Views on the upcoming Synod (“walking together”)

At Crux there is a piece about a new booklet published on 22 August by TFP concerning the upcoming Synod (“walking together”).  Card. Burke wrote the intro…

Burke claims Pope’s synod will foster ‘confusion, error and division’

Keep this in mind, however… at First Things…

CRITICS, ENEMIES, AND THE DIFFERENCE

Critics are not always enemies. Some speak out of love, even when their words are heated.

Circling back to the first one at Crux…

In the foreword to a new booklet by a conservative group criticizing Pope Francis’s looming Synod of Bishops on Synodality, American Cardinal Raymond Burke has slammed the process surrounding the synod, calling it deeply harmful and potentially schismatic.

Burke, a hero to the traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church, has been a frequent Francis critic.

In his foreword, Burke said the booklet touches on “a most serious situation in the Church today” which he said “rightly concerns every thoughtful Catholic and persons of good will who observe the evident and grave harm which it is inflicting” on the church’s members.

“We are told that the Church which we profess, in communion with our ancestors in the faith from the time of the Apostles, to be One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic is now to be defined by synodality, a term which has no history in the doctrine of the Church and for which there is no reasonable definition,” he said.

Both the term synodality and its adjective, synodal, he said, “have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding, in accord with a contemporary ideology which denies much of what the Church has always taught and practiced.”

Titled “The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box: 100 Questions & Answers,” by José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue, the booklet is an initiative of the conservative American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), which also has repeatedly criticized Pope Francis.

The 100-page booklet was published in various languages, including English, Spanish, and Italian, on Tuesday, Aug. 22, less than two months before the synod is set to begin, and includes answers to questions insisting that Catholic doctrine cannot be changed and suggesting that the current Synod on Synodality is implementing at a universal level the same ideas as the recently-concluded national German synodal process, called the “Synodal Path.”

[…]

My view is that there are two, not three, possible outcomes for the Synod (“walking together”).  They are a) it’ll fizzle into pointless posturing after which there will be a mainly yawn-inducing document with a couple of crowbar-inviting ambiguities or b) something disastrous will swiftly emerge out of a spirit of radical discontinuity.

What will not happen is c) sound, pastoral proposals will be brought to light based on a clear ecclesiology rooted in tradition.

As a chess game begins there are 3 outcomes possible: win, tie, and loss.  We are looking at two outcomes, not three, for the Synod (“walking together”).

Either way, it would be better if it didn’t happen at all.   I turn for inspiration to a great Father of the Church…

St. Gregory of Nazianzus writing to Procopius in 382.

I am, if the truth be told, in such a tone of mind that I shun every assemblage of bishops, because I have never yet seen that any Synod had a good ending, or that the evils complained of were removed by them, but were rather multiplied….