The Synod is a front and an affront. The proof is the Pope's recent motu proprio on annulment. He disregarded the discussions of the last Synod and struck a secretive committee to implement his own personal desires. Is he about to do the same again? What is the point of calling a Synod? If Benedict or John Paul II ever, ever tried to govern the Church in this manner, they would have been pilloried. Using just Summorum Pontificum as an example, it was no secret, it was talked about publicly for months. Benedict XVI spoke to groups and individual bishops about it and issued a serene letter as to why it was issued and they destroyed him over it.
On his flight back to Rome, Pope Francis answered questions again on the plane. I truly wish Popes would not hold press conferences on planes or anywhere else. The interview includes a question on the matter of divorce and remarriage and annulments. The Pope states quite clearly that:
"The question about 'Catholic divorce.' That doesn't exist. Either it wasn't a marriage, and this is nullity -- it didn't exist. And if it did, it's indissoluble. This is clear."In fact, it is not "clear" and that is the whole problem. He goes on to give other examples of why he felt he had to change annulment parameters but with what he has done leading to potentially "millions of annulments" akin to the situation in the United States in the early 1970's, is that not what he has done? There is a disconnect between what he is says on the plane and what he has said on paper in the motu proprio. You don't have to take this unqualified writer's word for it. Canonists have spoken out about this. Father Gerald E. Murray calls it a "flawed innovation." Benedict Nguyen writes that it will create "more confusion than clarity" and Ed Peters who calls for new consultation says these are the most revisions in "three hundred years." Remember, this is not about mercy, it is about law because it is about the sacraments. Pope Francis is not a canonist and he fired the best one in the Church!
Do not, I repeat, do not tire, do not develop synod fatigue. The next month is going to be from Hell, brought to you by the Danneels Mafiosi and Kasper conspiracy. You must read and pray and pray more and you must alert your Catholic friends to what is happening. Do not develop synod fatigue, the very future of the Church is at stake. Remember, Our Lord said, "the gates of Hell will not prevail" but that does not mean She won't be shaken to Her core. They may end up with the buildings but you and I must preserve the Faith!
Sandro Magister, one of the most credible Vatican journalists, along with Edward Pentin, has released this morning his latest column. He encapsulates much of what has been out there for a few weeks now and hones in on the risks we face.
I post the entire column below, with my observations interspersed throughout.
Synod’s Turn To Speak. But Decisions Will Be Up To Francis
The last exchange of fire before the opening of the work. The uncertainty about the procedure. The appeals to the pope. Why in the end it will be he alone who will draw the conclusions
by Sandro Magister
by Sandro Magister
ROME, September
28, 2015 – Back in Rome after his journey to Cuba and the United States,
culminating with the world meeting of families in Philadelphia, Pope Francis is
now facing the much more exacting challenge of the synod that will open on
October 4, the Sunday of the liturgical year on which - as if by a jest of
providence - Catholic churches all around the world will resound with these
words of Jesus: “Therefore what God has
joined together, no human being must separate.”
The synod will
last for three weeks, and the procedures
that will be adopted have not yet been made known, despite having a big
influence on the outcome of the work.
What is certain
is that there will not be a final message, no commission having been set up to
write one.
Another definite
feature, preannounced by Pope Francis, is that “each week there will be a
discussion of one chapter” of the three into which the preparatory document is
subdivided:
Instrumentum laboris
So this time
there will be no “Relatio post disceptationem” halfway through the work, after
a first phase of free discussion on everything, as at the synod of October
2014. The discussion will be broken up right away into narrow linguistic
groups, each of which will sum up its perspectives in reports destined to remain
confidential. At the end of the three weeks there will be a vote on a final
“Relatio,” and the pope will give the concluding talk. (The
old “divide and conquer.” No group will know what the other is doing or what
other language groups are thinking. Let’s not mix the Poles with the Germans
lest Marx and Kasper be confronted and confounded.)
Also unlike in
the past it is not expected that after a few months there will be a postsynodal
apostolic exhortation to cap everything off. The discussion will remain open to
future developments. The only embodiment of the provisory conclusions will be
the pope’s talk at the end of the work, which will as a matter of course
overtop and obscure all the other voices. (This has
been rumoured for a while. We will have to wait and see. Apostolic Exhortations
sum up the Synodal process and give Pope’s response. What will we see? More
personal decisions such as the recent motu proprio that simply order the will
of Francis not knowing what the Synodal Fathers desired? Where is Collegiality?
In spite of the
much-heralded emphasis on collegiality, in fact, the next round of the synod
will also see at work in Francis a monocratic exercise of papal authority, as
in last year’s session, at the end of which the pope kept alive propositions
that had not obtained the votes necessary for approval. And they were precisely
the ones on the most controversial points, divorce and homosexuality. (Pope Francis has been governing the Church in a monarchical
manner not seen since the time of Pius XI and certainly not in the post-Vatican
II era. Never, ever did St. John Paul II or Benedict XVI and certainly not poor
abused Paul VI ever, ever run roughshod over the bishops and faithful as this
Argentine Pope who grew up under Peron, has done. Where is the Collegiality so demanded at Vatican II? Or, is this
Vatican II revisited and its final chapter?
One undisputed
sign of this monocratic exercise of papal authority was the publication, last
September 8, of the two motu proprio with which Francis reformed annulment
procedures: (Indeed! A totally unexpected and secret
act on the part of Pope Bergoglio to turn hundreds of years of Canon Law and
Our Lord’s words on their heads. Annulments are not about mercy, they are about
law because of the sacrament!
Forbidden To Call It
Divorce. But It Sure Looks Like It
A reform of marital
cases had been expected for some time. But Francis set it in motion while
keeping out the family-centered synod, which he knew was not inclined to
approve what he had in mind. He set up the preparatory commission in August of
2014, before the convocation of the first session of the synod. And he signed
the motu proprio last August 15,
before the second session, scheduling its implementation for next December 8. (Did
you notice that? The Pope signed the Catholic divorce motu proprio on the Feast
of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and it is to become law on the
Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. If he did this
in some fain attempt to obtain Her blessing, I don’t think he will find it so.
I interpret this as a mocking of Our Lady and a vain attempt at letting us know
that this is infallible, which it is not for the very reason that a future Pope
can undo it. You see, the First Vatican Council codified the infallibility of
the Pope. Much to the surprise of the papolaters out there, it did not give him
more power, it in fact, limited his monarchical power. It defined very narrowly
what papal infallibility is and is not. The Pope can say the environment has
rights and capital punishment should be abolished but it has no more weight
than if he said the moon was made of creamed cheese. These are his opinions, they
are not doctrine and cannot be defined as dogma. They can quite rightly be
ignored. On the issue of infallibility, the only two times that it has ever
been invoked was when the Dogmas of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception and her
glorious Assumption were defined. Ironic, eh? What a disgrace!
The most
substantial innovation of the new procedures is that in order to obtain a
declaration of nullity, the mere word of the applicant will have the “force of
full proof,” without the need for other evidence, and the presumed “lack of
faith” will act as a universal master key not just for thousands but for
millions of marriages to be declared null, with an ultra-fast procedure and
with the local bishop as the sole judge. (Catholic
Divorce friends, pure and simple.)
On this the
synod fathers therefore find themselves facing a fait accompli. But it is hard
to imagine that they are not discussing it. Church historian Roberto de Mattei
has even hypothesized that some synod fathers may ask for the abrogation of
this act of governance on the part of Pope Francis, “up to now his most
revolutionary.” And he has cited the historical precedent of the retraction
made in 1813 by Pius VII - imprisoned by Napoleon Bonaparte - of his act of
subjection of the Holy See to the sovereignty of the emperor: a retraction
invoked publicly by Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, pro-secretary of state, and by
other “zealous” cardinals, as well as by the great spiritual master Pio Brunone
Lanteri, a future venerable: (The Pope must withdraw
the motu proprio on annulments. He must be resisted!)
Meanwhile, an
appeal has been issued in the American magazine “First Things” by a hefty
number of theologians, philosophers, and scholars from various countries,
asking the synod fathers to reject paragraph 137 of the preparatory document,
judged as contrary to the magisterium of the Church and a portent of confusion
among the faithful:
An Appeal Recalling the
Teaching of "Humanae Vitae"
The appeal concerns
the teaching of Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae” on birth control - an
encyclical that Pope Francis himself has called “prophetic” - and numbers among
its authors and signatories a good number of professors from the Pontifical
John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family: Stephan Kampowski,
Livio Melina, Jaroslav Merecki, José Noriega, Juan José Pérez-Soba, Mary
Shivanandan, Luigi Zucaro, as well as luminaries like the German philosopher
Robert Spaemann and the Swiss ethicist Martin Rhonheimer. (How bad has it gotten when the Catholic faithful need to
petition the Pope to be Catholic!)
In the judgment of the signatories of the
appeal, paragraph 137 of the preparatory document assigns absolute primacy to
the individual conscience in the selection of the means of birth control, even
against the teaching of the Church’s magisterium, with the added risk that such
primacy could also be extended to other areas, like abortion and euthanasia.
In effect, it is
precisely on the primacy of the individual conscience “beyond what the rule
might say objectively” that the supporters of communion for the divorced and
remarried rely, as one of these, cardinal of Vienna Christoph Schönborn
explained in an interview with “La Civiltà Cattolica” of September 26:
“There are situations in which the
priest, the guide, who knows the persons, can come to the point of saying:
‘Your situation is such that, in conscience, in your and in my conscience as a
pastor, I see your place in the sacramental life of the Church.’” (What happened to him since he
was the main force behind the Catechism of the Catholic Church?)
The split between the individual
conscience and the magisterium of the Church is analogous to that which
separates pastoral practice from doctrine: ”: (Remember that Father Thomas
Rosica has been saying this for nearly two years and I was sued by him for
calling him out on this) a danger that in the judgment of many looms
over the synod and has been the object of very strong words from Cardinal
Gerhard Müller, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, in a
lecture given on September 1 in Regensburg on the occasion of the release of
the German edition of Cardinal Robert Sarah’s book “God or Nothing
> Liturgy,
Grace, Marriage, and the New Danger of Schism
According to
Müller, “the separation of teaching and practice of the faith” was precisely
that which in the 16th century led to the schism in the Western Church. With
the deceptive practice of indulgences, the Church of Rome was in fact ignoring
doctrine and “the original protest of Luther himself against the negligence of
the shepherds of the Church was justified, because one may not play with the
salvation of souls, even if the purpose of the deception would be to bring
about a good deed.” (There can be no question that
Martin Luther’s original aims were just and many of his thesis points were
valid. However, once cut off from the Church there was no end to that which
would follow – which is why that we, no matter what Rome does, can never
abandon our Mother!)
And today – the
cardinal continued – the question is the same: “We may not deceive the people, when it comes to the sacramentality of
marriage, its indissolubility, its openness toward the child, and the
fundamental complementarity of the two sexes. Pastoral care must keep in view
the eternal salvation, and it should not try to be superficially pleasing
according to the wishes of the people.”
As can be seen,
the proponents of “openness” are very active, but the stances of those who oppose it are also numerous and strong.
On September 29 there will be a repeat
presentation in Rome, backed up with 700,000 signatures including those of 180
cardinals and bishops, of the “Filial Appeal” to Pope Francis that he pronounce
“a word of clarification” against the “widespread confusion arising from the
possibility that a breach has been opened within the Church that would accept
adultery—by permitting divorced and then civilly remarried Catholics to receive
Holy Communion—and would virtually accept even homosexual unions.” (St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle …)
This appeal to
the pope is not far from what was said by Cardinal Angelo Scola, archbishop of
Milan and a father at the next synod, in an interview with “Corriere della
Sera” of Sunday, September 27:
“The urgent priority, for me, is that the
synod would suggest to the Holy Father a magisterial statement that would unify
by simplifying the doctrine on marriage. A statement aimed at demonstrating the
relationship between the experience of faith and the sacramental nature of
marriage.”
The complete
text of the interview:
On September 30,
at the Angelicum University, cardinals Carlo Caffarra and Raymond Leo Burke,
two of the five cardinals who on the verge of the synod of 2014 took a stance
against their colleague Walter Kasper with the book “Remaining in the Truth of
Christ,” will reassert their ideas together with Archbishop Cyril Vasil,
secretary of the congregation for the Oriental Churches and also a coauthor of
the book.
And two more
books with the same perspective are about to come out, written by not just five
cardinals but seventeen, from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, six of
whom will take part in the synod either by reason of office, like the Guinean
Robert Sarah, or because they were appointed by the pope himself, like the
Italian Caffarra:
First Five, Now
Seventeen Anti-Kasper Cardinals
The synod is
around the corner and the battle is in full swing. And Pope Francis will have
the last word.
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English
translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.
