At the increasingly valuable Infovaticana there is a severely insightful offering about:
The endless synod of synodal synodality assembly
A couple excerpts. It begins (my emphases and comments):
A synod is (was) by definition an event: it was convened, celebrated, and closed. That is how it was for twenty centuries. The Synod on Synodality concluded in October 2024. Its Final Document was delivered. The matter, one might think, is settled.
But it is not. The closed Synod was followed by an “implementation phase” (2025-2028). Implementation is now followed by an “evaluation of the implementation”: diocesan assemblies in the first half of 2027, assemblies of the Episcopal Conferences in the second half, continental assemblies in 2028, and an “ecclesial assembly” at the Vatican in October 2028. And in case anyone still hoped that would be the end of it, the Notes warn: “the path does not conclude, but opens to a new phase.” Among the criteria for selecting assembly members is, in black and white, that they “be available to sustain the process beyond 2028.”
In other words: today we are recruiting the personnel for a process whose object, mandate, and end no one knows, because it does not exist. The Synod has discovered perpetual motion. We will evaluate the implementation, then implement the evaluation, then evaluate the implementation of the evaluation. This is not a caricature: it is, literally, the official calendar.
[…]
The “walking together about walkingtogetherity” is amorphous. It is mainly a self-licking icecream cone at this point. The point of it is “process”. But because it doesn’t have any real point, it can have any or every point, depending on where the organizers point it. It is a process of manipulation akin to how Marxism seeks to seize control. You’ve seen the photos of a sea of round tables with small groups, with relators, which yak about whatever until the pre-determined report is unveiled. Small group meetings in a Marxist context emphasize collective organization and action. These meetings are designed to facilitate coordination among communist working groups, ensuring that their efforts align with a unified plan. This approach is crucial for maximizing the effectiveness of discussions and actions taken by the group. a small number of organizers work together to prepare for meetings, ensuring that all members are informed and aligned on objectives. They then emphasis a kind of democratic processes where all voices are heard, fostering a sense of ownership among participants. That is, unless you have a different idea. Then you are marginalized within your group and your influence is reduced to zero. Meetings are highly facilitated addressing future initiatives. This facilitation is a key to guiding discussions, silencing dissent, and ensuring desired outcomes.
More from the article:
[…]
We are faced with a complete institutional architecture—diocesan, national, and continental teams, registered in a Roman database via an email address, synodus@synod.va—built entirely outside the Church’s law.
And this is no oversight. It is the method. What has no juridical nature has no defined competencies, no enforceable responsibility, and no channel for appeal. A canonical diocesan synod obliges the bishop to precise procedures; a “synodal team” obliges nothing and answers to no one, and precisely for that reason it can do everything: convene, filter, draft, synthesize, and send to Rome “the voice of the People of God.” Informality is not a flaw in the system: it is its competitive advantage. What cannot be governed by decree is governed by process, because a decree would have to be grounded in law and signed.
Canon law exists, it is worth recalling, to protect. It protects the faithful against arbitrariness, the parish priest against the diocesan apparatus, the bishop against pressures, and the entire Church against the whim of passing majorities. Replacing law with “facilitation” is not a pastoral liberation: it leaves everyone exposed to whoever controls the process.
[…]
More there.
It’s hard not to conclude the Synodal Church is the Ape of the Church.
Would the excesses you often cite of Vatican II implementation have been prevented or worsened by an intentional “Conciliar Evaluation Period”?
Would the excesses you often cite of Vatican II implementation have been prevented or worsened by an intentional “Conciliar Evaluation Period”?
Live long enough and you can observe an entire cycle within the time spiral we’re in. Back in the 60’s, when the radical left was a bit more open and explicit about what they were about, there was a public articulation that applies to what is currently described by the term “synodality” : the current issue is never the issue, the revolution is always the issue. Hope that brings some clarity.
The bureaucracy needs to expand to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy.
Well, if they admitted that the whole point of this was to change Church teaching on sexuality and ordain women, there would be a lot more opposition. Instead, they create a process so off-putting to any serious person that only those pushing the agenda would participate.
You wouldn’t even know this exists in my extremely vibrant diocese. (There were nine mostly young people in line at the 30-minute Monday afternoon confession time yesterday ten minutes before it started, and this is a consistent trend across parishes, not limited to just one conservative parish.) So no one at the Synod Office will hear from us, although we’d probably be pretty well “synthesized” into the official national/continental “summary” document if there was a robust effort locally.
Query: Should there be an organized effort among the orthodox to make our voices heard? Again, most serious people seem to think it’s not worth participating, but the process continues, and there must be a reason why it is being continued (see my first sentence).
What I am noticing is much like what occurred before and after Vatican II. For example communion in the hand was reported to have occurred in Holland in 1960 (see Roman Catholic Man Dec.28 2016 post). Now it’s clear most of Germany (and many other countries) have similar intent and disobedience.
There are endless videos of Rogue priests/bishops with “innovations” at Mass: Countless clown masses, priests riding scooters, squirt gun holy water, priests NOT handing out eucharist while lay Eucharist minsters do it all (I witness this in Downey, CA), homosexual union blessings, countless other offenses….
At what point of acceptance (and lack of policing) from the Vatican hierarchal leadership of the deviation from the “deposit of faith” is it appropriate for a Catholic layman draw a moral line and “judge” the voice of the shepherd and call it a false shepherd?
The actions of the modernists provide much evidence that possibly one or all the many different camps of the Sede’s are correct.
– I’ve heard there a camp of Sedes that draw the line at the Lateran Treaty.
– There indeed are the 1958 Sede’s.
– I know some Sede’s draw a line at the signatures of VII documents.
– I suspect there are Sedes that draw lines at different event.
– There is much good evidence and weight for the Bene-Sede’s position – of which the actions of BXVI’s successors seem to be proving that event to be correct…
There must be a point where there is enough evidence of actions of visible departure from the deposit of faith whereby the gulf between Pre-VII Catholicism and synodal Catholicism can be identified as two different religions.
I repeat: When can a layman morally discern that “This lamb does not recognize the voice of the Shepherd who falsely claims to be the The Bishop of Rome as well as the Shepherds of man of subordinate prelates”…??
At what junction in departure do we stand up and voice publicly that the prelates have indeed abandoned Catholicism and are creating a new religion?
Asking for a friend… ;)
No matter how many time I see it, I can’t get past Infovaticana’s picture of the synod venue — a conference assembled under the glimmering, baleful gaze of that large serpent eye. Poor devils.
Those who love their processes must know mors nos omnes persequitur.
“The Errors of Russia”
Thus- Synod Study Group 9.
If ever we were to get a wonderful pope again, he could use the synod to keep the troublemakers busy and out of the way while he works on the Church outside the echo chamber.
“I know you love your diocese of Modernist City, but we really really need you to synod full time – it is incredibly important that you be there.”
Ah, a man can dream, right?
This type of stuff is pushed by people who think that databases produce actionable information instead of it being a mirror of what you went looking for and what you put in there. Truly garbage in, garbage out if run by people who don’t understand data acquisition and data analysis – which is only a small subset of people in the hard sciences. The whole program will melt the brains of most priests and their staff. The massive incompetence of such a buzzword-worthy program coupled with local-level checking out will ensure that most of the malfeasance is ground to a fine paste by the churn of the bureaucratic grist mill.
Also, I have seen this before, back when I was a United Methodist in the 90s. It is not a sign of institutional decay; it is the decayed institution.
No, no, nothing has changed. Honest.
“Canon law exists, it is worth recalling, to protect. It protects the faithful against arbitrariness, the parish priest against the diocesan apparatus, the bishop against pressures, and the entire Church against the whim of passing majorities. Replacing law with “facilitation” is not a pastoral liberation: it leaves everyone exposed to whoever controls the process.”
Unfortunately, it seems that recent popes have arbitrarily changed Canon Law. Whenever canon law was first codified and then recodified, it allowed Canon law to be changed. It would seem to me that it would have been better for canon law to have never been formally codified and for the Church to have operated under a system similar to Common Law, a system clearly set up to bind the King and nobility. Similarly it should be clear in some manner what binds the Pope. This binding should be tradition, that is precedent. Clearly all this synodal stuff is designed to change Church Law by making up what can be called a good reason.
@WVC
That’s hardly fair to apes. Apes are fairly clever creatures. The synod is much more like a swarm of mosquitos.
Let us hope that this “meandering about meandering” soon reaches a merciful, natural end. The big test is the next synod. Will it be another emotional encounter session or a businesslike meeting of bishops? We will know what we might expect if it is actually a synod of bishops, not bishops and whoever else. While much has been made about 2024, considering what the expectations were. we dodged a bullet. When Francis let it pass without turning us into Anglicans, we were fortunate. Orders are still for men only and men cannot marry men. It is embarrassing that the standards for defining a win are so low, but a win is a win.
From my working days, this reminds me of “having a meeting to discuss when to have the meeting to decide when to call a meeting to actually decide a matter.” :)
Seriously though, one of the strong points of the Catholic Church was that dogma was immutable, doctrine was clear and defined, and there was certainty in the Faith. This synodality thing is a changeable, relativistic, unfixed entity. It runs completely counter to the Catholic Faith leaving it impossible to live one’s life according to the principles of the Catholic Faith. I strongly urge our Pope to just shut it down; it would be one of best things that he can do for the Church.
Pray for the Pope, pray for our Church!
Who would have suspected that the Passion of the Church would be accomplished by an endless bureaucratic process that invents its own language to disguise its sinister goals?
“We will evaluate the implementation, then implement the evaluation, then evaluate the implementation of the evaluation; in order to most efficiently imminentize the eschaton amongst the People of God™!”
Capitalism, democracy, freedom – 50 year ago, these were the most positive notions most Eastern European people could dream of.
After the collapse of the Soviet empire, I worked as a translator. I was shocked by the daily documents of large western companies we were translating. How can the western economy be so highly developed with all THIS bureaucratic, lame nonsense they keep on producing?
And now I see the same bureaucratic, lame nonsense coming from the Catholic Church – this is simply unbearable.
@jhogan: Re: synodality: “I strongly urge our Pope to just shut it down; it would be one of best things that he can do for the Church.”
From Pope Leo’s just published first encyclical, “MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS”:
“…it is unrealistic to think that the Church’s Social Doctrine can propose a single response that is valid in all contexts. [21] For this reason, he [Pope Paul VI] invited each Christian community to interpret the reality in its own country with clarity and responsibility. The fruitful tension between the universality of the Church’s mission and her local roots is an intrinsic aspect of her life, for she encompasses the whole world, while addressing the specific issues of each context as the real setting in which the Gospel takes shape.
27. In light of what has been said so far, the Church’s Social Doctrine can be seen more authentically. It is not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment.”
From this document this Papacy understands doctrine, (at least, to begin with, “social” doctrine,) as NOT a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a result of a process of “shared discernment.” It is unclear if it will be specifically derived from the teachings of Jesus Christ, or if it will be congruent with the Magisterium of the Church.
I don’t think Pope Leo is going to be ending synodality anytime soon. In fact, from this encyclical, he seems to be doubling down.
I wish I could agree with those who say we’ve seen this all before. I am inclined to think time spirals rather than circles, by which I mean that this is similar to but worse than prior attacks against the Church.
Synodality is the vehicle that could dissolve pretty much everything. It attacks the hierarchy, tending to render our priests rather superfluous; after all, the Holy Spirit is allegedly giving everyone guidance on the direction of the Church, right? And the attack is pernicious because we’ve all drunk the kool-aid of democracy and believe it our right to be heard. (Or consider the archbishop of NM’s recent defense of Muslims’ right to a mosque.) It attacks doctrine, which allegedly evolves over time as we do. Here, we’ve been weakened by the omni-present secular dogma of evolution, which has deceived many into thinking Truth changes.
Thus is seems that both authority and Truth are being severely attacked by a process that has no ending point, and that may not matter right now in one’s particular parish but could wash over everything like a rapidly approaching tsunami.
Schrödinger’s Synodality.
I’ll go along to our geographic parish if they have synodling meetings and put my tuppence worth in for the record.
My Sunday mass attendance will be quite far out of town…. hour and half drive both ways to the SSPX….. with out the SSPX to steady my ship I dont think I could face the usual parish pump vapourings.
I’m male 68 years old…. anyone any idea where I can get industrial strength string of pearls to clutch during all this nonsense…!!!
You could even call it Spinal Tap Synodality: “I don’t think the end can be assessed, as of itself, as being the end, because what does the end feel like? …. How far is all the way, and if it stops, then what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it, so what’s the end?”