Opportunities Missed

Fr Hunwicke looks at Francis's 'inclusive' synod that includes lapsed and non-Catholics, but seems to exclude anyone attached to Catholicism!

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

A pity that PF has (we learn) decided not to visit Glasgow after all. An opportunity missed! It is my favourite Scottish city; the Pollock Gallery rivals the V & A; the Hunterian is a most admirable museum; the University is a papal foundation; I once went and read a paper to a university society there and was most hospitably entertained ... being taken afterwards to galumph over the remains of the Antonine Wall. It also possesses a magnificent Greek Orthodox Cathedral, where the presiding priest is a former academic colleague of mine, Fr Mark Mitchell, a very fine Classicist ... a very fine Byzantinist ... and, I am confident, a very fine priest. 

What more could a Roman Pontiff ... or any visiting Argentinian ... want than Glasgow?

News spread yesterday (Remnant; Rorate Caeli) about the researches done by Diane Montagna into the genesis of Traditionis custodes. I have met Diane on a number of occasions, and judge her to be a superb and honest investigative journalist with good sources. The details and the conclusions she offers paint a picture of an institution and a CEO mired in chronic mendacity. 

And this morning, reports suggest that PF is today inaugurating his Synodal Process.

Heady days!

I think a Woman From Mars would be perplexed about this process of 'synodal' consultation. It is supposed to be so very open ... open to those on peripheries ... to the lapsed ... to those, even, who are outside the Church. Yet, in Traditionis custodes, PF has just done his imaginative best to strangle one of the Catholic Church's most lively and dynamic tendencies ... one that seems to attract the elderly and the young and the very young; the learned and the unlettered. The WFM would, surely, marvel at an 'open consultation' immediately preceded by a violent attempt to close off and preclude one particular possible direction of travel.

I am surprised that nobody seems even to be discussing the integration into PF's 'Synodal' process of those who favour a liturgical tradition which, as Benedict XVI made clear, has never been canonically abrogated; laics and clerics who could make their own distinctive contribution to the multifarious contributions which will be made by favoured papal cronies.

And, as for peripheries, I wonder about the members ... including very many women ... who have been ejected without mercy from religious houses because they have been judged by 'infallible' Bergoglian Visitors to 'lack a vocation'. What members of what synodal structures have been allocated to hear and listen to the sacked nuns and friars of the Bergoglian ecclesial landscape? And to the lay people deprived of their ministry?

Or are all these officially now a category lower even than the furthest of the most distant peripheries? 

Lower even than pedophile cardinals, bishops, and priests?

Unpersons?

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Have the SSPX been offered a role in the synodal process?