Cardinal Baldisseri ...

Father H with some biting comments on the 'synod', how it was rigged, and how it had little to do with the 'Youth' at the end. And I've included a reader's comment to Father at the end.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

... is rumoured to have turned nasty when someone complained about the manipulation of the Synod. The complainant wondered how participants without much Italian could be deemed to have assented to texts which they had only heard hurriedly recited ... in Italian. B is said to have threatened that he would run the next Synod in Latin. (Interesting that he is so convinced that he will still be alive and still in post.)

That will be the day. Using Latin would in fact have the practical advantage of putting all the linguistic and national groupings on to the same level; the Italians, and those who had spent years working in the Curia, would no longer be unfairly advantaged.

Since, however, that is unlikely, perhaps the Synodal language should be English. English had more  circoli than any other language-group. Or perhaps the main World languages should take it in turn to be the Language of the Synod. I am not joking.

When I was young, the Catholic Church in England was often sneered at as being "the Italian Mission". Now, with the de facto demise of the Church's international language, the sneer looks almost true.

I have little doubt that Blessed John Henry Newman would have considered that the proceedings at Synod2018 were simply invalidated by the unscrupulous way they were managed. His formula "practised upon" springs to my mind (I am recalling the letter printed at LDxxv164sqq.).

Most worrying of all is the smuggling-in of topics which you and I might have thought irrelevant to the published themes of a Synod. Such as having a "Youth Synod" slipping into its texts the need for the censorship of Catholics on the Internet.

These people have reached such a degree of confident arrogance that they do not even care when their motives and devices are transparently and indecently obvious.

Archbishop Chaput sensibly suggested that the Synod should, as a matter of urgency, deal with the homosexuality crisis in the upper clergy.

That's not how they work, though, is it?

In fact it's the exact opposite ...

The comment:

Does it strike anyone else as strange that almost 60 years ago, just when the world was on the verge of globalization in communications, travel, and trade, the only truly global organization, the Roman Catholic Church, had a common language -- and dropped it! 

I was at last starting to study Latin when the Council opened in 1962. By the end of that school year, Latin had all but disappeared from the Mass and I was furious. Within a couple of years, everything else went, too: reverence and decorum,sacred music and the organ, devotions, Confession, Benediction, fasting and abstinence. The ravaging was capped by the Novus Ordo, but by then there was hardly anything of the ancient liturgy and practice left to replace. This was all the greatest act of clericalism in the history of the Church, even while they were telling us that Vatican II had opened the "age of the laity." Lies. All of it lies. And we have been drowning in lies ever since.

May Mary's Immaculate Heart triumph!