The new Pope's #1 priority

Before he can get to all the other disasters

As the cardinals begin to go to Rome to choose a new pope, let them choose whoever it might be with one overarching task in mind:

To purge the Church of the existential threat, the viral process disguised as a deceptively benign multi-level marketing scheme imposed on her, known as Synodality.

I say “known as” but Synodality is a great unknown. However, while it cannot be defined — no one has done it, though many have squirmed or committed logorrhea while trying — it is nevertheless the synthesis of and replicative path for all the errors promulgated by Pope Francis.

Synodality is the logical conclusion of aggiornamento, and its engine.

Synodality is the worldly worship of becoming rather than transcendent confidence in Being.

Ecclesiology — how the Church sees herself — is under siege by the inchoate, blurry forces of Synodality. In this siege, the people begin to starve — but from the machinations of the enemy within.

Like Weston in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, an agent of Hegelian progressivism, Pope Francis didn’t actually seem to care about himself; his goal was, in his own words, “to make a mess” — to perpetuate chaos, to clear the deck for the forces of history.

Every destructive thing Pope Francis did during his reign — and there were many and they struck at the heart of the faith — enters the body of Christ through the distribution system, the poisonous adjutant, of Synodality.

We don’t know what Synodality is but we do know what it is not, and I will confine myself to a brief outline of what it is not.

The three pillars of the Church, the bulwark of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), are Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium.

Synodality serves none of these but seeks to undermine them.

Scripture is the Revelation of God. According to Our Lord in the Gospel, “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35); the word of Scripture is the word of the eternal Father (John 5:33-41). Scripture is a gift from God, given through the agency of the Church.

Revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. There are no new revelations, and that includes no new ways “to do Church.”

Scripture in Synodality is used as a rationalization but not as a touchstone. The life of Our Lord is important to Synodalists only insofar as it can be used to further an activist view of earthly existence, a striving to some material end, a Tielhardian Omega Point. His suffering, death, and resurrection, and the life hereafter, do not figure in Synodality.

Synodality gives lip service to Scripture, simply by citing a certain amount of it and insisting that it supports, you guessed it, Synodality. Unlike Scripture, however, it envisions imposing a managerial template, reducing communication in the Holy Spirit to exchanging notes and votes, and imbuing the hierarchy with a purely administrative power found nowhere in its texts.

The faithful are presented with the simultaneously chilling and soporific future of doing nothing but synodality, forever. I challenge anyone to read the Acts of the Apostles and find there anything from which one could conceivably develop whatever this is:

Consulting [the laity] is thus indispensable for initiating processes of discernment in the framework of synodal structures. We must, therefore, overcome the obstacles created by the lack of formation and recognised spaces in which the lay faithful can express themselves and act, and by a clerical mindset which runs the risk of keeping them on the edges of ecclesial life[85]. This requires a priority commitment in the task of forming a mature ecclesial sense, which, at the institutional level, needs to be transformed into a regular synodal process.

Tradition is the whole Church interpreting Revelation consistently, with unity, through the ages. St. Paul attests: “Therefore, brothers, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours” (2 Thess. 2:15).

Synodality doesn’t resemble holding fast. The word synod means gathering, traditionally of bishops. There is nothing in Tradition to prepare the People of God to change their conception of what the Church is, handed down from antiquity, according to what millennium they happen to live in. There is nothing in Tradition that backs up Pope Francis’s claim when he says: “Synodality is a style, it is a walk together, and it is what the Lord expects from the Church of the third millennium.”

The Magisterium is the teaching authority of the Church and is so closely bound with Scripture and Tradition that the faithful need not ever worry, or ought not ever be made to worry, about innovations and surprises.

The Magisterium presupposes hierarchy and affirms it as God-given in its very use of authority. Synodality, on the other hand, simultaneously creates a rigid hierarchy that arrogates to itself decisions about the conditions under which it will “listen” — in meetings where the synodal subjects and participants are decided beforehand, by the hierarchy and their agents — and undermines its own real character, given by Our Lord.

In this process, the bishops are seen as not authoritative, and yet, contradictorily, have the power to consign the faithful to a future of nothing but Synodality. Synodality tightly regulates who will and will not speak, and how and where. But it also repudiates the levels of authority established by Our Lord Himself, claiming that “the third millennium” represents a moment for those in authority to relinquish the keys.

Sometimes the laity have to recall the teaching authority of the Church to itself and to its proper role, as in the time of the Arian crisis. Today, the laity face the same sort of crisis, one that surpasses any one error, however bad that error be, in its attack on how the Church fundamentally functions. The laity now must exert the same prerogative of defending the Gospel, “a trust committed to us,” in the words of St. John Henry Newman.

The future pope must be willing to do his part and purge the Church of this existential threat. We will back him up.

Thanks for reading along with me! I welcome your comments!

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