CV NEWS FEED // In his foreword to a new book criticizing the possibly damaging ramifications of the upcoming October 2023 Synod on Synodality, Cardinal Raymond Burke decried the process as a threat to the Mystical Body of Christ.
Co-written by José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Iscue, The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box, attempts to elucidate the upcoming event and how it fits into what some consider Pope Francis’ new vision for the Church.
In Burke’s foreword, he praises the book for “address[ing] clearly and comprehensively a most serious situation in the Church today.” The book is composed of answers to a series of 100 questions that shed light on the synodal process.
“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,” Burke wrote.
The cardinal went on to describe “synodality and its adjective, synodal,” as being at the heart of an ideological strain within the Church that is working to undermine Church teaching.
“It is not a purely theoretical matter,” Burke continued, “for the ideology has already for some years been put into practice in the Church in Germany, spreading widely confusion and error and their fruit, division—indeed schism—to the grave harm of many souls.”
In 2021, Pope Francis announced that a “Synod on Synodality” would be conducted for the sake of the Church’s entirety in three phases: local, continental, and universal.
The universal stage is set to be carried out in two parts, with the convening of an Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in October 2023 and 2024. This October’s Synod will mark the sixteenth assembly of its kind, with 300 bishops and laity in attendance.
Speaking on the relevance of the upcoming synod to everyday life, Burke said the event should “rightly [concern] every thoughtful Catholic and persons of good will who observe the evident and grave harm, which it is inflicting upon the Mystical Body of Christ.”
Seeking the unchanging “truth of Christ,” Burke insists, is the only way forward for the faithful as they traverse through this precarious moment in the Church’s history. We must, he writes, “undertake the true reform, which is daily conversion to Christ alive for us in the Church’s teaching.”An online version of the book may be accessed here.
