Wynken, Blynken and Synod

Apologies to Eugene Field

Wynken Weighs In (Gavin Ashenden)

The handbook or vademecum for the Synodal process puts it like this:

“Widespread participation is an important part of the diocesan process, with no one being excluded. “We must personally reach out to the peripheries, to those who have left the church, those who rarely or never practice their faith, those who experience poverty or marginalization, refugees, the excluded, the voiceless, etc.”

This rather gives the game away. These are sociological categories, not ecclesial or spiritual ones. How does someone who has deliberately turned their back on the church, or refuses to practice their faith constitute the Church? Do they have no agency, no will, no responsibility?

Gavin Ashenden was a senior clergyman in the Church of England who recently converted to the Catholic Church. 

https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-synodal-way-offers-nothing-more-than-quasi-marxist-content-in-a-spiritual-comfort-blanket/

Blynken Boos (Rachel Amiri) 

(Raymond Arroyo and Cardinal Müller) were especially critical of remarks by Cardinal Grech to the attendees of a recent gathering organized by the Leadership Roundtable where he said, “What has the Church to fear if” LGBT and divorced and civilly remarried Catholics “are given the opportunity to express their intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience? Might this be an opportunity for the Church, to listen to the Holy Spirit, speaking through them also.” Müller understood this as “a hermeneutic of the old cultural Protestantism and modernism, that is, individual experience on the same level as the objective revelation of God.” They seem unable to comprehend the possibility that the Church might benefit in any way from hearing from people whose lives and experiences aren’t always aligned with Church doctrine, but who yet say they “need help, support, and clarity” from the Church.

Throughout the interview, Müller and Arroyo presented the synod as a political and ideologically driven undertaking, in which unchangeable moral doctrines were under assault by modernists and secularists. At one point, Arroyo asked, “As someone who has dedicated his life to protecting this doctrine and extending it, what must you think as you watch a system being created where all of that doctrine seems to be up for grabs, Your Eminence? Where anyone can, by a popular vote, we can toss out or pull in doctrines of the moment?” Arroyo and Müller both spoke of the leaders of the synodal process as if they are working towards a predetermined (and heterodox) outcome or are engineering a “play for Vatican III,” as Arroyo put it, adding—in perhaps a bit of projection—“to kind of create a ‘pop-culture’ Vatican III.”

- from an editorial challenging the stance of Arroyo and Card. Müller

https://wherepeteris.com/cardinal-muller-and-the-destruction-of-the-church/

Nod (John L. Allen Jr. at Crux)

Among the various points the bishops raised with the pope, according to Barron, was the question of how exactly he understands the meaning of “synodality.” The concern was inspired, he said, by his experience of trying to get a clear sense of it during a 2018 Synod of Bishops on Young People, plus watching contemporary developments in Germany and a “synodal process” there which critics worry will end up in a sort of doctrinal free-for-all.

As Barron tells the story, Francis pointedly told the US bishops that “synodality” does not mean a parliament or a democratic vote. The real protagonist in a Synod of Bishops, the pope said, isn’t any of the bishops or other participants taking part, but the Holy Spirit.

As Barron would later point out in a blog entry he penned on the visit, that’s fully in alignment with traditional Catholic understandings of power in the Church. In a secular democracy, power flows up, from the consent of the governed; in the Church, power instead flows down, from the sovereign will of God as discerned and mediated by teaching authorities. In other words, “synodality” isn’t about what bishops or other stakeholders want. It’s about the entire Church, beginning with the bishops, trying to figure out what it is God wants facing a particular set of challenges.

Those are things the pope has said before, of course, including in his remarks to basically every Synod of Bishops on his watch, but it’s still instructive that he repeated them with such emphasis.

Here’s how Barron summed it up:

“Whatever Pope Francis means by ‘synodality,’ he quite clearly doesn’t mean a process of democratization, or putting doctrine up for a vote,” Barron wrote. “He means, it seems to me, a structured conversation among all of the relevant ecclesial players—bishops, priests, and laity—for the sake of hearing the voice of the Spirit.”

Is that working?

https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2020/02/pope-to-us-bishops-no-synodality-doesnt-mean-democracy

Postscript

The Church - and a world in need of Christ's offer of redemption, for that matter - does not need pie-in-the-sky, blissfully naïve optimists blessing sinful behaviour and working to reinvent the Church and fashion it into their own images. Nor does she need dour pessimists who see conspiracies behind every rock and who are ready to form an elite corps of robotic perfectionists. In the case of the former, those folk should join a unitarian community. In the case of the latter, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society is always ready to admit additional Catholics who want to don the badge of self-righteousness.

The Church needs honest humble realists who acknowledge the hierarchical foundation of the Church established by Jesus Christ Himself. The Church needs well-formed faithful Catholics who work and pray for the salvation of souls. The Church needs saints striving to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ in communion with the See of Peter. The Church needs saints who insist on truth, goodness and beauty. She needs Catholics committed to worshipping God in the beauty of holiness.