Your Catholic Week in Review (Synod Edition!)

From Michael Hichborn, of the Lepanto Institute, a recap of the mostly horrific news of the past week.

From the Lepanto Institute

Over the last few days, the Vatican has issued two documents that should deeply trouble faithful Catholics across the world.

The first involves a new apostolic constitution entitled Episcopalis Communio -- one that turns the synod into a body with actual Magisterial authority.

In short, if a "consensus" emerges from these annual synods?  They will have the authority of a Magisterial document.  From Edward Pentin over at National Catholic Register:

Most significantly, he has taken up Paul VI’s prior suggestion to turn the Synod of Bishops into a deliberative, more legislative body rather than a merely consultative one by stating that the final document will now form part of the “ordinary magisterium of the Successor of Peter,” subject to papal approval. 

The 2015 Synod of the Family was plagued with errors, with such novelties as giving the Holy Eucharist to divorced and remarried couples being silently introduced in "draft" documents before a minor reaction quelled the attempts at revolution from the German bishops.  

The response?  Came in the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, where a tiny footnote forced Cardinal Raymond Burke's hand along with three other cardinals to respond with a dubia -- questions that remain unanswered.

Fast forward to the present day.  The Vatican has published a preliminary 66-page document that -- according to even charitable observers -- delimits a "a false understanding of the conscience and its role in the moral life; a false dichotomy proposed between truth and freedom; false equivalence between dialogue with LGBT youth and ecumenical dialogue; and an insufficient treatment of the abuse scandal."

That characterization was provided by an unnamed theologian to none other than Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia in a blistering critique of the Instrumentum Laboris for the upcoming Synod, which Chaput forwarded on to First Things for publication:

Over the past several months, I’ve received scores of emails and letters from laypeople, clergy, theologians, and other scholars, young and old, with their thoughts regarding the October synod of bishops in Rome focused on young people. Nearly all note the importance of the subject matter. Nearly all praise the synod’s intent. And nearly all raise concerns of one sort or another about the synod’s timing and possible content. The critique below, received from a respected North American theologian, is one person’s analysis; others may disagree. But it is substantive enough to warrant much wider consideration and discussion as bishop-delegates prepare to engage the synod’s theme.

Feel free to read the entire critique. 

Yet for even daring to publish this criticism, Chaput has endured the hate of the 'Bergoglians' (their own term to describe themselves) over Twitter and other social media outlets.  

Faithful Catholics can read the tea leaves here.  The 2015 Synod was a disaster, so Amoris Laetitia tucks in the vital footnote to keep the true desire of the Bergoglians alive.  The dubia goes ignored.  New guidelines are issued that raise the synod to the level of a magisterial parliament, a new 66-page document is issued...

In politics, there is a truism that states one should never raise a question until one knows the answer.  That is to say, don't set the wheels in motion until you are certain of the result.

Pope Benedict XVI mentioned some time ago that the truth was not up for majority vote.  That was then, and very sadly it appears as if the truth -- the Sacred Magisterium -- is now up for a "consensus" vote to be approved by Pope Francis.

Is that 2/3rds of the assembly?  A majority?  3/4ths? 

Such are the times... but one does get the sense that the Bergoglians are in an awful hurry for some reason.  Whether it is the ongoing sexual abuse scandal or some other exigency, certain wheels are in motion.  What the answer will be is anyone's guess, but one can certainly presuppose the outcome. 

Shockingly enough, we have absolutely zero information on who leaked these documents to the German newspaper Der Bild.  What is not leaked (curiously enough) is Brandmuller's response to Benedict's original letter... which suggests that the individual leaking the correspondence did not have immediate access to it.  Make of this as you will.

Nevertheless, there are some interesting tidbits to draw from this exchange:
 

1. The letter is corrective, fraternal, and direct.  Benedict doesn't explicitly scold Brandmuller, but he does ask him rather directly what others might have done were they in Benedict's shoes. 
2. Pope Benedict compares his resignation to that of Pope Pius XII's never-enacted plan to return to the status of a cardinal, should he be taken prisoner by the Nazis.  This alone is a startling comparison, suggesting that Benedict believes his resignation to be one not of his own free will, but somehow coerced.  It begs the question: What did Benedict XVI feel threatened by?
3. Benedict's second letter is much different than the first.  The first letter is in reaction to a press account; the second letter is far more pastoral, and reflects upon Brandmuller's concerns (in a letter we cannot see) regarding the current crisis in the Church today.
4. Pope Benedict mentions the "agitation" of those sympathetic to the interpretations of Fabrizio Grasso.  Unlike the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who praised Benedict's resignation in the book The Mystery of Evil, Grasso implies quite the opposite in his book The Renunciation -- one where Grasso cages Benedict's resignation as the manufacturing of a "dual papacy", one where the Greek root of Satan (i.e. the divider, the adversary, the accuser) creates a papacy that is no longer unitary, but divisive -- and draws heavily on the thought of Carl Schmitt, a darling of the European right. 

Many of these undercurrents are hard to follow for an American reader.  Most Americans (in fact, the great majority of us) have no conception of who these two men are, Italian philosophers who hold a tremendous amount of sway over the minds of Vatican insiders and the swirling controversies within and outside the Church.

Certainly European politics is playing a part against a divided papacy under siege.  Yet America's youth in terms of the wider European Church has both the blessing of naivete and the curse of being a "backwater" on the edge of the world. 

For us here in America, our condition as a "mission church" inoculates us in one sense to the machinations in Rome.  Yet our new role in a post-Second World War order means that we have outsized economic influence, even if we consist of barely 5% of the world's Catholics.

Keep this in mind:  American money finances Catholic charities at home and abroad.  American money finances the Institute for the Works of Religion (i.e. the Vatican Bank).  American money turns the light switches on and off at St. Peter Basilica.  American money finances the Vatican diplomatic corps in various and sundry ways...

Now if certain prelates can use the relative wealth of the American Catholic Church to gain position in Rome by choosing one side over another?  So be it... and thus the Cardinal McCarricks and Cardinal Wuerls of the world gain influence, infecting a pilgrim Church with European politics.

Pope Benedict and Cardinal Brandmuller -- when discussing the affairs of the Vatican -- are not thinking of this in the terms of struggling against the corruption inside the American hierarchy.  Most pewsitting Catholics just want a faithful Church and could care less about the machinations of men such as Fr. Antonio Spadaro as he compares Catholics here in America to "fundamentalists" and "integralists"(again, his words).

Yet it is advantageous in the extreme to paint faithful Catholics as co-operators in a wider European political contest.  Thus the concerns of the faithful are more easily ignored. When we shout "fidelity!" these bureaucrats train the bishops to hear "politics!"

Nothing -- and I mean nothing -- could be further from the truth.  And if Benedict XVI truly was pressured to resign due to political machinations, then this deserves to be more deeply and faithfully explored without polemics.  Brandmuller and Burke are not insensible to the tremendous financial pressures (and therefore, loss of prestige) the German Catholic bishops are under as people flee a conference that believes nothing and expects everything. 

We are in the beginning stages of a spiritual chastisement, one that will be painful to endure.  Yet the Blessed Mother has promised to protect the faithful... and thus Pope John Paul II's advice to pray the Rosary frequently are the best arms we can muster in defense of our faith, even during a time of faithless men.