Sin And The Synod: An Inquiry

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

If you deserve a severe penance the next time you go to Confession, you might request that your confessor require that you read the “North American Final Document for the Continental Stage of the 2021-2024 Synod.”
The “Synodal Process” has received ample attention on these pages already, and our coverage will continue, because this new document augurs ill for the future of the Church.
In reading the report, I was reminded of Sherlock Holmes, who once told Watson the secret of his success: “Watson, when I say you are instructive, I mean that I learn from your mistakes.”
And mistakes abound in this document, and the authors know it. So they liberally employ the familiar “fog factor.”
Consider: “In the Continental Assembly . . . there was a deep desire for greater inclusivity and welcome within the Church. . . .”
Wow! Right on! “Go and teach all nations!!” Hey, that’s great news – this may start a trend!
But wait, hold on…no, no, no, that’s called “proselytizing.” That’s very bad. I’m sorry I brought it up.
No, for the Synodizers, “inclusivity” means welcoming “certain people or groups [who] feel unwelcome in the Church, [including] young people, immigrants, racial or linguistic minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, people who are divorced and remarried without an annulment, and those with varying degrees of physical or mental abilities.”
Whew!
We pause now for a word from our sponsor — Holy Mother Church: For the past two millennia, she has preserved and promulgated the truths of the Gospel. As part of that Great Commission, she has protected the Church’s teaching by making distinctions.
In this document, the Synodal fathers have avoided distinctions. Big time.
The above passage identifies certain Catholics who blatantly reject Church teaching, and then uncharitably confuses them with a curious mélange of other Catholics whose various features are, to put it bluntly, irrelevant. The authors merely insert them as distractions in a lame argument that can be stated simply: “So what if they’ve rejected Church teaching?”
The document draws its authority (as though it had any) for this intentional confusion from “Session Two,” whose leaders report that “there is a need to differentiate between the importance of teaching and the need to welcome those into the Church, especially as it relates to our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters.”
Here again, we encounter the deliberate, debilitating fog, conveniently buried in bad grammar. To whom does “those” refer? Sinners? That’s all of us. In that, we and “our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters” are all called to the same destination: the confessional.
In addressing this passage, we don’t need to “differentiate” between “teaching” and “welcoming,” we need to distinguish between moral goods and moral evils.
You know, sin and all that.
But the word “sin” does not appear even once in the entire document.
We can see where this is going. If the truth makes you feel bad, you’ve got company over in Session III: “We think we are welcoming, but we know that there are people who feel ‘outside’ the Church.”
Should one distinguish between “thinking,” “knowing,” and “feeling”?
Aristotle, Metaphysics, first line: “All men by nature desire to know.”
College student: “I feel Aristotle is wrong.”
Me: “What do you think about him?”
Silence.
After all, thinking people can converse, even argue. But how do you argue with a feeling?
Well, no sale. The Holy Ghost trumps Aristotle every time, and Session VIII is super grateful indeed. “The very real feeling of the guiding presence of the Holy Spirit is [the synod’s] greatest strength,” they feel.
Now everybody knows this is a con, so what’s going on?

Words, Words, Words

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “It means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master–that’s all” — Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass.
Clearly the Synod is heading in the wrong direction. To confront it, we must prayerfully consider alternate paths. And take them.
First off, we must recognize that the Synod is in fact a political, not a religious — and certainly not a theological — initiative. We confront a similarly destructive direction in our secular politics. In both spheres, the revolutionaries seem to be in control, and, in both spheres, good people do the best they can to resist.
Our resistance might be well-motivated, but in both spheres we are at a fatal disadvantage because, while we use logic to confront error, the other side uses the dialectic, grounded not in truth but in power. And in both spheres they have the power, and they’re using it.
But is resistance our only option here? What actions can we undertake in a truly Catholic way while the Synodizers go their own way?
Are “LGBTQ+ persons [and] people who are divorced and remarried without an annulment” just another ignored minority, like “women” and “young people”?
No.
Then what is to be done?
We can’t know where to go from here without knowing how we got here in the first place.
Consider this “active measure” that any American bishop can take today without asking permission of the Synodizers:
Relieve from duty all active and retired members of the clergy in his jurisdiction who disobey their promise of celibacy by obdurately living in breach of the Sixth Commandment.
If the cleric refuses, the bishop can follow the lead of Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki and “suspend their faculties to hear Confessions and grant absolution.”
No mother should fear taking her son to his First Confession. Period.

How We Got Here

Why do we even have to bring this up twenty-one years after the public learned about the sex-abuse scandals?
Back then, Mary Eberstadt described the “evasive maneuvers” employed to mask the fundamental cause of this disaster: “Man on boy sex.”
Eberstadt called it “the elephant in the sacristy.”
But now the elephant has taken his circus act on the road. The notorious Fr. James Martin, SJ, has made a career out of advocating for homosexuality while condemning his critics. Martin “says Catholics must place orphan children with homosexual men,” writes Austin Ruse, “or else they become guilty of a new sin: homophobia.”
Twenty years ago, led by then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Bishop Wilton Gregory, our shepherds told us that “the scandals are behind us.” They’ve repeated that mantra ever since.
Yet, when it comes to sodomy they are more silent than a monk in a Carthusian monastery in the deepest hollows of Germany’s Black Forest.
Eberstadt once described the “truce” that homosexual priests had made with their parishioners after the appearance of Humanae Vitae: “You forgive me my boyfriend and I’ll forgive your contraception in the confessional.”
That was fifty years ago. It’s probably been going on ever since but for the past twenty years we’ve lived in a post-scandal world that should have brought us to our senses.
Why the silence?
Everybody now knows that most of the criminal abuse of children was “homosexual in nature,” however strongly many of our shepherds deny it to this day. Instead, they tell us that seminaries are now better, that the rules are stricter . . . but I’m still hearing from young men who were either hounded out of the seminary by the Sodomite Syndicate or who left because they were so disgusted by it.
Is that why we never hear a sermon on the first chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans?
Whatever happened to Humanae Vitae?
Has Holy Mother Church signed a peace treaty with the Sexual Revolution?
Is that what the “Synod” is all about?