Synodality: Institutionalized Self-Interest and Selfishness

'A new form of religion has come into being— masquerading as Catholicism—in which selfishness has been institutionalized. This new religion has called itself Synodality.'

From Crisis

By David Torkington

A new form of religion has come into being— masquerading as Catholicism—in which selfishness has been institutionalized. This new religion has called itself Synodality.

St. Angela of Foligno was a wife and mother before she became one of the greatest mystics in the Church. She called prayer “The School of Divine Loving,” or Schola Divini Amoris, because it is the place where selfishness is cast aside in order to practice what she called Divine Loving—in other words, the same sort of loving with which God loves us.

Throughout the Old Testament, we see God’s divine, selfless, unconditional loving in action. Throughout the New Testament, we see this same Divine Loving in action once again through His Son, Jesus Christ. The message is quite simple: it is only by practicing this Divine Loving in what St. Angela of Foligno called “The School of Divine Loving” that we can be united with Jesus Christ and then—in, with, and through Him—with the Father.

Sadly, this selfless Divine Loving was extracted from Catholic Spirituality and, therefore, selfishness was eventually institutionalized in Synodality. 

In perennial Catholic spirituality, Systematic Theology, which taught how to come to know God with the mind, was always taught hand-in-glove with Mystical Theology, which taught how to practice Divine Loving in prayer. Do not be frightened by the word mystical. It comes from a Greek word that simply means unseen, invisible, or hidden.  The very essence, then, of what Mystical Theology teaches us is how to love God in the very depth of our souls that is unseen, invisible, and hidden to all but God Himself. 

When we set aside time for prayer, no matter what form of prayer we choose, we will always find our selfishness ready to prevent what God has created us for—namely, union with Himself. In this prayer, selfishness is always there, tempting us to forget God by losing ourselves in a hundred and one distractions and temptations that come from the world that we have just left, and the world to which we will soon be returning.

However, traditional Mystical Theology teaches that it is only by continually turning away from these distractions and temptations that we are, in effect, making acts of love, as we try to keep raising our hearts and minds to God in the School of Divine Love. This is how selfless, unconditional loving is gradually learned—not in a few days or even months, but in years. 

St. Teresa of Avila actually said that you cannot pray without distractions and temptations because the essence of prayer for us is learning how to make acts of selfless loving by continually turning away from such diversions. If you find that in one quarter of an hour of prayer you have had fifty distractions, do not become discouraged or think that prayer is a waste of time. In fact, you have been learning how to say no to self and yes to God, as you have been learning the same selfless, unconditional loving with which God loves us. In short, you have been preparing for the union, beginning in this life, for which God has created us. See how, in the Gospels, Jesus Christ Our Lord was continually tempted in His prayer—in the desert, in Gethsemane, and even on the Cross. 

Once you realize this, you will understand that by practicing selfless, unconditional loving in prayer, you are imitating Christ and choosing to take up your cross in order to follow Him. Each time you turn away from a distraction, you are making an act of love while simultaneously dying to self and beginning the lifelong journey of learning the selflessness that leads to the Divine Loving that can alone unite us with God. 

In the year 1687, a pseudo-mystic called Molinos was condemned in Rome for leading thousands of people astray. He promised to lead them to what St. Teresa of Avila called the Prayer of Quiet, a genuine mystical state, by simply doing nothing in prayer. Not only that, but he told his followers to do nothing about temptations either. He was finally condemned for leading the faithful back into Protestantism and into gross sexual sins that were committed with him and with each other, as you can read in Msgr. Ronald Knox’s book Enthusiasm (chapters 11&12). 

Understandably, the Church came down heavily on this heresy. However, the enthusiasm of anti-mystical witch hunters went too far and the baby was thrown out with the bath water. All forms of deep personal prayer that would lead to union with God were seen as leading back to the heresy of Quietism, and they were slowly but surely stifled. 

That is why young men like me, who went to religious life before the Second Vatican Council, were simply not taught how to pray. We were taught how to say prayers, but we were not taught the deep personal prayer that leads to union with God, or what St. Thomas Aquinas called contemplation. Inevitably, we were condemned to a lifetime apostolate without what St. Thomas Aquinas called the fruits of contemplation—namely, the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. 

The disasters that we have now all experienced became the inevitable consequences of preparing for an active ministry without contemplation. What in effect happened immediately after the condemnation of Quietism was that Mystical Theology, which taught people how to act selflessly, was taken out of the Catholic spirituality where it had flourished for centuries for the good of individual Catholics and the good of the world for which they had been called. The prayer where selfishness is turned into selflessness simply evaporated along with the teaching of Mystical Theology that taught how to practice it. 

This was the beginning of a journey to the “me-me, self-seeking society” that flourishes today. If there is no means of teaching children to act selflessly in family life, then those children are destined for disaster: disastrous lives, disastrous marriages, and further, disastrous families until the chain of selfishness is broken. In the aftermath of Quietism the same thing happened in God’s family that we call the Church. It has happened to both sheep and shepherds after Quietism. So, inevitably, the consequences of selfishness have escalated in subsequent centuries, and the chain of selfishness has yet to be broken. 

When I was a young man, before the Second Vatican Council, those diabolical consequences were there, but they were still out of sight. After the Council, they came out into the open, and on such an industrial scale that I do not need to enumerate them, for they have been there for all to see. What was not seen, however, until recently, is that what was once seen as a horrendous personal sinfulness has now become something even more hideous. A new form of religion has come into being— masquerading as Catholicism—in which selfishness has been institutionalized. This new religion has called itself Synodality.  

Voltaire once said that God created man in His own image and likeness and man has returned the compliment. Synodalists have not only created God in their own image and likeness, they have substituted their own form of relative, human wisdom for His Divine Wisdom. Without the infused virtues that are the fruits of deep personal prayer, this purely human wisdom is redolent with the stink of selfishness that lurks beneath a superficial and sanctimonious surface of religiosity, that has the stench of sulphur about it. 

Before the Renaissance in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Catholic Credo began with “I believe in God,” and it was to God’s wisdom to which Catholics looked for guidance. But at the Renaissance, where modernism was born, a new Catholic Credo began with the words “I believe in Man.” The two were not necessarily mutually exclusive; in fact, they carried on together until after Quietism. It was then that contemplative prayer, where Divine Wisdom was learned, was taken out of Catholic spirituality. 

Gradually, as subsequent centuries passed devoid of the Divine Wisdom that was once the mark of true sanctity, Catholics turned to human wisdom instead—and to a new breed of Catholic leaders who had become adept at culling it from the wisdom of the world, regardless of whether or not it was in agreement with the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. Once you have seen what has happened, it is easy to see the many and various ways in which this new hybrid and heretical Catholicism expresses itself.

The real question that must be addressed is what we must do now to turn the clock back to the Faith of our Fathers when these heretics have been replaced. Or even if they are not, because, quite apart from the ultimate fate of the Unholy Oligarchy that now rules in Rome, we must know what we must do to turn back to God and rebuild our spiritual lives after the example of Jesus Christ Our Lord. The answer has already been given to us by Our Lady in her authentic appearances in the last century. Her simple teaching is summed up in three words: repent, pray, and sacrifice.

In order to repent every day of our lives, we must practice repentance by continually turning to God at speed in prayer. There are two levels of prayer. The higher level consists in a prayer like the Rosary, a devotion such as the Stations of the Cross, or a practice like meditation that leads to contemplation and union with God. Then there is the lower level that consists in learning the divine, selfless, unconditional loving by endlessly making acts of love, by relentlessly turning away from distractions, that can alone bring about the union with God that has been kindled in our prayerful meditations. This loving is finally achieved with the help of the Holy Spirit. 

The sacrifice that Our Lady calls upon us to make is the sacrifice of our own free time in which to do this. The sacrifice we make in order to love God is to be united with the great sacrifice Christ Himself made, each time we go to Mass. There, we continually receive the supernatural help and strength to travel onward, week in and week out, practicing the Divine Loving that can alone unite us with God, as our matchwood sacrifices are united to the great redeeming sacrifice of Christ the King, our Redeemer. 

Although St. Angela of Foligno died in 1309, she was only beatified in 1701. Then, thanks to the work of Pope Benedict, she was canonized in 2013. In this way, Pope Benedict has given to us the saint who is calling us back to the prayer of Divine Loving in the Schola Divini Amoris. For her, distractions in prayer do not provide an obstacle to Divine Loving, they make it possible! 

Only those who practice Divine Loving will be able to stand up to and finally destroy the institutionalized self-interest and selfishness that is called Synodality. These Synods and the evil they generate continually commit the sin against the Holy Spirit. That is why I have begun to spell Synodality without a ‘y’ and with an ‘i’ to form the new word Sinodality. There is no such sin as “sin against Sinodality” for which we need to seek forgiveness, for we have not sinned against the Unholy Oligarchy. It is they who have sinned and continue to sin against us. But more importantly, they sin against the Holy Spirit, by committing the sin of blasphemy. 

They do this in two ways. Firstly, they use Him to deify their own decisions, which are purely human if not positively heretical, as we can see in their latest proposal to relativize Catholic moral teaching. Secondly, they exclude Him from their own spirituality, which is inspired by the wisdom of man, not the wisdom of God. How dare they mock the third person of The Holy Trinity by speaking about listening to the promptings of the Holy Spirit when they are listening to their own unpurified, unruly, and unchristian spirit that is riddled with self-interest and self-seeking. 

It is possible to find times in history when men and women have sinned even more gravely against God’s commandments and suffered the consequences. However, at no time in history has God’s chosen vicar on Earth and his cardinals sinned so clearly against God Himself, His Divine Son, and the Holy Spirit He sent to love, lead, and guide us. 

This is the sin for which the Gospel says there is no forgiveness (Matthew 12:31-32). Maranatha!