By Fr. John A. Perricone:

With the tidal wave of crises facing both civilization and the Church, it might seem difficult choosing a single one creating the most peril.

Actually, it is not.

For the astute Catholic, one alone wins that distinction.

Synodality. It drains Mother Church of her supernatural mandate to be a Light to the nations, while mutating her into a trembling echo of the World.

 Synodality represents the full maturity of the Modernism condemned by Pope St. Pius X over one hundred years ago.  Quite simply, both Modernism and Synodality venture to make the concrete Depositum Fidei into a malleable mass of subjective impressions.  Here, Hegelian dialectic supplants Credal exactitude.  More mincing souls would find that description too harsh or overbearing, but it expresses the truth.  No one less the former head of the Holy Office, Gerhard Cardinal Muller, recently wrote a damning indictment summarizing the whole Synodal enterprise entitled: The Seven Sins Against the Holy Spirit: A Synodal Tragedy.  Against the faint of heart, I stand with the titanic Catholic intellect of Cardinal Müller.

Over intellectualized approaches to this question only lead to abstract solutions offered by pipe-smoking theologians in their cossetted faculty lounges.  It is an exercise worthy of Marie Antoinette’s purported, “Let them eat cake.”

The Son of God never dealt in abstractions, which is why the Creed is expressed with such thunderous clarity.  Heresy always hides in the shadows of so-called lacunae.  Synodality is not heresy, because it does not possess the gravitas of heresy. This makes it more perilous, for it is not as obvious.  Synodality does not take truth seriously.  It is more comfortable in the Gnostic demi-monde of privileged knowledge available to an anointed few.  Try eavesdropping on Synodal ‘dialogues’.  Better yet, force yourself to read the official documents launching the new Synodal year.  There you will find the true gnosis despised by St. Irenaeus in his Adversus Haereses.  Today it would go by the less elevated phrase, ‘word salad”:  an accumulation of sounds meaning nothing.  Or more like a Californian consciousness raising exercise.

There lies the problem:  meaning.  It is the reward of embracing the truth.  It is terribly specific, like a slap across the face.  Enemies of truth hide in the tall grass of manufactured meanings, allowing them cover in worlds made of their own fancies.  Lewis mocked it in Alice in Wonderland, Orwell terrified us with it in 1984 and Huxley called it a Brave New World.  Each of these authors were sounding dire warnings against departing the uplands of truth for the redoubts of invented worlds.

Can Synodality simply be called rationalism?  Sadly not.  Even that ruinous venture, tumbling down the rabbit hole of reason without truth, attempts some attempt at reason.  Not Synodality.  It swims in the brackish waters of self-congratulatory newspeak.  It substitutes the truth for titillating sound bites attractive to the unhinged cognoscenti, but helpful to the more serious crowd whose mission is to forget the Divine mission of Christ’s Church.

In the teeth of a culture careening toward moral collapse, the Church should be bellowing, “And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.”  Period.  Instead, much of the Church’s officialdom hand us Fiducia Supplicans, and swings open its Holy Doors in Rome to a gang declaring war on God’s designs.  Rather than leave science do its careful work in arriving at evidence-based conclusions, the Vicar of Christ blesses hunks of ice as he invokes a newly minted moral category called ‘climate justice.’  All the while deeply doubtful about taking any action against the indubitable injustice of the suppression of the Latin Mass.

Observe the two-tiered world of Synodality.  The ‘made-for-public’ facade of everlasting dialogue without truth.  But, beneath it lurks the hidden work of hard-fisted suppression of anything deemed ‘inflexibly’ Catholic.  In the free-floating carousel world of Synodality there no longer exist penalties, because every sincerely held position is sacred.  Save one: that which was once considered sacred, such as the moral law and the Church’s irreformable doctrines.

Synodality redefines Faith as a journey into the self-realization rather than a steep climb up the hill of Calvary.  Instead of lovingly pondering the riveting truths of Revelation, it invites the sterile invention of new paths of meaning.

Synodality trumpets that we have no answers, only endless self-discovery.  A major Archdiocese recently commissioned a study as to why it was dying.  Eschewing that blunt term, in true Synodal fashion, it renamed it, ‘a changing landscape.’  It reported that since 1998:

  • Mass attendance down 53%
  • Baptisms down 61%
  • Marriages down 75%
  • Funerals down 56%

This assessment becomes more frightening when it discloses that there are only 127 priests under 50, and by 2024, fewer than 131 pastors for over 300 parishes.

Any clear-headed onlooker would call that fact sheet a death march.  Not for the Synodalist.  This is one more step toward the Omega point of greater dialogue. In the light of such rattling news, what did the Archdiocese recommend?   Teach the Faith more clearly?  No.  More Confessions?  No.  More prayer and sacrifice and return to traditional acts of piety?  No.  The Rosary and increased devotion to the Mother God? No.   Stations of the Cross, Invocation of our Guardian Angels and prayers to St. Michael the Archangel?  No.

What was suggested?  Synodality.  Then, more Synodality.  And, after that, more Synodality. This is like quenching thirst with salt water.

This cul de sac is not surprising. This is the Synodality which recently advertised a photo of a few octogenarians of a dying Religious Order giddily signing its death certificate as they smiled gleefully into the camera.

Synodality causes the world to look upon the Church as guilty of a profound lack of seriousness. Once, even our enemies marveled at the martyrs who accepted death rather than compromise one iota of the Church’s sacred patrimony.  Now they see a Church whose stock and trade is compromise.

Without fear of appearing unappreciative of ‘ambiguity’ it must be said that Synodality is the greatest menace the Church faces in the twenty first century. The present Catholic intelligentsia as well as the greater number of higher clerics may disagree.  But, post hoc, ergo propter hoc notwithstanding, the current collapse of the Church on every continent seems to have happened on their watch.

Put bluntly, Synodality is in the business of promoting parlor games rather than saving souls.

Hmmm.  Saving one’s soul.  When was the last time a Catholic heard that phrase?  One more fatality of Synodality.