Synodality is not a mark of the Church

Amoris Laetitia, Abu Dhabi, and Traditionis Custodes make up the Troika of Deep Concern

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. ~ The Nicene Creed (drafted in 325)

What I will argue here is not about the SSPX.

I am not a Society of St. Pius X member (having only ever been to one of their Masses at a conference, and to none of their chapels). I wish them well (and am aware of the criticisms), but this is my thesis:

They could vanish, and the trouble we’re in will remain.

I will try to keep my argument about a “Troika of Deep Concern” moving. I will put all the extras below in the footnotes. You can get the gist with the shorter version, since you’re probably up on the documents and actions. You know what the controversy with the SSPX is.

In 2024, Cardinal Raymond Burke told Raymond Arroyo on The World Over,

“No one has been able to define what the meaning of Synodality is … [yes,] there is a role for consultation… according to the ancient Synods; [Synodality] is not an essential mark of the church. [Synodality] is extremely troublesome, and dangerous, and it needs to be needs to be corrected…” [emphasis added]

In his appeal to the Vatican on behalf of the SSPX this February, Bishop Athanasius Schneider said,

“The current situation regarding the episcopal consecrations in the Priestly Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has suddenly awakened the entire Church.”

Both of these prelates put their finger on the spot.

Bishop Schneider is correct: People have a sense that the situation is about more than this little faction, with its discontents, intransigence, and confidence. Even if you think theirs is a faulty confidence, be honest. Something has come up, and it’s not just about the SSPX. If it were, opposition to them would not be so heated.

The non-SSPX-yet-Francis-resisting, vaguely-Synodality-rejecting Many, feel existentially uneasy. Online pundits can dismiss and mock the Society as much as they like, but we can’t take away the prophetic quality of the witness, and those opposed to them can’t deny they spend their non-SSPX-focused time also lamenting the trouble we’re in.

We need to confront the real “state of necessity.”

Pope Francis’s Disruptions

Three major acts of Pope Francis represent the culmination of his mission, self-proclaimed, which was to sow confusion, and make a mess. (I will try to restrain myself to these particular acts; I am well aware that there are many others.) We’ve lived with confusion for 13 long years, and now we are waking up to what their culmination, Synodality, means for us as a Church.

Cardinal Burke is correct: Synodality is extremely troublesome and dangerous.¹

The Troika of Deep Concern comprises acts aimed at the goal of changing ecclesiology from what’s expressed in the Creed to something different. We intuit it, even if we’re not (like Cardinal Burke) sure how. The Troika transforms three sides or roles of the Church: the interior, the exterior, and the unifying bloodstream of the those two, namely, worship.

The first blow: Amoris Laetitia (AL), the apostolic letter published in 2016, after the Synod on the Family. AL disrupts the inner life and promise of the Church: marriage and its covenantal transformation of the community, reflecting the union of Christ and His Church, as St. Paul tells us in Eph 5:32: “This is a great mystery.”

The Dubia cardinals spoke up about questions raised by AL in Chapter 8. While those questions are valid, I think there’s a more specific problem in the previous chapter. In my book, God Has No Grandchildren (affiliate link), I explain that without ever, in a document of 60,000 words on the topic, quoting or referencing the words of Our Lord that establish marriage as a sacramental union, and forbid divorce, AL calls marriage an “ideal”(implying an aspirational, rather than attainable, quality) and speaks of the possibility of recognizing “a new relationship” after divorce, including the reception of Holy Communion. In other words, by normalizing the divorced and remarried, AL calls into question God’s relationship with His people and the whole sacramental system.²

The second blow — The 2019 Abu Dhabi Declaration. (ADD) If Amoris Laetitia has to do with the mystery of the interior life of persons and of God’s love for the Church, the message of Abu Dhabi represents the abdication of the outward, centrifugal mission of the Church. It gives up on her mark of apostolicity.

Some say the ADD is not “Church teaching” because it is just a sort of proclamation, a good-will gesture, an informal expression of brotherly love. However, it’s important to remember when Bishop Schneider met with Pope Francis to urge him to add a proviso to the declaration’s most controversial passage, “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”

Bishop Schneider reported, after the meeting:

“On the topic of my concern about the phrase used in the Abu Dhabi document – that God “wills” the diversity of religions – the Pope’s answer was very clear: he said that the diversity of religions is only the permissive will of God. He stressed this and told us: you can say this, too, that the diversity of religions is the permissive will of God.”

What happened then? Pope Francis gave the cordial nod to Bishop Schneider, but the final, official statement did not include any such amendment to the language; it was put into the record without any qualification. According to the Pope, God wills all religions. Whether this counts as “Church teaching” or not, the declaration is on record as being “implemented” as such.³

I confess I was surprised when, three years after what I thought was the last straw of Amoris Laetitia, the Abu Dhabi Declaration is what shocked many of the faithful out of complacency. But perhaps the difference was that the ADD was short and to the fatal point, whereas AL was long and the point was buried.

Can we be surprised, though, that accepting the plurality of marriages is followed by accepting a plurality of faiths?

The third blow: Traditionis Custodes (TC). If AL attacks the nuptial meaning of Christ’s love for His Church by undermining marriage, and the ADD attacks the Gospel mandate to teach and convert nations, TC disrupts the circulation system that makes the Church a living body (in fact, the Body of Christ), a whole, and unites every part and function: the Liturgy in its fullness of sacraments, prayer, and celebration of the liturgical year. TC does this by tightly restricting the Traditional Latin Mass .

In theory, this is a merely legislative matter, but in the Church, there is not supposed to be a division between the legislative and the doctrinal. Everything flows from the worship of God. We’ve often said “Lex orandi, lex credendi” — the law of prayer is the law of belief. Legislation sends a message. If I were a Latinist, I would be able to provide a tag that conveys that how we worship affects our bonds, our life together, our conscience. How can Tradition, the continuous worship of millennia, with its fruits in the saints and in the conversion of all the nations, be truncated and dismissed?⁴

We must admit it: we have come to see division as the norm and expect it. TC opened a healing liturgical wound with spitefully worded division. But with the “SSPX moment,” perhaps we are stopping to ask why we expect division. It amounts to a kind of schizophrenia and cannot be healthy for the faith.

The fourth blow, from the newly elected Pope Leo, is one more hit. Its significance is for what makes all the rest possible, in the primary fact of Revelation, the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Second Person of the Trinity: Mater Populi Fidelis: Doctrinal Note on Some Marian Titles, Regarding Mary’s Cooperation in the Work of Salvation.

Mary’s title of Mediatrix of all Graces and the lesser known but still valid and historical title Co-Redemptrix keep alive in the hearts of the faithful the unique and pivotal role she accepted with her fiat, in which she becomes the means of uniting heaven and earth. They are not over-pious epithets or exaggerations, but rather, true expressions leading us to the reality of the hypostatic union, in which the human nature of Our Lord deigns to originate under the heart of His Blessed Mother. Truly, there is no greater paradox in God’s revelation, no greater sign of His love for His creatures, which He seals with His death on our behalf, on the cross. In the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, the people cry out, “Theotokos, save us!”⁵

The State of Necessity is not going away

These are the flashpoints of emergency; the SSPX highlights them but we know them as well. No matter what happens with the SSPX, whether they are excommunicated or, in some unlikely scenario, take an oath that satisfies both them and the Vatican and allows them to consecrate bishops licitly, these disruptions remain and are not resolved. The Troika drags us into Formlessness, the anti-doctrine.

Synodality replaces Form; it is a process, not a proper ecclesiology, traditionally serving to understand, manifest, and transmit its own working principles, established by God.⁶ The new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas from Pope Leo offers no relief from the specter of a bureaucratic, managerial model, imported under the rubric of “The Listening Church.”

The Church has two fundamental ways of manifesting her mission in the world. One is overt, by creedal proclamation. The other is mystical, simultaneously embedded in our human nature by means of that mystery, the nuptial reality of unity and fidelity, radiated in the sacrament of marriage. These ways engage the intellect, to be sure; they can also be discerned by what their pattern implies, even if one hears no explication, and are kept alive in the sacramental system, the liturgy as a whole.

The indissolubility of marriage was contradicted in Amoris Laetitia. The unique mission of the Catholic Church to save souls was contradicted in the Abu Dhabi Declaration. At the same time, the much-needed renewal of Tradition was bullied back into the catacombs. Love for Our Lady, mandated from the Cross, has been made cold.

Saying so doesn’t make us schismatics

We have a right to express our alarm and to oppose this effort without being called schismatics. St. John Henry Newman correctly identified the fact of being baptized as the “trust committed to us” to defend the Creed and by extension, Scripture and Tradition, the pillars of the Church which the Creed encapsulates.

The Magisterium exists to support those pillars, not to replace them; it is, in fact, subordinate to them. By baptism, each one of us is meant to be incorporated directly into the life of the Church, a life sustained by the faithful, loyal to Scripture, Tradition, and the perennial Magisterium. That’s it, that’s the way.

The SSPX is almost a distraction. I mean no disrespect in saying this, but these issues I’ve outlined remain, regardless of the issue of their forthcoming consecrations and the implications thereof. Making that question the focal point is a misdirection away from the obvious and growing disconnect between how the Church has always viewed herself and how her hierarchy overtly tells us they view her; how they are actively remaking ecclesiology (knowledge of what the Church is) itself.

Again, the project has a name: Synodality. But the four marks of the Church, according to the Nicene Creed, are these: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. Replacing these marks with a novel process represents a crisis. The faith was never meant to be a sort of multi-level marketing scheme, trickling worldly ideas down by means of a vast network of meetings and conferences, to end up at the parish, where the man in the pew receives the fruits of this dismaying spirit, and must wonder how, against the current odds, he will keep his children safe in the fold.

1. Synodality is peddled as “listening,” but let me say by way of compression, that any ecclesial process resulting in a report normalizing the abomination of homosexual mockery of marriage is its own condemnation.

2. By means of footnotes, one of which, 329, is a deception (I explain in my book (affiliate link) and here), the document allows for sexual activity in the new relationship. Shockingly, it implies that such activity could be seen as strengthening the new bond “for the sake of the children” — but St. Augustine, quoted by Pius XI in his encyclical Casti Connubii, the most comprehensive statement of the nature of marriage promulgated in one document, specifically disallows removing the requirement for separation on the grounds of “the sake of the children.” The reader can infer what he would think of using children to approve of a sexual relationship.

Further, during the pontificate of John Paul II, in the aftermath of that pope’s apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, questions arose regarding the possibility of the couple resorting to the interior forum in order to be fit for reception of Holy Communion. Can a pastor absolve the couple? These questions are put to rest by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who emphasized protection of the public bond of marriage in order to safeguard the whole sacramental system. Yet, in AL, the arguments are all dredged up again as if they are newly conceived, without regard to marriage’s unique position as a public act, precluding the remedy of a merely pastoral approach. This all goes to the protection of children and their understanding of the faith itself.

Amoris Laetitia, with its overwhelming volume of words, and its footnotes mainly referencing secular thinkers and Pope Francis himself, rather than the perennial Magisterium, defies systematic analysis. Two of the four Dubia cardinals have died waiting for a resolution.

In parishes, schools, marriage tribunals, and most importantly, the popular imagination, the impression of the Pope having vitiated the very clear teaching of Our Lord Himself on marriage has its effect. Very few marriages take place in Catholic Churches any more, and so-called Same-Sex Marriage remains the law of the land in the Western world, including in Catholic countries. The nuptial love, of God for His Church has faded in the moral imagination of the people.

3. A Statement of fraternal correction by Cardinal Burke and Bishop Schneider at the time the document came out:

The affirmation on the diversity of religions in the Abu Dhabi document and especially the errors in the Instrumentum Laboris for the coming Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon contribute to a betrayal of the incomparable uniqueness of the Person of Jesus Christ and of the integrity of the Catholic Faith. And this occurs before the eyes of the whole Church and of the world. A similar situation existed in the fourth century, when with the silence of almost the entire episcopate, the consubstantiality of the Son of God was betrayed in favor of ambiguous doctrinal affirmations of semi-Arianism, a betrayal in which even Pope Liberius participated for a short time. St. Athanasius never tired of publicly denouncing such ambiguity. Pope Liberius excommunicated him in the year 357 “pro bono pacis”, i.e. “for the sake of peace”, to have peace with Emperor Constantius and the semi-Arian bishops of the East. St. Hilary of Poitiers reported this fact and rebuked Pope Liberius for his ambiguous attitude. It is significant that Pope Liberius, unlike all his predecessors, was the first pope whose name was not included in the Roman Martyrology.

After the intervention by +Schneider, Pope Francis stated in the introduction to Fratelli Tutti, his encyclical on the topic of universal brotherhood:

This [the Abu Dhabi declaration] was no mere diplomatic gesture,” Francis writes in the encyclical letter’s introduction, “but a reflection born of dialogue and common commitment.”

So it doesn’t work to minimize the importance of the ADD, nor do the myriad diocesan committees on ecumenism and outreach treat it as trivial, after its implementation (an ominous word for those invoking magical powers for the official Magisterium). Implementation means it’s what children are taught; how children learn the role of the Church in the world and in respect to other religions. We are left with the unsettling thought, “Yes, I too — and not only the SSPX — felt the blow; I too fear an internal abdication of faith in Jesus Christ.”

4. For a round-up of commentary on this document, go to my post here.

The pretext for issuing TC was a survey of bishops on their experience with the use of the Traditional Latin Mass. Leaving aside the veracity of that claim (though it is a serious issue), what shakes confidence in continuity is the declaration of TC that “the liturgical books promulgated by the saintly Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, constitute the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.”

5. Even Pope Benedict XVI, who expressed some misgivings on the precise meaning of the Co-Redemptrix title and didn’t use it himself, refrained from making any pronouncement, precisely out of deference to tradition and, let’s put it this way, knowing that there are things we don’t know. Sidelining Our Lady, as the document proposes (rather inconsistently in its argumentation) as merely a sort of super-witness, and a mother in a sentimental rather than material and spiritual way, undermines our hope in our own ultimate end, by God’s grace: “God became man so that man might become God,” as Saint Athanasius daringly puts it.

6. The disruption of the moment creates intolerable anxiety in the faithful, in our having nothing solid to catch hold of. Things certainly seem heretical. It’s a feature of modernism to tamper with the meaning of words, making assessment impossible. The attacks on Scripture and Tradition, made by Pope Francis and so far upheld by Pope Leo, avoid the charge of outright heresy (I guess) because they are not, apparently, meeting the criteria for that offense; or if they are, there is no one willing to prosecute it. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?