My good friend Fr. Murray was on with Raymond Arroyo and Robert Royal and one of their topics was an odd thing the Windy Cardinal said about synoldaling (“walking together”). He compared synoldaling to an ethnic Croatian folk dance.
Little did he realize…. with some emphases.
ARROYO: Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago wrote in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, this week that synodality is the Church learning to dance. He compared it to Croatian folk dances in his childhood parish hall. Father, is that actually a description of governance, or is it a way of taking authority, if you will, from the Church without having to define who is leading?
MURRAY: I thought it was a very unfortunate analogy that the cardinal used, because he is basically saying that the relationship in the Church now is like a dance, and the dance involves people moving and all the rest.
But a Croatian folk dance is staged. In other words, the steps are all predetermined. Nobody acts independently. If you act independently, you mess up the dance. By implication, then, synodality means that we can all dance together, but we all have to know already what the steps are. If we step out of line, there is a problem.
I do not think he intended it that way, but that is exactly what synodality has become. As you saw in the synodal process used at the last consistory of cardinals, they were given a checklist of topics they could discuss and restricted time in which to speak. Then, of course, the table discussions were filtered through what the moderator of each table wanted.
That is basically like a dance: you do steps A, B, C, D, and E, and then we all clap at the end.
Why are they using analogies? Because synodality has no definition. We all know what a hammer is. We do not describe a hammer as something like a wrench, but not quite. We know what things are, and we have definitions when they are objects that we can identify.
Synodality cannot be identified, and they are using that to their benefit. Any innovation they introduce, such as putting laypeople in the Synod of Bishops, is now simply called synodality.
ARROYO: That metaphor may be apt, though, Father. It is choreographed within an inch of its life. Everybody claps at the end, and you have to do the two-step many times in between.
It’s on YouTube HERE
ex seaxe on WDTPRS – 16th (Novus Ordo) Sunday in Ordinary Time: Wherein Fr. Z rants.: “In England we had an Education Act in 1944 offering every pupil a secondary education up to age 16 based…”
