The View From The Fainting Couch: Pentin’s book provokes the vapors

Burke Derangement Syndrome™ has struck again!

Michael Sean Winters of the Fishwrap has swooned upon his fainting couch at the news of Edward Pentin’s new book about what happened at the Synod of Bishops last October.

More about Pentin’s new Smoking Gun Book™ about last year’s chaotic Synod.

MSW hasn’t read the book.  “I have not read this tome”, he wrote.

But he seems to know all about it!

Not only that, even though he wasn’t there and didn’t have any special access to the key players cited by Mr. Pentin, MSW knows how to judge all things concerning that Synod.

What has brought on this case of the vapors?  This is the key, according to MSW:

The second charge Pentin levels is more pernicious [not to say “venomous“]. He suggests that the Interim Report was given to the press in an effort to sway the synod towards its purportedly more “liberal” views, especially on the hot button issue of homosexuality. [There it is.] Apparently, few if any of the spoken interventions even mentioned the topic, so people were surprised to see it in the Report. This is one of the problems with the Synod format: If the topics are not assigned in advance, and each of the synod fathers can speak on whatever they want [sic], they are more likely to focus on the issues affecting a vast majority of families, not on a relative side issue like homosexuality. [I don’t think it was a side issue at all.] We do not know how many of the written interventions discussed the topic, nor how often the topic was addressed in less formal settings. [“We do not know”… and yet here is MSW, judging.] I thought the language on homosexuality in the Interim Report was unimpeachable: It basically said everyone should be welcomed in the Church. Full stop. [Not quite full stop, no.  First, they were vague.  What does “welcome” mean?  In the civilized world is there a Catholic parish that turns homosexuals away? Not a one.  It isn’t a sin to be a homosexual.  Does it mean give them Holy Communion without emendation of life if they are openly sexually active?  What does “welcome” mean?  Should we have them stand up during Mass so we can all say “Bravo!”?  Also, are we to welcome homosexuals because they are homosexuals or because they are people?  There was clearly an agenda hidden inside the vague language.] It happily, and hopefully, avoided the language of “intrinsic disorder” which, whatever its theological precision, which is questionable, its pastoral significance is obvious and malign.   [The Church teaches that homosexual acts are gravely sinful and intrinsically disordered.  Full stop.]

And it’s all Card. Burke’s fault, apparently!

This book was written by Pentin, but it could alternately be called The Synod According to Cardinal Burke. The petulant cardinal made a beeline for Pentin and other conservative reporters at the end of each session of the synod last year.

This is complete B as in B, S as in S.

Read Pentin’s book, everyone.  There were indeed people trying to rig the last Synod to accomplish a pre-determined agenda.

The Rigging of a Vatican Synod? An Investigation of Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family

Buy it and tell others to buy even if it is unlikely that they (like MSW) will actually read it.

Warning: What we saw last year will be nothing compared to the skulduggery this year.  As I have written before, I expect and less transparency and more rule changes to shut down opposition to the underlying agenda.  The Synod will be a real battlefield.  Prayers are in order.

national-schismatic-reporter-color_cropped

UPDATE:

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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28 Comments

  1. Deo volente says:

    Does anyone seriously read the “Fish Wrap”? I have never seen a copy!

  2. Deo volente says: seriously read

    How else can one read such a horrid source?

  3. Charles E Flynn says:

    Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius Press, interviewed Edward Pentin about his new book:

    Journalist and author Edward Pentin discusses “The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?”.
    (video: 7 min. 36 sec.)

  4. Benedict Joseph says:

    Somebody in the Kansas City area need only go over to the habitat of NSR and hold up a crucifix. I believe you’ll see it decompose into smoking green slime.
    That is an awkward attempt at employing humor to magnify the incontrovertible evil the paper generates daily. My few forays over there on the internet are nothing less than hurtful. To see those proclaiming adherence to anything Roman Catholic, yet exhibiting nothing less than intellectual disorientation at best, if not full blown atheistic secularist hedonism, is beyond my capacity to absorb. But what can one say when, as always, the hierarchy displays a disingenuous pacifism in place of the virtue of fortitude.
    A rag, upside down, inside out, spawned by the father of lies for popular consumption by those addicted to themselves.

  5. Cradle Catholic says:

    Thank you for the link, Charles E. Flynn, I have just watched the video and read the text below it.
    At the end of the text, there is a quote about Pentin’s book from Cardinal Napier of South Africa who was very frank at his press conference at the 2014 Synod of the Family. But guess what…the quote refers to Cardinal Napier as “co-president of the 2015 Synod of the Family” – for me, this is very good news! Hopefully, he will stop any attempt at manipulation in this up-coming Synod!

  6. DonL says:

    I still dream of a faith strong enough that no one participates (after such an announcement) in any synod business until such time as those items previously voted down by votes be removed from discussion permanently.
    Anything less is a mockery and a diabolical misuse of the entire synod in order to accomplish evil in the name of good.
    Why allow a rigged synod to pretend it is other than that by your participation?
    My next dream, was upon refusal, a mass walkout–that no one may doubt for a moment that any advise coming out of the ruins be illicit.
    How else does one thwart such shenanigans by the diabolical?
    But then, I dream.

  7. DonL says:

    “Does anyone seriously read the “Fish Wrap”? I have never seen a copy….”

    I suspect it is used by certain groups as incense.

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  9. wanda says:

    Kindle will send a free sample of Mr. Pentin’s book.

  10. Vincent says:

    I have already read Edward Pentin’s book. And very good it is too – I definitely recommend it..!

    He quotes senior sources as saying that at most 5 of the representations to the synod were concerning homosexuality. It wasn’t even much on the radar until the second week following the Relatio. I always wonder how anyone can provide such a critique of something they haven’t read. Very shoddy journalism (although at least he admitted it…)

    By the way, Cardinal Vincent Nichols disagrees that the language on homosexuals was “unimpeachable” – he said it didn’t go far enough! If even a cardinal thinks that, then who is MSW to judge?

  11. jacobi says:

    It is clear to anyone who wishes to see, that the Synods on the Family are being manipulated to purpose, a purpose which includes the Indissolubility of Marriage, permissibility of sex outside of marriage, permissibility of homosexual practice, and implicitly, a denial of the Real Presence and the Ordained Priesthood.

    Now the people who are advocating, or supporting this are not in the same Church as me. I am a Catholic. I do not know what they are.

    Pentin’s book (I shall try to read it but there is so much to do) will be pivitol. This second session will be a crunch. Personally I cannot see anything but heretical schism coming from this second Synod .

    What puzzles me, and I suspect many other thinking lay and indeed clerical middle of the road Catholics is what is the Holy Father’s situation in all this. Jesuitical plot to ensure all works out in the end or is he as confused as the rest of us?

    I really don’t know?

  12. Perhaps some of the synod organizers referred to might be edified by the following words of St. Augustine found in an old breviary in the readings for Matins of the 15th Sunday after Pentecost:

    But they who doing evil, become also involved in evil habit, so that the very habit of evil will not let them see that it is evil; will in turn become defenders of their own evil deeds. They rage when they are rebuked, like the Sodomites long ago. . . . So dominant among them became the practice of this abominable foulness, that wantoness now became justice; and the one who opposed it, more to be censured than the one who practiced it. Persons like these, pressed down by malignant habit, are as though buried. What am I saying brethren? They are in fact so buried that we may say of them which was said of Lazarus: he now stinketh.

  13. Sandy says:

    This is sounding like the Vatican II manipulations by the “Rhine” bishops, at least as we are told in the truly informative books written by insiders (whereby documents were re-written and pushed through).

  14. iPadre says:

    We have seen the Liturgy battles, the abortion battles and everything in between.

    And now, “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan”. The battlefield is the family. Life and the family. ” Sr. Lucia of Fatima

  15. Norah says:

    MSW hasn’t read the book. “I have not read this tome”, he wrote.

    But he seems to know all about it!

    Not only that, even though he wasn’t there and didn’t have any special access to the key players cited by Mr. Pentin, MSW knows how to judge all things concerning that Synod.

    It boggles my mind that someone would critique a book they haven’t read. I further boggles my mind that the print media would print a critique of a book which the author or the critique hadn’t read.!

    I wouldn’t mind if he provided an intelligent analysis of the book mounting arguments based on fact.

  16. Norah says:

    Not meaning that I would be swayed by an honest review of Pentin’s book; I would prefer that to a rehash of prejudices and guesses. Mr Winters does his journalistic profession no credit here.

    Truth is the accommodation of the mind to reality.

  17. jameeka says:

    “Tome”?

  18. Grateful to be Catholic says:

    “Tome” no doubt intended to be off-putting. In fact you can read it in less than an hour. Get it.

  19. I continue to remain bewildered as to why an synod is even needed. What is there some kind of emergency going on in the world other than a cataclysmic scale of uncatechized Catholics in the world? Catechize the Church with Authentic Truth and problems will be solved. Period. Perhaps even reinitiate another Papal Condemnation of Modernism.

  20. Pingback: T -29: The Trojan Horse | The Deus Ex Machina Blog

  21. The Cobbler says:

    “This is one of the problems with the Synod format: If the topics are not assigned in advance, and each of the synod fathers can speak on whatever they want [sic], they are more likely to focus on the issues affecting a vast majority of families, not on a relative side issue like homosexuality.”
    Winters thinks the synod should not focus on issues affecting the vast majority of families? Talk about bugs vs. features…

    “This book was written by Pentin, but it could alternately be called The Synod According to Cardinal Burke. The petulant cardinal made a beeline for Pentin and other conservative reporters at the end of each session of the synod last year.”
    Speaking features and bugs, am I to infer that Winters believes it is better for journalists to opine on these things without sources for them? I mean, I was going to ask if he would have gobbled up inside info had anyone come running to him with such, but then I realized he’s gone off pontificating even without it (indeed, even without the now public info available in the book he pretends to critique), so…

  22. Wayward Lamb says:

    Re: “Does anyone seriously read the “Fish Wrap”? I have never seen a copy….”

    The answer is apparently yes. In the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese, many NO parishes offer free copies of Catholic periodicals for the faithful to take home and read at their leisure. In some parishes, it’s the diocesan newspaper and Our Sunday Visitor. In other parishes, it’s the National Catholic Reporter. It is often easy to predict which parish will offer which periodical based on the parish’s liturgical practices.

  23. scotus says:

    Father, you quoted MSW and then added your own comment in red:
    “they are more likely to focus on the issues affecting a vast majority of families, not on a relative side issue like homosexuality. [I don’t think it was a side issue at all.]”
    I think that MSW is, ON THIS OCCASION, correct. In relation to all the challenges facing the family today, homosexuality IS a ‘relative side issue’. Everybody belongs to a family but less than two per cent of the population suffers from same-sex attraction. So, homosexuality is an issue which does not directly concern 98% of the population. It gets far too much attention and should be given the attention it merits: very little. (You, on the other hand might have been referring to the way in which the issue tended to dominate much of the proceedings of the Synod. Which was very unfortunate.)

  24. Ann Malley says:

    Mr. Petin’s book is a must read for Catholics who are unaware of the political realities that operate within Holy Mother Church. But whereas many are shocked by the revelation of the machinations behind the October Synod (hijacked agendas), many more do not understand the maneuvering that occurred at VII. The path for such Synods was not forged yesterday…. we on the ground just didn’t have the means of communicating them as we do now:

    “…The Second Vatican Council – An Unwritten Story Paperback – December 8, 2012
    by Professor Roberto deMattei.”

    Hosea 4:6 My people have been silent, because they had no knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will reject thee, that thou shalt not do the office of priesthood to me: and thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I also will forget thy children.
    ***************

    Thank God for the internet, Mr. Pentin, concerned Catholics, and those like Fr. Z who are concerned with the pursuit and promulgation of the truth. Even if it’s ugly.

  25. benedetta says:

    You know, Father, I’ve been thinking — is not “schismatic” perhaps too optimistic a word for what Fishwrap does? It’s quite clear that they were founded upon and continue to be directed wholly by anti-Catholic bigotry. It is not as if there were some historical moment in real time and a rational, if not heretical, explanation for what they are. Rather, their raison d’etre is only traceable to bigoted sentiment. Therefore I believe we should not put them in the category of schismatic but rather in the area of the tradition of propaganda of a hate group which defines itself out of animus towards one particular religious group of believers. For example, when was the last time they spoke in charity — love — of Christ’s flock, Holy Mother Church, the communion? Their writing is always posited from their descriptions that they believe there is something wrong with us, with the Pope, with the Church, and that thus the Church must always be attacked. They aim for the maximum divisiveness and hatred imposed upon believers as possible, no? Is that borne of “schism” which implies something rationally understood in history?

  26. Legisperitus says:

    Cardinal Burke is practically the last man on earth I can imagine being “petulant.”

  27. TheDude05 says:

    Norah I don’t think facts have ever crossed the mind of any of the reporters at the fishwrap. I think MSW gets the same word of the day that Father Z does, he used pernicious more than once in a paragraph and I think overall 5 times in the article (I’m counting from memory so as not to traumatize myself further by rereading it). I also like how when in doubt trot out the old “look at the sissies in lace lambasting homosexual heroes” bit. So there are some Bishops who are not only orthodox in thought but also in regards to clerical attire and vestments, stop the presses the Catholic Church is old timey! The irony being that he shows his own stereotyping by assuming lace is the homosexual clothing of choice, which is probably a pernicious assault on his character. The only thing I found correct in his article is that the release of the mid term report did have the opposite effect in that it did galvenize truth, the only problem being they still stuck the garbage in the final report.

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