CV NEWS FEED // Amid concerns that the Synod on Synodality is, as reported by the Pillar, “creating false expectations of changes to contested Church teachings and practices,” leading bishops have become increasingly vocal in their concerns with the Synod’s process, leadership, and future.
‘Toxic Nightmare’
Cardinal Gerhard Mueller told EWTN’s World Over host Raymond Arroyo that Synod leaders “have the intention to substitute their own subjective ideas, against a revealed reality of Jesus Christ,” which he called a path to the “destruction of the Catholic Church.”
In an article published posthumously just after his sudden death on January 10, Australian Cardinal George Pell warned: “The Catholic Synod of Bishops is now busy constructing what they think of as ‘God’s dream’ of synodality. Unfortunately this divine dream has developed into a toxic nightmare despite the bishops’ professed good intentions.”
Ambiguities & Agendas
Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, MN, recently wrote about his participation in one of the “listening sessions” for the Synod. “I found myself increasingly uneasy with two words that feature prominently in the document and that dominated much of our discussion—namely, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘welcoming,’” Barron wrote. “The ambiguity of the terms is a problem that could undermine much of the Synodal process.”
Archbishop Charles Chaput also spoke forcefully about Synod organizers’ recent directives to participants to avoid “imposing an agenda” on the process. He responded:
The only worthy agenda for the synod is the one given to us by Jesus in the Gospels. The Church right now is a divided house; both the ecclesial left and right have agendas. Church gatherings should be about proclaiming the Gospel and not about advancing a particular ideology or sociological analysis.
In addition to ambiguity, Bishop Barron is also concerned with what he calls “the trumping of doctrine, anthropology, and real theological argument by sentiment, [that is] the tendency to psychologize the matters under consideration.”
The explicit intention of many prelates to use the Synod as an opportunity to revisit and revise settled Catholic doctrine could be the Synod’s downfall, Barron concluded. “To throw all these settled teachings into question because they don’t correspond to the canons of our contemporary culture would be to place the Church into real crisis.”
Dogmatic Challenges
Cardinal Hollerich, the Relator General for the Synod on Synodality, has publicly challenged the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. “I think it’s about time we did a fundamental revision of the doctrine here,” he said.
Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego has also interpreted the Synod as an opportunity to change Church teaching. He published a lengthy essay in America Magazine calling for a eucharistic theology that “invites all of the baptized to the table of the Lord.”
“The effect of the tradition that all sexual acts outside of marriage constitute objectively grave sin has been to focus the Christian moral life disproportionately upon sexual activity,” McElroy claimed.
Catholics have, he wrote, “placed [sexual activity] at the very center of our structures of exclusion from the Eucharist. This should change.”
Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, responded that “Jesus himself called sinners to repent.”
“He ate and drank with tax collectors, yes, and this is what inclusion should look like, but he always called the sinner to conversion,” Conley pointed out. “Accompaniment for Jesus was always paired with a call to conversion. This should not have to be argued. It is there for all to see.”
Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City also addressed Cardinal McElroy’s claims, pointing directly to the Synod as a vehicle of confusion.
“I have been saddened,” Archbishop Naumann wrote, “that in the preparation for the Synod on Synodality, there has been a renewed effort by some in Church leadership to resuscitate moral confusion on human sexuality.”
“Cardinal McElroy appears to believe that the Church for 2,000 years has exaggerated the importance of her sexual moral teaching and that radical inclusion supersedes doctrinal fidelity, especially in the area of the Church’s moral teaching regarding human sexuality,” Naumann warned.
A Way Forward
This is not, Naumann notes, the stated intention of Pope Francis in calling for the Synod:
Pope Francis has said clearly that synodality is not voting on doctrine and moral teaching. The Holy Father has also reminded us that synodality is an effort to listen to the Holy Spirit, not the spirit of the age.
Naumann concluded with a reference to Pope Benedict XVI’s famous characterization of the modern world as languishing under what he called the “dictatorship” of relativism:
If we truly listen to the Holy Spirit, I am confident that it will not lead us to abandon our moral teaching in order to embrace the toxic spirit of an age oppressed by the dictatorship of relativism.
