raised a red flag related to tampering with the apostolic nature of the Church, rejecting Christ’s intent for episcopal leadership, and weakening the spiritual fatherhood of priests.

The final document for the Synod on Youth was released in Italian. An English translation is expected in the next few weeks. The English translation of the final document from the Ordinary Synod on the Family ending October 25, 2015, was not released until mid-December 2015.

Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., thought it would be problematic to apply magisterial authority to the Youth Synod document. The idea of listening is just fine, he told LifeSiteNews, but giving the document that sort of authority would go too far.

“That’s not our understanding of the magisterium, at least historically,” he said.

Regarding the insertion of Synodality to the final document, it really isn’t a synod if it’s called for one thing but then becomes about another, he added, with people behind the scenes pulling levers, as has happened in all of the three last synods. Why go through this process then?, Msgr. Pope asked.

While the term LGBT did not make it into the final document, the term “sexual inclination” did, along with vague language on ministering to homosexual individuals, that could be read as a green light for affirming homosexual behavior.

This effort to insert ambiguous language that would destabilize Church teaching recalls the Synod on the Family, which pushed “accompaniment” of couples in “irregular unions,” the primacy of “conscience” with regard to individuals in adulterous or other sinful unions discerning that they could receive Communion, and also a “healthy decentralization” of power, referencing a push to redirect power away from the papacy and toward episcopal conferences.

The paragraph on sexuality in the Youth Synod final document says among other things that “there are questions concerning the body, affectivity and sexuality which require a deepened anthropological, theological and pastoral elaboration.” It references “paths of accompaniment in the faith of homosexual persons” and speaks of these paths helping these persons “to recognize the desire to belong to and contribute to the life of the community; and to discern the best ways of achieving it.”

It also says these “paths of accompaniment” are to help homosexual individuals “integrate the sexual dimension more and more into their personality, growing in the quality of relationships and walking towards the gift of self.”

The Church does not define human beings by their sexual inclinations, whether ordered or disordered. The Church teaches as well that homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered, and homosexual acts gravely immoral, and that sexual intercourse, or the marital act, is reserved for a man and a woman sacramentally married to each other.

Regarding ambiguity pertaining to sexuality in the final document, Msgr. Pope said he would have preferred a more rigorous articulation of Church teaching, and that God’s teaching involves more than people’s feelings.

While the language may not itself outright defy Church teaching, he said, it certainly doesn’t offer the teaching either.

“There’s a lot of stuff in the showroom, but there isn’t much in the stockroom,” said Msgr. Pope.

“We have to get people reacquainted with what God teaches,” he continued, “who we are and how He made us. The Church is not going to change what God has taught about human sexuality. Let’s go back to the source.”

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput told the National Catholic Register that the expressed need for “deepening” or “developing” our understanding of anthropological issues is one of the most “subtle and concerning” problems in the text.

“Obviously, we can, and should, always bring more prayer and reflection to complicated human issues,” Chaput said, but stated further that the Church “already has a clear, rich, and articulate Christian anthropology. It’s unhelpful to create doubt or ambiguity around issues of human identity, purpose, and sexuality, unless one is setting the stage to change what the Church believes and teaches about all three, starting with sexuality.”

The archbishop said the final document, “while not without its own flaws, is an improvement over the original instrumentum laboris text.” He did not comment on the final document’s call to be read in complementarity with the working document.

Archbishop Chaput, who had raised concern over the working document in advance of the Synod, had also told Francis and the other Synod Fathers in his intervention that the term LGBT should not be used in the Youth Synod document.

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“There is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are, as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community, the body of Jesus Christ.

“This has never been true in the life of the Church, and is not true now. It follows that ‘LGBTQ’ and similar language should not be used in Church documents, because using it suggests that these are real, autonomous groups, and the Church simply doesn’t categorize people that way.”

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Chaput, who had called upon the pope to cancel the Synod on Youth in light of the Church’s surging sexual abuse crisis, criticized the final document’s treatment of the abuse scandal, terming it “frankly inadequate and disappointing on the abuse matter.”

“Church leaders outside the United States and a few other countries dealing with the problem clearly don’t understand its scope and gravity,” he said. “There’s very little sense of heartfelt apology in the text. And clericalism, for example, is part of the abuse problem, but it’s by no means the central issue for many lay people, especially parents.”

Jesuit Father James Martin, Vatican communications consultor and fervent proponent of LGBT affirmation, praised the Synod’s final document’s use of the term “accompaniment,” and said it “acknowledged that the church doesn't know everything about LGBT people and (as with other groups) must listen to them.” Martin also lauded the document’s acknowledgement that many in the Church already work to minister to persons identifying as LGBT, [The wily Martin says this, as if the term LGBT were found in the final document, which it is not - hoping that if he and his ilk repeat it enough, people will start to believe it is in the final document. But since it isn't, perhaps Martin is sure the pope will use it in his post-synodal exhortation] and said it “spoke clearly of the need to reach out, include and look for ways for LGBT people to be part of the life and mission of the church.”

Canadian priest, professor and commentator Father Raymond de Souza noted how Francis released the new Apostolic Constitution right before the Synod, allowing him to designate its final document as magisterial, and said that, as this is a novelty, it remains to be seen what magisterial declaration for the Youth Synod document would bring.

He pointed out how the final document referenced the Instrumentum laboris, prepared months before the Synod, and how it said it should be read in “complementarity” with the final document, questioning how the two documents could add up to be magisterium.

“That adds a further question about status,” Father de Souza said. “The ‘working document’ was not prepared by the synod, nor was it voted upon by them. How then could it have any status at all, let alone that of being ‘complementary’ to a potentially magisterial document?”

[Which just goes to show that Bergoglio's synod-handler circusmasters did not even bother to consult the text of the new Apostolic Constitution when they rammed through the proviso that the IL was to read as a complement to the final document. Worse even is that the synod delegates who voted for that proviso constituted at least two-thirds of the assembly. And they are supposed to be among the best and the brightest in 'the Church' today! How scary is that????

Because what does that say of them?
1) They were not even aware of the Apostolic Constitution Bergoglio snuck into the 'magisterium' before the synod, just as he snuck in his decree on fast and free marriage annulments before the second 'faily synod' began; or
2) They knew about it - and that it makes synodal declarations part of the Magisterium - and were happi;y unquestioning about all that; and
3) If they knew about it and approved the proviso on the IL, anyway, then they did so mindlessly and robotically, because how can any person in his right mind fail to see that the very defective IL - which was not prepared by them, was roundly criticized by many of them, and obviously not voted on by them - cannot in any way, shape or form be considered part of the Magisterium, i.e., of official Church teaching, with or without Bergoglio's sneaky Constitution?
But this is just one of the many ways this synodal assembly was a travesty of what a synodal assembly ought to be, or of what any democratic deliberative body ought to be. I suggest some Vaticanista get a list of all those who voted NO for the IL proviso - and on this basis, release the names of the HOPELESS IDIOTS AND BERGOGLIO ROBOTS who voted Yes for it.

Father de Souza wrote in the National Catholic Register about another significant issue with the Youth Synod – that of translation obstacles. The text of the document was read in Italian in the Synod hall, but only available in Italian via hard copy, and there wasn’t sufficient time for Synod Fathers to process it.

This mirrored the 2015 Synod on the Family that resulted in Amoris Laetitia, where non-Italian-speaking bishops and cardinals had to vote on the final document presented in Italian without the option of going outside the Synod hall for translation assistance.

Chaput had written in his column as well about the ambiguity of rules and process at the Youth Synod, and also the lack of needed translations.

There was friction because of the translation problems at the Youth Synod, de Souza wrote, and it was unclear why the Synod secretariat could not takes steps to see that translations were provided.

“In his concluding address, Pope Francis said that the document now needs to be prayed over, studied and reflected upon, before proper decisions can be made,” Father de Souza said. “Prayer, study and reflection would have also been suitable before it was approved.”