Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 2:18am

PopeWatch: Stealth Vatican III

Sandro Magister notes how the Pope is accomplishing his goals through “synodality”.

 

The synod of last October was supposed to be about young people. And instead in concluding it, Pope Francis said that “its first fruit” was “synodality.”

In fact, the most surprising paragraphs of the final document – and also the most contested, with dozens of votes against – were precisely the ones on the “synodal form of the Church.”

Surprising because synodality was practically never talked about, neither in the preparatory phase of the synod, nor in the assembly, nor in the working groups. Only to see it appear in the final document, in the writing of which “L’Osservatore Romano” has revealed that the pope also took part.

An “obvious manipulation,” Sydney archbishop Anthony Fisher called it, giving voice to the protest of not a few synod fathers over this contradictory way of imposing an idea of collegial government with an act of sovereignty from on high.

But then came “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the official voice of Casa Santa Marta, to confirm that it has to be this way, entitling its editorial of commentary on the synod: “The young have reawakened the synodality of the Church.”

And so one’s thoughts go back inexorably to that 1999 synod at which Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a Jesuit like Jorge Mario Bergoglio, sketched out the “dream” of a Church in a perennial synodal state, listed a series of “disciplinary and doctrinal knots” that had to be addressed collegially, and concluded that for such questions “not even a synod could be sufficient,” but that there was a need for “a more universal and authoritative collegial instrument,” in essence a new ecumenical council, ready to “repeat that experience of communion, of collegiality” which was Vatican II.

Among the questions listed by Martini is none other than the ones that today are at the center of Francis’s pontificate:

– “the position of woman in the Church,”
– “the participation of the laity in some ministerial responsibilities,”
– “sexuality,”
– “the discipline of marriage,”
– “penitential practice,”
– “ecumenical relations with the sister Churches,”
– “the relationship between civil laws and moral laws.”

And like Martini, Francis too keeps hammering away at the “style” with which the Church should address such questions. A permanent “synodal style,” or “a way of being and working together, young and old, in listening and in discernment, in order to arrive at pastoral choices that respond to reality.”

So much for the ordinary life of the Church, on all levels.

 

Go here to read the rest.  What the Pope is attempting to do through “synodality” is to destroy the very concept of orthodoxy in Catholicism.  This is the protestantization of the Catholic Church where Catholic Church teaching will bend and shift to meet the “pastoral” needs of the day.  In short Catholicism transformed from a Faith into a mere label which will increasingly have no meaning of substance.

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Howard
Howard
Tuesday, November 13, AD 2018 10:13am

Insert joke about synodic vs sidereal motions here.

John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
Tuesday, November 13, AD 2018 11:39am

The “good thing” is that the next occupant can with a flourish of the pen excise it all.

Clinton
Clinton
Tuesday, November 13, AD 2018 12:35pm

But it’s not even “synodality” that’s being shoved down the
Church’s throat– it’s the desires of this pope and the evil men
surrounding him, written into a document predetermined before
assembling the bishops to rubber-stamp and provide a veneer
of respectability. The presence of the bishops provides good
optics, but neither their input nor their questions are needed
or appreciated– an “obvious manipulation” as Archbishop
Fisher noted. It’s autocracy masquerading as “synodality”.

DonL
DonL
Wednesday, November 14, AD 2018 7:36am

The level of deceitful image-making for political ends is difficult to differentiate from the routine machinations that take place in Washington under progressivism.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Wednesday, November 14, AD 2018 9:00am

“perennial synodal state” sounds like churchspeak for “permanent revolution.”

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