My latest in First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-5
Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary
October 9, 2024
Today’s diary entry is a bit of a grab bag of topics: all of which, it seems to me, are related on a foundational level. And their connection is a view of the Synod as a revolutionary opportunity to reinvent the Church from the ground up. I might even go so far as to suggest that one of the dynamics at work in Synod-2024 is an attempted coup d’église by Catholic progressives, a coup aimed at changing Catholic teaching on a range of moral and sacramental matters without the messiness of transparency or the meddling interference of collegial collaboration with the world’s bishops.
This would be the final assault on the hill that was John Paul II/Benedict XVI, via the pathway of press conferences and the secretive study groups run by apparatchik sock puppets of the Roman Curia and the Synod General Secretariat.
One had hoped that this would not be the case, since the Instrumentum Laboris had nothing in it concerning these “hot-button issues” which, as just noted, had been assigned by the pope to extra-synodal study groups whose work will not be done until the summer of 2025. But now we see Synod members publicly commenting on the study group that dealt with women’s ordination and openly questioning its negative findings, which may or may not be what the pope wanted to happen. But this entire flap raises a more basic question: Why else have yet another study of an issue that many had thought to have been settled? One does not talk to death a topic that one thinks is closed. As we approach the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, shall we have a study group to explore whether Arius was right after all?
The Synod members have indicated that they wish a fuller report from all the study groups, and so will devote the afternoon of October 18 to getting a broader briefing on their “tentative” findings thus far. So much for the idea that the Synod will not get bogged-down in the muck of debates over hot-button issues. So much for the idea that the Synod is about a more synodal Church of shared collegial governance between the pope and the bishops—the only true teaching of Vatican II on the topic—and that all it seeks is a less centralized Church. So much for the idea that the Synod is not a “parliament” of political factions all jostling for the inside rail. Instead, this begins to seem like the long-dreamed-of “Vatican III” (although this would be “Vatican III Lite”), where the Church is to be “unburdened by what has been.”
Along these lines, the study group dealing with thorny moral theological issues has effectively lobbied for an end to Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) and the Church’s millennia-old natural law moral theology, in favor of an approach that doesn’t begin with moral commandments and absolutes but rather with the “lived experiences” and subjective conditions of individuals in their concrete circumstances. They argue that there cannot be a predetermined, one-size-fits-all set of objective moral truths that is applicable in all cases, and that the Church therefore needs a—here we go!—“paradigm shift” in her moral theology.
But the putative paradigm shift is nothing more than the old proportionalist fever-dream of a Church of guilt-free contraceptors and various kinds of fornicators. Because one can hardly imagine that the paradigm shift spoken of here is intended to greenlight climate change deniers and those who challenge papal teaching on the use of plastic straws and other single-use petroleum-based products. One also cannot imagine that this new paradigm means that we are now free to believe that national borders matter, or that ecclesial “indietrism” is a legitimate option.
No. This is about sexual morality pure and simple. And it is part and parcel of the desire to embrace the new, alternative rainbow religion and its gnostic anthropology. Fr. James Martin, S.J., founder of Outreach, is a voting member of the Synod and is, as they say, “working the process.” Fr. Brian Gannon, the executive director of Courage (which encourages chaste living in its ministry to those who experience same-sex attraction) is not. That speaks volumes.
The General Relator of the Synod, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J., of Luxembourg, who is a public dissenter from Church teaching on homosexuality, has stated that we have not yet implemented the ecclesial vision of Vatican II, and that the Synod now gives us an opportunity to do so. Left unspecified, as usual, is exactly what that theological vision is, or why it is that—apparently—the last two popes were theological rubes who missed the Vatican II party boat. The good cardinal has spoken vaguely about getting out of the “pyramidal” model of ecclesial authority and into something more relational and communal. Which is, of course, more 1970s ecclesial argot: code for dissent from settled Church teachings.
Finally, and on an extra-synodal topic that is nevertheless related to all this, one of the new cardinals whom Pope Francis will create on December 8, Archbishop Jean-Paul Vesco, O.P., of Algiers, stated in a 2022 interviewthat the Church, following the promptings of Pope Francis, should abandon the kind of evangelization that seeks to convert people to the faith, in favor of the path of “fraternity” that seeks instead to live the Christian faith as a confessional witness within the context of a culture of dialogue. As Christians, he said, we are united “first” to all other people “fraternally,” and that this is the basis for our human solidarity. Christ, apparently, is merely one among many “religious” toppings on the ice cream cone of fraternal global solidarity.
The cardinal-elect believes that such an approach is “revolutionary.” And indeed it is. It is revolutionary in the sense that it goes against everything Christ explicitly taught in his missionary mandate to his disciples, to go into all the world and make disciples of the nations. It is also directly contrary to two millennia of explicit Catholic teaching and praxis; it demeans the witness of the martyrs who proclaimed the gospel in hostile lands; it is incongruent with the teaching of Pope Francis himself, who called the Church to be “permanently in mission”; and it contradicts the stated intention of the Synod to be an instrument of renewal in the service of evangelization and mission.
So why is this man now to be a cardinal? Why is Cardinal Hollerich the General Relator of the Synod? Why is Fr. Martin so visibly platformed? Why is Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., another dissenter on the topic of homosexuality, to be a cardinal? Because he is the best Dominican the Church can find to honor? I think not.
This entire synodal affair begins to seem as dry as the Covid-empty holy water fonts in churches throughout Rome. And just as sterile.
But the rain has stopped, and I took a lovely walk along the Tiber with my wife, Carrie, this morning.
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