The Orwellian Synod

I'd not thought of it as 'Orwellian', but, upon reflection, it is full of Newspeak and Doublethink. It's actually quite an appropriate term.

From Catholic World Report

By Larry Chapp, PhD

Even though there are new elements in the neo-progressivism of today, that it is a recurrence of the older narrative but now decked-out in the verbiage of “discernment”, “accompaniment”, “inclusion”, “listening” and “sensitivity to complex situations”.

In my youth I attended a very conservative seminary for my undergraduate formation. I was fine with that since I was a very conservative young man theologically, filled with the usual zeal that comes with youthful idealism. It was the season of the post-conciliar, antinomian insanity, and it seemed as if the Church had become the preferred refuge for clerical miscreants of every dissenting theological persuasion. But Pope John Paul II had just been elected, so there also seemed to be hope that a young. conservative Catholic such as myself could actually find a home and a safe haven in the Church.

But I was wrong.

During my last year in the seminary (1980-81) the Diocese of Covington, Kentucky, where the seminary resided, got a new and much more liberal, “That 70’s Church” type of bishop. What followed was an immediate purge at the seminary, with many fine priests and professors getting the boot out the door—without, of course, any due process or “dialogue”. They were all replaced with very liberal priests of the “Father skippy-toes sings Broadway show tunes” variety who immediately instituted a new formation program. That program was characterized by the then popular fetishization of “openness” and “big tent dialogue”, which in turn soon led to a reign of terror in which vocations were annihilated and the personal character of many seminarians assassinated.

The only way to survive was to play dead and to act as if you believed in nothing. Nothing, that is, going beyond the ultimacy of the new capo regime of gangster genitalism in which, with a wink and a nod, one could find in the “new seminary” any number of cirque du soleil practitioners of theatrical sexual antics. You were not allowed to openly express a love for high liturgy, which was viewed as a sign of a retrograde troglodytic “rigidity”. But you were encouraged to express a love for getting high as a sign of your non-rigid openness to the world.

It was, therefore, abundantly clear that not all rigidities were equal.

But what struck me the most, even at that young age, was the manipulation of language for the furtherance of this new genital Gnosticism as a legitimate “development of doctrine”. We were told in a pounding, percussive succession of re-education lectures (“Days of Recollection”!) that God was “doing a new thing” that apparently contradicted all of the “old things” that God used to say and do—but now regrets—and that we could not be “fundamentalists” anymore since fundamentalism is one of the things God once liked—but no longer does.

There was also a strange and ironic ecclesiolatry going on. All of the emphasis was upon the Church as the generator of truth and, in this case, new truths, but not on the Church as the preserver of truths that had been gifted to her by God in divine revelation. And to the extent they did emphasize that God alone was the source of the truth of divine revelation, it was only to reinforce some bizarre voluntarist concept of a God who could just make stuff up as he went along and as it suited him/her/they/them/it. Of course they did not really believe in any of that and it was really all just a mere cipher for dismissing the normativity of divine revelation as anything binding.

The more intellectual revisionists appealed to a concept of God wherein God was portrayed as a vague Hegelian gas or plasma field that permeated historical processes and only came to itself in the Heraclitan flux of a historically mediated “Being as subjectivity”. Thus, divine revelation reduced from a source of actual conceptual content, no matter how rooted in mystery and poetic categories of symbolization, to a mere process or pedagogy that set in motion a dynamical movement “forward” in ever new historical permutations.

Therefore, what was true yesterday could be false today since God’s pedagogy in revelation is characterized by a historical unfolding, whereby we move from infancy to adulthood with many missteps along the way. And those missteps could include errors in the Bible and Church dogmas—errors which were the product of a more naïve and pre-scientific adolescent stage of our development and which we alone now have the vantage point from which to set them right. Because we are now, in our own minds, in the “adult” phase of the pedagogy.

This is what C.S. Lewis meant by “chronological snobbery”, which is a peculiar, yet defining, feature of the specifically modern mind, which views itself as enjoying a rational and scientific vantage point unavailable to previous generations. In other words, history as a rolling party bus of bar-hopping, dynamical flux does eventually have a terminal point—and that point is us. The theological guild set up camp in Francis Fukuyama’s cul de sac in order to engage in an endless block party of celebratory cultural exceptionalism. The flux stops here and so does all real dialogue. There is a curve to history and it has curved straight into modern Liberalism’s garage. And now the garage door is shut.

The error in all of this is that although divine revelation is indeed historically grounded and does involve a slow pedagogical unfolding of God’s gradual self-revelation, the terminal point of that revelation is not modern liberalism, but the rather more shocking particularity of the absolute singularity of a first century, Galilean Jew. And this means that the Church is not a generator of truth via the path of a curated reconnoitering of liberalism’s thought-hoard, but via a gradual coming to grips with the full depth of that Galilean Jew’s life as the very embodiment of God himself and the very self-exegesis of God’s logic as an infinite, internal processio, in a unity of persons.

Which is why there is, in all modern liberal Catholic theologies, a not-so-latent anti-Judaic Marcionism that plays in the sandbox of a vulgarized Law/Gospel dialectic. Because, in order to justify a Catholic iteration of modernity’s scorched-earth destruction of all pre-modern traditions (which are viewed as primitive stages of maturation), one has to disengage the Christ-image from its Judaic context and present it in Docetic terms as a mere avatar of God “for those pre-scientific and ignorant Jews.” Which can now be redeployed holographically as an avatar/icon of libertine liberation from all sexual and gender restrictions. We are therefore presented with a clear choice for or against the absolute theological normativity and priority of the historically concrete Christ, over and against the malleable and fungible Docetic Christ of a thousand faces. Christ as savior from sin and a provocation to repentance becomes Christ the liberator from oppressive religious structures and moral taboos.

These revisionist Catholic genital Gnostics continued to use words like “revelation” but invested them with subtle new meanings. Rahner’s epigones appealed to “anonymous Christianity” and “the transcendental structure of unthematized spiritual experience” as the new privileged location for discerning God’s divine revelation—a “revelation” that apparently could now only be teased out and understood by the Germans! And there was constant reference to some vague and essentialized notion of “modern man” and what this construct could not “believe in any longer”.

But all it really meant was what the secularized, bourgeois Eurocrats of the late 20th-century found to be culturally and politically unpalatable.

I do think that we are seeing a resurgence of a new version of this old dynamic, especially in all of the current gyrations and agitations surrounding “synodality”. In reality, the post-conciliar Docetic and Marcionite Gnosticism never went away, as it continued to live on almost everywhere in the Catholic academic guild. And despite the rise of significant countervailing theological voices against this hegemony, it remains true that the ecclesial theological needle is now moving once again leftward and in ways that are tellingly similar to the old genital Gnosticism that never really died out, but simply went underground during the previous two pontificates.

Therefore, my claim is a simple one. Namely, that even though there are new elements in the neo-progressivism of today, that it is a recurrence of the older narrative but now decked-out in the verbiage of “discernment”, “accompaniment”, “inclusion”, “listening” and “sensitivity to complex situations”. But what they really want is precisely to reignite the fires of that post-conciliar revolution and to reopen the debates over women’s ordination, contraception, intercommunion with Protestants, communion for the divorced and remarried, cohabitation, and a green-lighting of the whole LGBTQ+IA++ world of endless sexual identity acronyms.

This can be easily discerned by reading what has been written by folks such as Cardinals McElroy and Hollerich, as well as many other lesser ecclesiastics associated with the planning of the synodal path toward synodal understandings of synodal people in their synodal circumstances while looking to the synodal Jesus. The sheer emptiness of the term “synodal” as it is tossed around in the Instrumentum Laboris like an incantation and a mantra is a clear clue that it is a cipher for something else. The “thing” that the term “synodal” denotes is not the thing they say it is. Therefore, the synodal way looks, for all intents and purposes, like a set of a priori theological conclusions in search of a legitimating process. And that “process” which will bring us to the desired conclusions is called “synodality”, no matter what that process eventually turns out to be.

Their interest does not reside in a true reform of the juridical structures of the Church and a de-emphasis on the hyper-papalism of the past 200 years. If I thought that is what they were after, I would support them. But that is not what they are truly after. And the actions of Pope Francis and his episcopal allies prove this since there is very little collaborative synodality at play in the governing style of this pope. If they had respect for their own rhetoric concerning a more synodal Church then they would respect the synodal process, which they do not.

For example, many German bishops, Cardinal Marx included, as well as the head of the German episcopal conference, have stated that even though their own synodal process failed to reach the necessary two-thirds super majority in support of the revolution, they are still going to go ahead and implement it in their dioceses. So why did they not just do that in the first place? Because they really thought that the faux democracy of the synodal way would produce the desired results, which would give them the pretext to do what they were going to do, but now with the fig leaf of juridical respectability covering their apostate loins. The Belgians are moving ahead with rituals for blessing same-sex “unions” despite its rejection by the previous DDF and not a peep emanates from the Vatican in protest. Perhaps if the new ritual was in Latin the Pope might intervene against such “backwardism”, but his “no enemies to the Left of me” mentality has so far kept him silent.

It seems, then, that the freight train of dialogue travels along tracks that move in only one direction—a secular liberal one—and the decision has been made that the synod will privilege only those voices in order to reach the already determined conclusions. “Synodality” thus emerges as a cynical game and a strategic ruse to bring in through the backdoor what you cannot simply bring directly in through the front door. It is the destruction of the very concept of “truth” in theology and its replacement with a purely sociologistic and political calculus. Thus, you are either a political “enemy” or a “friend” of Pope Francis, and this is the only important category.

Once again, this is not new. We have seen it all before. There will be calls for dialogue, inclusion, diversity, openness, parrhesia, and debate, until the desired results are reached and at that point all conversation will cease. The garage door will be closed and anyone who dissents from the neo-Montanist assertion that “God is doing a new thing” will be dismissed as bigots, reactionaries, rigid backwardists, and anti-magisterial dissenters. Theological careers will be ruined, successful pastors will be reassigned to Our Lady of Moonshine parish in Dog Breath USA, or put in charge of the diocesan cemeteries, and seminaries will be instructed to weed out the recalcitrant obstructionists.

So, please be attentive. Please pay attention, for example, to the style of the art associated with the Synod. They all look like the cartoonish ecclesiastical art of the 1970s and I do not think that is an accident. It is just further evidence of the thought world these folks inhabit. It is the thought world of rotary phones, eight-track tape players, and Hans Küng. It is “Muskrat Love” and Charlie Curran all over again.

The more conservative defenders of Pope Francis (such as the folks over at “Where Peter Is”), who are desperate to maintain an ultramontanist narrative of total obedience to the Pope no matter what, inevitably emerge at this point to make it clear that Pope Francis has said many wonderful things about the aims of the Synod and that he has cautioned against this kind of neo-modernist theologizing. But his closest friends and allies, in their various writings on the upcoming Synod, and his many episcopal appointments—e.g. Archbishop Fernandez as head of the DDF—argue otherwise. Constantly and consistently, Pope Francis’s actions undermine his words and in no way instill confidence that his governing of the Church will avoid turning the keys to the palace over to the theological Vandals who have been camping outside the gates for sixty years.