Sowing The Seeds Of Synodality

• 9 months ago

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Where did these “Synods” come from, anyway?

According to the Catholic news source ZENIT:

“The term ‘synod’ stems from two Greek words: ‘syn,’ which means ‘together,’ and ‘hodos,’ which means ‘way,’ in other words, to ‘come together, to walk together’.”

“The institution of the synod of bishops was established by Paul VI on September 15, 1965,” ZENIT continues, “in keeping with the request of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, to maintain the collegial spirit fostered by the council.”

“In synod assemblies, the Holy Father and the bishops generally discuss questions relating to the universal Church, although they can also address issues of local Churches. Usually, the participants are representatives of the episcopate.”

And finally, “the synod exercises its function primarily as a consultative body under the direct authority of the Pope. He convokes the synod; chooses the topic; designates its members; in general, presides over the assembly; and decides how to implement suggestions made by the bishops.”

So that’s what a synod does. In collegial fashion, bishops (and, apparently in “Synodality Synod” 2024’s version, the laity) consult, and make suggestions to the Pope. And the Pope retains all authority to accept, to implement, or to ignore their suggestions.

Since 1965, there have been 19 synods: nine “ordinary,” two “extraordinary,” and eight “special.”

Why have this one?

Because the seeds sown over half a century ago have now ripened to the point of schism. No longer are morality, eternal life, and salvation the goals of Catholic life.

It’s all about politics. And the seeds were sown over half a century ago, in the Second Ordinary Synod, which met in Rome in the autumn of 1971. It is little-known today, but it constitutes a pivotal event in the course of the war on Catholic teaching.

The subjects to be addressed by the Second Synod were the “Ministerial Priesthood” and “Justice in the World.” The fundamental mission of the Catholic Church was the major target. Whatever the purposes invoked by the dissident bishops, their goal was to convert the Church into a weapon of worldly power and dominion.

The “Spirit of Vatican II” was in the air, and many found it irresistible.

As Raymond Cardinal Burke put it last May, “the so-called ‘Spirit of Vatican II’. . . was a political movement divorced from the perennial teaching and discipline of the Church.”

The cardinal’s subject was the reform of the Code of Canon Law, but, as he explained: “The crisis of canon law had its origin in the same philosophical presuppositions which were inspiring a moral and cultural revolution in which the natural law, the moral ethos of individual life and life in society, was questioned in favor of an historical approach in which the nature of man and nature itself no longer enjoyed any substantial identity but only a changing, and sometimes naively considered progressive, identity.”

As Augustine warned us centuries ago, Satan’s rebellion against God burns in the soul of every member of the City of Man. “The earthly city,” he writes, “which, though it be mistress of the nations, is itself ruled by its lust of rule” (City of God, 1, preface).

• + + “Christ was the first Communist” — Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin’s first Minister of Education.
• + + Browsing in our family library recently, I found Christ and Revolution, a slim volume written in 1973 by Marcel Clement, a French philosopher whose countless publications focused on the intellectual history of Marxism.
  
  Early on, Clement recognized the Marxist spirit that would soon envelop and corrupt so much of the palaver that was about to be peddled as “Gospel” under the Catholic label.
  
  To shed light on the early days of that epidemic, he focuses on two interventions in the Second Synod that exemplify the conflict that would mature into the revolution that we are living through today.
  
  The ingredients are familiar to us now, but bear in mind: Gustavo Gutierrez’s “Liberation Theology” had appeared just weeks before, and the USCCB’s “social justice” crusade would begin to get traction only five years later, at the notorious “Call to Action” conference held in Detroit in 1976.
  
  The first intervention we will consider is that of Cardinal Henrique y Tarancón, who was archbishop of Madrid and president of the Spanish Conference of Catholic Bishops.
  
  In Tarancón’s view, “the salvation described in the Scriptures is not a salvation outside of history, to which one should afterwards add justice as something that either precedes or follows. Among the present forms of sin, one should list some social facts, such as colonialism, cultural or economic domination, [and] oppression.
  
  “The grace of God through which man is liberated from sin is not only given to him individually, but also socially, through the ecclesial community, so that it may impregnate the whole social reality. One does not solve the problems posed by the liberative action of the Church in the social domain either in abstracting from the reality of the world, or in introducing a separation of salvation from justice.”
  
  Here we see themes that dominate today’s dissident Catholic Left. They pervade the Culture of Death throughout the West. “Cardinal Henrique y Tarancón’s ‘conception of an historical salvation realizing itself through the reform of structures’ rests on a theology of grace,” writes Clement.
  
  “The latter is not essentially given to society through the conversion of hearts. Directly spread somehow through ‘the ecclesial community,’ it is the latter which will transform the reality of the world in impregnating it.”
  
  The alternative intervention addressed by Clement was proposed by Joseph Cardinal Hoeffner, archbishop of Cologne. The cardinal, speaking in the name of the German episcopate, declared, “In the New Testament, ‘justice’ signifies the just life of man before God, or the justification of man through Christ. Evangelical freedom consists not in the liberation of man from the slavery of other men, but in the liberation of man from his own sins, through Jesus Christ. I doubt whether it can be said that the liberation and development of peoples are integral parts of redemption.”
  
  What a far cry from the rebellious voice of today’s German Conference of Catholic Bishops, who are on the verge of schism, due precisely to their revolt against the natural law and the Church’s Magisterium.
  
  Clement immediately recognized the mortal threat hidden in this new “gospel”:
  
  “In short, Cardinal Hoeffner defines the justice Christ brought us as an interior justice, the liberty through which he frees us as an interior liberty, the kingdom he revealed to us as an interior kingdom. It goes without saying that the growth of this justice, of this liberty, of this kingdom in the souls is accompanied by great benefits in man’s exterior life. But the type of justice preached and brought by Christ does not essentially coincide with temporal justice in history. The latter type of justice often called today ‘liberation’ or ‘development’ has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the Gospel.”
  
  After the battlelines were drawn at the Second Synod, Cardinal Hoeffner’s declaration slowly gained momentum in the West. Fr. Francis X. Moan, SJ, had digested its terms completely by 1980. “That’s what the Gospel is all about — politics!” he told me, after Mass on the steps of Holy Trinity Parish in Georgetown.
  
  And it’s no surprise that the “Spirit of Fr. Moan” lives on at Holy Trinity today.
  
  After all, it now serves as Joe Biden’s parish when he’s in town.
  
  “Ideas have consequences,” wrote Richard Weaver.
  
  And bad ideas have very bad consequences.