Synodality (“walking together-ity”): It is the thought world of rotary phones, eight-track tape players, and Hans Küng. It is “Muskrat Love” and Charlie Curran all over again.

There is a terrific read at Catholic World Report today by Larry Chapp.  It is a retrospective which is actually a contemporary diagnostic.  What is going on today, we’ve seen before in germ.   Today, however, the germ has hatched out into something harder to weed out.

There just popped into my head the line from Claudius in Robert Graves book (and the super PBS series). Anyway.

A couple of samples from the piece. I’m tempted to do an audio recording of it so that more people can absorb 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 say and 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.

There was also a strange and ironic ecclesiolatry going on. All of the emphasis was upon the Church as the generator of truth and, in this case, new truths, but not on the Church as the preserver of truths that had been gifted to her by God in divine revelation. And to the extent they did emphasize that God alone was the source of the truth of divine revelation, it was only to reinforce some bizarre voluntarist concept of a God who could just make stuff 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 divine revelation as anything binding.

[…]

I do think that we are seeing a resurgence of a new version of this old dynamic, especially in all of the current gyrations and agitations surrounding “synodality”. In reality, the post-conciliar Docetic and Marcionite Gnosticism never went away, as it continued to live on almost everywhere in the Catholic academic guild. And despite the rise of significant countervailing theological voices against this hegemony, it remains true that the ecclesial theological needle is now moving once again leftward and in ways that are tellingly similar to the old genital Gnosticism that never really died out, but simply went underground during the previous two pontificates.

Therefore, my claim is a simple one. Namely, that even though there are new elements in the neo-progressivism of today, that it is a recurrence of the older narrative but now decked-out in the verbiage of “discernment”, “accompaniment”, “inclusion”, “listening” and “sensitivity to complex situations”. But what they really want is precisely to reignite the fires of that post-conciliar revolution and to reopen the debates over women’s ordination, contraception, intercommunion with Protestants, communion for the divorced and remarried, cohabitation, and a green-lighting of the whole LGBTQ+IA++ world of endless sexual identity acronyms.

[…]

Once again, this is not new. We have seen it all before. There will be calls for dialogue, inclusion, diversity, openness, parrhesia, and debate, until the desired results are reached and at that point all conversation will cease. The garage door will be closed and anyone who dissents from the neo-Montanist assertion that “God is doing a new thing” will be dismissed as bigots, reactionaries, rigid backwardists, and anti-magisterial dissenters. Theological careers will be ruined, successful pastors will be reassigned to Our Lady of Moonshine parish in Dog Breath USA, or put in charge of the diocesan cemeteries, and seminaries will be instructed to weed out the recalcitrant obstructionists.

So, please be attentive. Please pay attention, for example, to the style of the art associated with the Synod. They all look like the cartoonish ecclesiastical art of the 1970s and I do not think that is an accident. It is just further evidence of the thought world these folks inhabit. It is the thought world of rotary phones, eight-track tape players, and Hans Küng. It is “Muskrat Love” and Charlie Curran all over again.

[…]

And now for one of the dumbest songs ehvur…

UPDATE:

Remember when the official Parodohymnodist here thought that the mascot of the Synod (“walking together”) on Synodality (“walking together-ity”) should be quokka named blather?

I think I found just the right theme song.