The Head of the SSPX on Synodality
Fr. Pagliarani, Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X, on Pope Francis, synodality, and why the charge of heresy may always remain futile
We receive The Traditionalist, a publication on issues related to the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), edited by our friends the McCaffreys, Roger and Priscilla.
There I read an interview with the Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), Fr. Davide Pagliarani, available on the Society website. His clarity of thought and expression gave me an unaccountable consolation. Since the feeling that we are not alone and that there do exist leaders who understand is not one I have often these days, I am moved to share some of his most trenchant words and I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Last fall I met many members of the SSPX at the Angelus Press conference, including Bishop Fellay (with whom I serendipitously had breakfast, just the two of us at table in the hotel restaurant); I came away with a definite sense that here are people who, whatever their failings and who among us has none, are simply trying to live the Catholic life not in reaction to anything but acting according to their beliefs. I think that is not something most people would say about the Society (if they know about it at all); perhaps it is a change in tone, but I don’t know enough to know. In any case, it was my observation.
So I read the Superior General’s answers in the journal with great interest. What kind of a mind does he have? What are his gripes and bugaboos? Is he conditioned by a rebellious or cultic mentality we hear so much about — the rigidity and harshness we are told characterize the Traditional movement in general, and the SSPX in particular?
I found that he just spoke the truth, eloquently, and it resonated with me.
The topic of the interview is the upcoming “Synod on Synodality” and its implications. Fr. Pagliarani digs right in:
“After [the Pope’s] two central and innovating ideas of mercy, understood as a ‘universal amnesty’, and the new morality based on the respect of the earth as the ‘common home of all humanity’ it is undeniable that recent years have been characterized by the idea of synodality. This is not an absolutely new idea, but Pope Francis has made it the priority axis of his pontificate.
“This idea is so omnipresent that many have, to a certain point, lost interest in it, even though it represents the quintessence of a mature and perfect modernism.”
Even though I’ve thought, read, and written about the drastic departure from traditional theology, doctrine, and teaching in this pontificate, I don’t know that I’ve read a paragraph that states the current situation in such a compressed, calm, and yet piercing way. It was so obvious to many when we heard it: that Pope Francis’ idea of mercy undermines the first words of Our Lord in His public mission, “Repent and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15). This plea from the Son of God means nothing like universal amnesty.
Not as obvious to many, I think, is the Pope’s shift of morality from the burning center of God’s Being (for He is Goodness Itself) towards nature, which has no center*. Even the orthodox have trouble articulating why we don’t make “our common home the earth” some sort of guide, especially when to do so means opposing the highest authority, the Pope — means resisting his ideas. In fact, many have made the attempt to bring what Pope Francis says somehow in line with fundamental principles of natural and divine law, to cringing effect. Fr. Pagliarani affirms common-sense unease with this new and calamitous imposition with his pointed and ironic phrase, “the quintessence of a mature and perfect modernism.”
I’m always grateful when someone clarifies inchoate disturbances. I’m not saying others haven’t said all this. I’m just saying, there it is, in one short paragraph: the summary of our woes under Pope Francis: his two innovative, subverting ideas and his final slippery synthesis.
Fr. Pagliarani is asked about the definition of the synodal process. He calls it “a concrete reality rather than a predefined doctrine” — “ a confused method, or better still ‘a praxis’, which has been launched without knowing in advance all the possible outcomes… a desire to turn the Church upside-down.”
He continues with an outline of the process of synodality and its relationship to evolutionary theory. When asked “Are there any passages in this synthesis that stand out as particularly dangerous” he forthrightly responds, “Unfortunately, most of the passages are frightening!”
But then, helpfully, he speaks of “two passages in particular” that “summarize the intent of the whole document” — “the desire to change the very essence of the Catholic Church…”
First:
“… the explicit desire to recognise a Church that functions in reverse, and in which the teaching-Church no longer has anything to teach: ‘It is important to build a synodal institutional model as an ecclesial paradigm of deconstructing pyramidal power that privileges unipersonal managements. [NB: this sort of syntactical incoherence is its own warning.] The only legitimate authority in the Church must be that of love and service, following the example of the Lord.’
“Here we wonder whether we are in the presence of a heresy or, quite simply, of a ‘nothingness’ that we cannot even describe. A heretic, in fact, still ‘believes’ in something, and may still have an idea of the Church, even if his idea is distorted. However, where we are dealing with an idea of the Church that is not only fuzzy but also ‘liquid’… a Church without doctrine, without dogma, without faith, and in which there is no longer any need for an authority to teach anything.”
This passage he identifies is of the utmost importance for us to confront.
Many strive to show that Pope Francis is a formal heretic and I have signed some of their efforts myself (on the grounds that if it quacks like a duck, you don’t need a formal inquiry to know for sure). My husband warns of the difficulty of clearing the high bar of proof of heresy, where the defendant is a master of confusion, strategically lobbing contradictory documents, statements, and interviews, and misdirecting his critics with convenient sound bites for every position. One thing a self-respecting heretic supplies is some internal consistency in his teaching, and this is something we have learned can’t be said of Pope Francis.
So this passage about the “nothingness” of synodality, its indescribability, struck me as so perfectly phrased. How true it is in contrast, as Fr. Pagliarani says, that the heretic believes something.
We are all pretty familiar with Chesterton’s quip that the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman has lost everything except his reason. We might not quite remember Chesterton going on to say, “The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.”
Nevertheless, we can say that the madman is wrong. There is something there to dispute, even if it has a certain internal consistency. Chesterton again: “Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion.”
The Church has dealt with that sort of thing from the very beginning. We know what it looks like and how to refute it, because the Church teaches the larger truth, the largest of all. That’s why we keep reaching for signs of error when we try to identify what disturbs us in the current mess. But the “perfection” of modernism is nothingness. There is nothing to reach for. We cannot grasp nothing.
Fr. Pagliarani is asked, “You also mentioned a second passage?”
“Definitely. There is this second passage that seems to me to sum up the spirit of the whole text, and at the same time, the real feeling of these last few years of Pope Francis’ pontificate: ‘The world needs a “church that goes forth”, that rejects the division between believers and non-believers, that looks at humanity and offers it more than a doctrine or a strategy, an experience of salvation, a “coup of gift” that responds to the cry of humanity and nature.’ I am convinced that this short passage contains a much deeper meaning and significance that might at first appear.
“The Church is reduced to proposing a diminished and naturalized ‘gospel’ to a humanity that no longer needs to be converted.
“To reject the distinction between believers and no-believers is certainly crazy… the Church offers humanity a teaching that no longer corresponds to the transmission of a transcendent Revelation.”
What can I say. I appreciate him calling it crazy. Otherwise I might feel that I am crazy, and I’m pretty sure I’m not.
He goes on accurately to characterize Amoris Laetitia as opening the doors to accommodating the “affective needs” of those desiring same-sex unions (something most commentators are in culpable denial about) and to predict Fiducia Supplicans (this interview is from May 2023 and that document came out in December of last year):
“Thus, a dialectic and confused situation is created — in this field as also in others — and in which everyone naturally ends up waiting for the competent authority to pronounce itself… This authority is then free to put a brake on when things seem to be too premature, but can also concede and let things go ahead so that, little by little, things become part of various customs and habits. Sometimes the Church’s traditional doctrine is reiterated and even defined as immutable, which reassures the conservatives. But the pastoral needs of particular cases are equally put forward, applying a ‘miraculous’ mercy that reconciles the irreconcilable.
“This way of exercising authority undergoes the same mechanism that governs modern democracies: something that cannot be approved to day will be approved tomorrow, when, through the same dialectic… the situation will be sufficiently mature and minds sufficiently prepared.”
He calls this “the mechanism triggered by the synodality” — why we are “faced with the most accomplished example of modernism.”
On the topic of the suppression of the TLM by the Pope, Fr. Pagliarani offers the deeply sympathetic and astute observation that
“… a priest cannot live his priesthood in a fulfilling way if he accepts a sword of Damocles hanging over his head all the time. Likewise, he cannot live serenely if he is constantly on the lookout for the slightest rumour. [By the way, this applies to the generally compliant priest celebrating the Novus Ordo as reverently as he can; if not as decisively, yet qualitatively, as he anxiously worries which of his gestures or homilies will be deemed unacceptable by a capricious authority, however permissible in the rubrics.] A priest should live united to his Mass, without having to wonder if he will still be allowed by his superiors to celebrate it tomorrow…
“… this situation provokes a permanent dichotomy between the liturgical sphere and the doctrinal sphere, which risks making these priests live in a permanent state of deception, paralyzing them irremediably, when faced with the necessary public profession of their faith.”
He ends the interview by saying,
“Today more than ever, we must be aware that the traditional liturgy in the Catholic Church also corresponds to a morality that we have no right to alter in its principles… no one can be saved without the Cross and without [Our Lord’s] Sacrifice… there is only one kind of love that saves — because there is only one true love that purifies; it is the love of the Cross, the love of Divine Redemption, the love that Our Blessed Lord has shown us… However, this love cannot exist without faith, nor without those who teach it.”
I found nothing to object to in any of the interview along the lines of strangeness or disaffection from normal Catholicism that we’ve been taught by authorities to fear from the SSPX, and much to ponder.
My posting these excerpts isn’t about the SSPX per se, but about the important observations made by their Superior General that anyone of good will ought to consider. These observations have stuck with me these last few months enough to cause me now, finally, to jot them down here. I hope they edify you as much as they did me.
*That nature has no center is a very trenchant observation made by the equally controversial Hans Urs von Balthasar in his deep and far-ranging book Prayer, published by Ignatius Press. (Affiliate link)*
You might also like this post: The four groups entirely excluded by the Synod as well as this interview I did with Fr. McTeigue: Excluded from the synod?
Leila, I recently read "Open Letter to Confused Catholics" by Marcel leFebvre, at a friend's suggestion. Well, it was not at all what I expected, and his tone was not at all what I would have thought. Nothing strident, nothing but mildness, actually, in the first part of the book. He only got more firm near the end. I, who goes to Novus Ordo masses all the time, and wish it was better, but doesn't "mind" it per se - I found nothing, not a thing in it to quarrel with. If you haven't read it, DO.
This discussion is very interesting, and not easily settled. In Jesus' day, I suppose the religious leaders of the Jews expected obedience? Did God expect the Jewish people to be obedient, or did that only come about in the beginnings of Christianity? Because even though Jesus kept the law perfectly, they had him killed (as we know) because they were threatened by him and he wouldn't stop what he was doing. After he went up and the apostles received the courage to continue his work, they went against the law of the state, but they were also a thorn in the side of the religous leaders, but they kept on because they knew it was God's will.
Without getting into anything personal about Pope Francis, if the smoke of Satan is, in fact, entered into the church, well then, somebody has to resist it, right? What about the Abomination of Desolation? I know many Protestants think this refers to the Temple sacrifices beginning again. I don't see this. It's a wonder to me why it's taken the Jews so long to re-establish the sacrifices, since from their point of view, that's what God wants of them, right? But, in our holy temple, where Jesus resides in the tabernacles, if at some point our religious leaders deny the presence of God, or is somehow a government or secular meaning is attached to it, then those who are trying to remain faithful will have to figure out how to cope. And don't think we aren't halfway there already - some of these German bishops are really more worldly than faithful.
(don't know if I've veered from the subject, but I do wonder what St. Catherine would say if she were living in this time of ours)