A Synod Designed to Push Lies

 On Instagram, thebasiccatholic has shared some very interesting information.

So what we have here is an eye witness account of the reality of the Synod on Synodality.

All the discussion from faithful Catholics leading up to this synod has been puzzling over why, given the clear and documented lack of faith and formation among the general Catholic population (just of of many recent examples here), Rome would seek to consult lay people and even non-Catholics (see no. 6 here) about the direction the Church should take.

Revitalise it how? By walking away from Church teachings? We have seen that modelled in numerous Protestant denominations and we know the result is irrelevance and oblivion. It is widely recognised that the majority of baptised Catholics are not practising, and, of those that are practising, only a small minority are able to articulate their faith with any clarity. Given this reality, it seems a forgone conclusion what any survey will reveal: the lack of belief in Church teaching on sexual issues, divorce, etc etc. 

We were assured that this was not the case - although it was not clear what, then, the purpose of such a time consuming endeavor could possibly be. 

Now the official Synod media team have posted a series of pictures to help us understand:

I've posted the above screenshot rather than embedding the Tweet because surely, someone has to delete this rubbish at some point?

The images all promote LGBTQI+ pride - an anthropology completely at odds with Catholic teaching. One image is of a woman dressed as a priest and one image portrays a rope snapping over a church building which clearly puts "liturgy", "scripture", "Catholic identity" and "fidelity" on the "reck" [sic] side:

Accountability? You must be kidding. Bishop Zanchetta gets caught abusing seminarians and fiddling the books, so Francis gives him a job overseeing Vatican finances. pic.twitter.com/ZGhumCuTmh

— Damian Thompson (@holysmoke) September 25, 2022

It reflects particularly badly on those who like to be thought of as orthodox. https://t.co/GJ1YMMbp7K

— Damian Thompson (@holysmoke) September 25, 2022

Thompson puts his finger on the most important point for me. Why are clergy and bishops so quiet? Why are they allowing this to happen?

What can we expect with Mario Grech leading the process?

Put this together with the report given to Basic Catholic I posted at the beginning of this blog and you have a Vatican department charged with deliberately subverting Catholic responses to the Synod to push an agenda which is fundamentally at odds with the teaching and mission of the Church.

Over at Gaudium et Spes Dr Larry Chapp provides the following summary of the situation in a post he entitles: Orwellian Synodality

'In my youth I attended a very conservative seminary for my undergraduate formation. And I was fine with that since I too was a very conservative young man theologically, filled with the usual zeal that youthful idealism brings. It was the season of the post-conciliar antinomian insanity in the Church where it seemed as if she had become the preferred refuge for clerical dung beetles of every perversion who could not cut it in the world as a regular human being, and tired old feminist nuns with a thousand years of axes to grind. But my own diocese of Lincoln Nebraska had resisted the madness (or so it seemed on the surface to me as a naïve young man) and Pope John Paul II had just been elected, so there seemed to be hope that a young conservative Catholic such as myself could actually find a safe haven and a home in the Church.

But I was wrong. My last year in the seminary (1980-81) the Diocese of Covington, Kentucky where the seminary resided got a new, and much more liberal, “That 70’s Church”, type of bishop. What followed was an immediate purge at the seminary with many fine priest/professors getting the boot out the door, without, of course, any due process or “dialogue”. They were all replaced with very liberal priests of the “Father skippy-toes sings Broadway show tunes” variety who immediately instituted a new formation program characterized by the then popular fetishization of “openness” and “big tent dialogue”, which in turn soon led to a reign of terror where vocations were annihilated and the personal character of many seminarians assassinated. 

The only way to survive was to play dead and to act as if you believed in nothing. Nothing, that is, that went beyond the ultimacy of the new capo regime of gangster genitalism where, with a wink and a nod, one could find in the “new seminary” any number of cirque du soleil practitioners of theatrical sexual antics. You were not allowed to openly express a love for high liturgy which was viewed as a sign of a retrograde troglodytic “rigidity”, but you were encouraged to express a love for getting high as a sign of your non-rigid openness to the world. It was, therefore, abundantly clear that not all rigidities were equal. [Sounds like the Vatican presently, doesn't it?]

But what struck me the most, even at that young age, was the manipulation of language for the furtherance of this new genital Gnosticism as a legitimate “development of doctrine”. We were told in a pounding, percussive succession of re-education lectures (“Days of Recollection”!) that God was “doing a new thing” that apparently contradicted all of the “old things” that God used to do but now regrets, and that we could not be “fundamentalists” anymore since fundamentalism is one of the things God once liked but no longer does. And by “fundamentalist” they meant adhering to Church teaching in matters of sexuality and liturgy in particular or holding to a view of Revelation that was even remotely related to the notion of objective truth and propositional clarity. What was even more striking was that the words “Christ” and/or “Jesus” were very rarely mentioned and scripture was rarely quoted. [Again, this sounds like the present pope!]

“Big Tent” Catholicism was apparently just a form of euphemistic doublespeak for the blessing of the sexual revolution since in reality the tent under construction was actually much smaller than the old, traditional tent, and was really never meant for everyone, since the tent masters were exclusionary on a grand scale, similar in all ways to a bouncer outside of a posh and hip Manhattan night club for the uber sophisticated.

There was a strange and ironic ecclesiolatry going on as well since all of the emphasis was upon the Church as the generator of truth, and in this case, new truths, and not on the Church as the preserver of truths that had been gifted to her by God in Revelation. And to the extent that they did emphasize that God alone was the source of the truth of Revelation it was only to reinforce some bizarre voluntarist concept of a God who could just make crap up as he went along and as it suited him/her/they/them/it. 

Of course they did not really believe in any of that and it was really all just a mere cipher for dismissing the normativity of Revelation as anything binding. 

The more intellectual revisionists appealed to a concept of God wherein God was portrayed as a vague Hegelian gas or plasma field that permeated historical processes and only came to itself in the Heraclitan flux of a historically mediated “Being as subjectivity”. Thus was Revelation reduced from a source of actual conceptual content, no matter how rooted in mystery and poetic categories of symbolization, to a mere process or pedagogy that set in motion a dynamical movement “forward” in ever new historical permutations.

Therefore, what was true yesterday could be false today since God’s pedagogy in Revelation is characterized by a historical unfolding whereby we move from infancy to adulthood with many missteps along the way. And those missteps could include errors in the Bible and Church dogmas – errors which were the product of a more naïve and pre-scientific adolescent stage of our development and which we alone now have the vantage point from which to set them right. Because we are now, in our own minds, in the “adult” phase of the pedagogy. In other words, history as a rolling party bus of bar-hopping dynamical flux does eventually have a terminal point, and that point is us.

And so the theological guild set up camp in Francis Fukuyama’s cul de sac in order to engage in an endless block party of celebratory cultural exceptionalism. The flux stops here and so does all real dialogue. There is a curve to history and it has curved straight into modern Liberalism’s garage.

And now the garage door is shut.

The error in all of this is that although Revelation is indeed historically grounded and does involve a slow pedagogical unfolding of God’s gradual self-Revelation, the terminal point of that Revelation is not modern Liberalism, but the rather more shocking particularity of the Absolute Singularity of a first century Galilean Jew. And this means as well that the Church is not a generator of truth via the path of a curated reconnoitering of Liberalism’s thought-hoard, but a gradual coming to grips with the full depth of that Galilean Jew’s life as the very embodiment of God himself and the very self-exegesis of God’s logic as an infinite, internal processio in a unity of persons. Which is why there is in all modern liberal Catholic theologies a not-so-latent anti-Judaic Marcionism that plays in the sand box of a vulgarized Law/Gospel dialectic. Because in order to justify a Catholic iteration of modernity’s scorched-earth destruction of all pre-modern traditions (which are viewed as primitive stages of maturation) one has to disengage the Christ-image from its Judaic context and present it in Docetic terms as a mere avatar of God “for those iron-age, ignorant Jews” but which can now be redeployed holographically as an avatar/icon of libertine liberation from all sexual and gender restrictions. We are therefore presented with a clear choice for or against the absolute theological normativity and priority of the historically concrete Christ over and against the malleable and fungible Docetic Christ of a thousand faces.

This sense of history’s inevitable progression into modernity as the final phase of some ill-defined maturation process is not believed any longer by most modern secular intellectuals. Most of them have long since moved on from such high-minded and hortatory Enlightenment moralizing which is viewed by most now as still far too classical in its understanding of existence. They have moved instead into a cynical and merely stipulative Liberalism having no grounding in anything except our functional desire to create the social conditions necessary in order to maximize the digital transformation of our world into a techno-paradise of manufactured reality tailored to the whims of the untethered self. There is a nihilistic weariness with reason and metaphysical thought as such viewed now as just so-many epiphenomenal brain ejaculations having no purchase on reality. We are now content to rest in the shallow end of the pool which is the safe zone of techno-manipulation. It is the quiet totalitarianism of an “opposable thumb” anthropology that sees humanity’s most distinctive and defining trait as our ability to grab hold of things in order to acquire them and bend them to our immediate material needs.

But the Catholic theological guild of the post-conciliar era was too stupid to see that this is the eventual outcome of Liberalism. As a cannibalistic and parasitical entity from its birth it could only eventuate in its own nihilistic self-immolation. And when I say that these Catholic thinkers were stupid I mean “stupid” as in stupid. They were intellectually deficient and obtuse on a global scale. Just educated enough to sound like Heidegger, Kant, and Hegel, but not nearly smart enough to understand them, they proceeded to redefine Catholicism in a manner that can only be described as a different religion altogether, but still using the same symbols and terms, and through it all too ignorant to understand that this is what they were doing. Yes, yes, some of it was deliberate and calculated. But I lived through this period. I knew these people. And most of them were well-meaning, but stupid, rather than Catholic versions of Dr. Evil in his underground volcanic lair plotting the destruction of the world. They simply had grown tired of the effort required to maintain the cognitive dissonance between Tridentine Catholicism and modernity in some kind of tolerable psychological modus vivendi, and had thrown in the towel and joined the modern world as Stockholm syndrome participants.

They were thus a set of conclusions in search of an argument and it did not matter if the arguments were genuinely coherent or even remotely Catholic.
These revisionist Catholic genital Gnostics continued to use words like “Revelation” but invested them with subtle new meanings. Rahner’s epigones in the chronically mediocre clerical world of the chanceries and seminaries appealed to “anonymous Christianity” and “the transcendental structure of unthematized spiritual experience” as the new privileged location for discerning God’s Revelation -- a “Revelation” that could now only be teased out and understood by the Germans apparently. The Germans were fond of making sweeping generalizations about “modern man” along the lines of what it is that “modern man” can “no longer accept or believe”. In reality, all they were describing was the bourgeois Angst of highbrow culture in places like Cologne and Munich and confusing that with every culture on the planet. Which is a move you can make only if you are assuming that your own culture is somehow paradigmatic in a “cutting-edge” and normative kind of way for all others. 

It would seem that still to this day there are those in Germany who continue to eat the Schnitzel of Teutonic exceptionalism and to then confuse that spirit with the Holy Spirit. And once again, what is old is new again, and as it was in 1975 so it is again in 2022. Like that ugly paisley fat neck tie that has hung in your closet for decades without use but which is now in vogue again, the Germans have paused from their secular preoccupations long enough to put that Church tax to good use and to rouse the 2% of Catholics who still attend Mass there to denounce that Church in the name of the Church in the hopes of getting people back to Church.