"It notes that a proposal has emerged from the synod process to recognize “episcopal conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church, and favoring the appreciation of liturgical, disciplinary, theological, and spiritual expressions appropriate to different socio-cultural contexts.” "
I suggest this says that each local Church ("episcopal conference" can decide its own morality, what is evil and what is good. Not nothing.
And yet that's not in fact what it says, because you have to do a substitution to even try and make that point.
Francis sucks, his Synod on Synodality sucks, but let's criticize it for where it actually sucks. He's made clear time and time again (including in the official document starting this process just a few months ago) that synods were CONSULTATIVE in nature, and that any such body, while having doctrinal authority, did not have authority over doctrine. That's been a pretty consistent message.
Francis has explicitly rejected the idea that such a conference could decide its own morality, warning the German bishops that Germany already had a Protestant church and not to imitate it too much.
And, in case you haven't been paying attention, to really drive the point home, Francis has stripped almost all discussion of hotbed issues from the synod (and by extension lesser bodies) and relegated them to study groups, where they will die by inertia.
The issue with the synod is nothing is actually defined. Nice statements like "bodies have bishops have doctrinal authority' are certainly true (our eastern brothers understand this quite well) but without expressly saying what that authority is, AND IS NOT, does it matter? Or is it just window dressing?
For years Francis has played a game of strategic ambiguity on this process, thinking by saying nothing, he advances his agenda. Despite the fact that every synod has left with Francis either being defeated (synod on the family) or being forced to back down and get mad at bishops for discussing what he told them to discuss(Synod on the Amazon).
Christ's admonition about letting your yes be a yes and no be a no has never been more apparent in its wisdom than in the age of Francis.
See para 32 of Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium from 2013. It seems to be suggesting the same idea about authority for Bishops' Conferences - that each would have doctrinal authority. Would each country then set its own doctrine? Is any sane Catholic even considering this?
"Yet this desire has not been fully realized, since a juridical status of episcopal conferences which would see them as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority, has not yet been sufficiently elaborated"
> episcopal conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority
This sounds like https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CombiningMecha but with bishops instead of robots (I assume bishops have some degree of doctrinal authority within their diocese and now we are talking about combining them into MEGA-BISHOP which will have some degree of doctrinal authority within MEGA-DIOCESE). If that's not what they wanted me to think of then they needed to include an illustrative example because I have no idea what they are talking about.
"(This is a characteristic example of the working document’s sometimes rarefied and clumsy prose.)"
LOL - You think?
It's interesting to me that as the focus of the Vatican has shifted further away from the core of the Gospel and towards this focus on pseudo secular buzzwords like "listening", "diversity", "inclusion" and even synodality, the overall lexicon and prose of the Church has degraded. Gone are is the soaring rhetoric of JPII and the deep theological prose of BXVI.
Gone are the short documents like "Rerum Novarum" of 1891. It is still readable today. Most recent encyclicals and Vatican documents are unreadable because of their sheer length. Not to mention their often obscure wording.
It's the end state of the professorization of the priesthood. All these guys are academics, none of them have ever had a real job, and none of them have actually been pastors who cared for the souls of their flocks.
Nobody whose actual paycheck depends on communicating ideas to another human writes like what we see in the document (or in many recent papal documents). This writing is suitable only for people with tenured sinecures.
By the by, wasn't there at least one bishop involved in this who had bragged that he had never won a convert to the faith?
“the places that are the tangible contexts for our embodied relationships marked by their variety, plurality and interconnection, and rooted in the foundation of the profession of faith, resisting human temptations to abstract universalism.”
We must all efficiently
Operationalize our strategies
Invest in world-class technology
And leverage our core competencies
In order to holistically administrate
Exceptional synergy
We'll set a brand trajectory
Using management's philosophy
Advance our market share vis-à-vis
Our proven methodology
With strong commitment to quality
Effectively enhancing corporate synergy
Transitioning our company
By awareness of functionality
Promoting viability
Providing our supply chain with diversity (versity, ooooh)
Are we sure that this new Synodal working document isn't AI generated? I mean, it really could have been. It's been done once already during the synodal process...
I cannot underscore just how relieved I was that the document did not harp on hot button issues and instead was focused on ecclesiology. I appreciated the quote included above: "How to transform structures and processes so that all may participate and share the charisms that the Spirit pours out on each for the common good." I used to be a TLM Mass attendee, and -- before Benedict XVI-- I grew up with the NO Latin Mass. I still LOVE both to be honest. By taking me out of westernized culture, I can enter into the paschal mystery in a really profound way. Where I started to drift over the years seeing just how much I was being taken for a ride when I was younger...inappropriate questions in confession, creepiness in the sacristy as an altar boy. You find plenty of these abuses in NO too. I think it's rare behavior crosses into the line to criminal behavior, but I've been forced to slowly accept that wherever there is protracted clergy loneliness, there is a huge risk creepiness. The model we have is no longer sufficient for pastoral ministry. Having met with so many people in my diocese and in the neighboring one to listen to their own experiences, I've learned that this still ongoing issue is unchecked and protected by an army of extremely faithful laity (who are good well-meaning people) and well-trained in apologetics. Even where people are whispering about yellow flags, alcoholism, pornography in the rectories...the defense of the church is so strong that people have to be willing to sacrifice their own credibility to speak up. To be clear, the issue was NOT the priests that love TLM (you can find crappy behavior in the hippie wing of the church too!) The problem was the framework of learning theology by learning how to defend answers.
To me, synodality is about learning how to discover the greater reality of God through his Church. A call to mutual re-discovery of the richness of the sacraments while at the same time setting down these massive defensive walls we have built up. Not everyone in the Church has the same experience. We can enrich our understanding of Catholicism by opening up to see how God transforms others in situations we find unusual or uncommon in America. I look to the propaedeutic stage of seminary formation as a sign of hope. I look to the pastoral teams in the Diocese of Turin as a sign that a city needs clergy to bring the sacraments to the elderly, to the migrants, to the youth and not necessarily a copy/paste parish every five miles. These are positive signs.
As the Synod has been transformed from an event into a process, I guess that boredom, tedium, apathy and irrelevance are now permanent features of Church governance. It reminds me of the long unreadable documents from my trade union days in the 1980s. Only the hard core old Stalinists had the zeal and endurance to study them.
I really hope this article is the result of Luke typing "Write a moderately sympathetic summary of the Instramentum Laboris for the Synod on Synodality in 2024" in ChatGPT and that he didn't actually have to read through this sophomore sociology textbook himself.
I can’t wait to see how the final canon law decision on the Diocese of Steubenville, OH gets rationalized against this:
“If the synodal Church wants to be welcoming, then accountability and transparency must be at the core of its action at all levels, not only at the level of authority. However, those in positions of authority have a greater responsibility in this regard. Transparency and accountability are not limited to sexual and financial abuse. They must also be concerned with pastoral plans, methods of evangelisation, and how the Church respects the dignity of the human person, for example, regarding the working conditions within its institutions.”
I don't see, even in teeny-tiny letters, the word apostolic. The absolute crux of the matter is that I don't see how we can be both an apostolic Church and a synodal Church. In fact, I can't even see the point of trying the second if we are agreed on being the first.
I'm tired.
A brief guide:
Nothing. It was nothing. It said nothing, it hinted at nothing, etc.
The synod on synodality dies, not out of rebellion, but apathy.
Apathy is death.
"It notes that a proposal has emerged from the synod process to recognize “episcopal conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church, and favoring the appreciation of liturgical, disciplinary, theological, and spiritual expressions appropriate to different socio-cultural contexts.” "
I suggest this says that each local Church ("episcopal conference" can decide its own morality, what is evil and what is good. Not nothing.
And yet that's not in fact what it says, because you have to do a substitution to even try and make that point.
Francis sucks, his Synod on Synodality sucks, but let's criticize it for where it actually sucks. He's made clear time and time again (including in the official document starting this process just a few months ago) that synods were CONSULTATIVE in nature, and that any such body, while having doctrinal authority, did not have authority over doctrine. That's been a pretty consistent message.
Francis has explicitly rejected the idea that such a conference could decide its own morality, warning the German bishops that Germany already had a Protestant church and not to imitate it too much.
And, in case you haven't been paying attention, to really drive the point home, Francis has stripped almost all discussion of hotbed issues from the synod (and by extension lesser bodies) and relegated them to study groups, where they will die by inertia.
The issue with the synod is nothing is actually defined. Nice statements like "bodies have bishops have doctrinal authority' are certainly true (our eastern brothers understand this quite well) but without expressly saying what that authority is, AND IS NOT, does it matter? Or is it just window dressing?
For years Francis has played a game of strategic ambiguity on this process, thinking by saying nothing, he advances his agenda. Despite the fact that every synod has left with Francis either being defeated (synod on the family) or being forced to back down and get mad at bishops for discussing what he told them to discuss(Synod on the Amazon).
Christ's admonition about letting your yes be a yes and no be a no has never been more apparent in its wisdom than in the age of Francis.
"episcopal conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority"
I believe this means that an episcopal conference can assert doctrine?
"assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church"
This means that there can be "diversity" in asserting doctrine, yes?
Ipso facto, I stand by my comment.
See para 32 of Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium from 2013. It seems to be suggesting the same idea about authority for Bishops' Conferences - that each would have doctrinal authority. Would each country then set its own doctrine? Is any sane Catholic even considering this?
"Yet this desire has not been fully realized, since a juridical status of episcopal conferences which would see them as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority, has not yet been sufficiently elaborated"
> episcopal conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority
This sounds like https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CombiningMecha but with bishops instead of robots (I assume bishops have some degree of doctrinal authority within their diocese and now we are talking about combining them into MEGA-BISHOP which will have some degree of doctrinal authority within MEGA-DIOCESE). If that's not what they wanted me to think of then they needed to include an illustrative example because I have no idea what they are talking about.
Did not expect to see TV tropes on the Pillar website, and I am not upset about it
"(This is a characteristic example of the working document’s sometimes rarefied and clumsy prose.)"
LOL - You think?
It's interesting to me that as the focus of the Vatican has shifted further away from the core of the Gospel and towards this focus on pseudo secular buzzwords like "listening", "diversity", "inclusion" and even synodality, the overall lexicon and prose of the Church has degraded. Gone are is the soaring rhetoric of JPII and the deep theological prose of BXVI.
Gone are the short documents like "Rerum Novarum" of 1891. It is still readable today. Most recent encyclicals and Vatican documents are unreadable because of their sheer length. Not to mention their often obscure wording.
It's the end state of the professorization of the priesthood. All these guys are academics, none of them have ever had a real job, and none of them have actually been pastors who cared for the souls of their flocks.
Nobody whose actual paycheck depends on communicating ideas to another human writes like what we see in the document (or in many recent papal documents). This writing is suitable only for people with tenured sinecures.
By the by, wasn't there at least one bishop involved in this who had bragged that he had never won a convert to the faith?
Not Benedict XVI's.
“the places that are the tangible contexts for our embodied relationships marked by their variety, plurality and interconnection, and rooted in the foundation of the profession of faith, resisting human temptations to abstract universalism.”
We must all efficiently
Operationalize our strategies
Invest in world-class technology
And leverage our core competencies
In order to holistically administrate
Exceptional synergy
We'll set a brand trajectory
Using management's philosophy
Advance our market share vis-à-vis
Our proven methodology
With strong commitment to quality
Effectively enhancing corporate synergy
Transitioning our company
By awareness of functionality
Promoting viability
Providing our supply chain with diversity (versity, ooooh)
We will distill our identity
Through client-centric solutions
And synergy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
All with artificial intelligence baby!!!
*record scratch*
STOP THE PRESSES!
Are we sure that this new Synodal working document isn't AI generated? I mean, it really could have been. It's been done once already during the synodal process...
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/how-ai-helped-shape-asias-synod-document
Well, now that's stuck in my head.
Heh. Knew the reference immediately. Good show ol’ chap!
I cannot underscore just how relieved I was that the document did not harp on hot button issues and instead was focused on ecclesiology. I appreciated the quote included above: "How to transform structures and processes so that all may participate and share the charisms that the Spirit pours out on each for the common good." I used to be a TLM Mass attendee, and -- before Benedict XVI-- I grew up with the NO Latin Mass. I still LOVE both to be honest. By taking me out of westernized culture, I can enter into the paschal mystery in a really profound way. Where I started to drift over the years seeing just how much I was being taken for a ride when I was younger...inappropriate questions in confession, creepiness in the sacristy as an altar boy. You find plenty of these abuses in NO too. I think it's rare behavior crosses into the line to criminal behavior, but I've been forced to slowly accept that wherever there is protracted clergy loneliness, there is a huge risk creepiness. The model we have is no longer sufficient for pastoral ministry. Having met with so many people in my diocese and in the neighboring one to listen to their own experiences, I've learned that this still ongoing issue is unchecked and protected by an army of extremely faithful laity (who are good well-meaning people) and well-trained in apologetics. Even where people are whispering about yellow flags, alcoholism, pornography in the rectories...the defense of the church is so strong that people have to be willing to sacrifice their own credibility to speak up. To be clear, the issue was NOT the priests that love TLM (you can find crappy behavior in the hippie wing of the church too!) The problem was the framework of learning theology by learning how to defend answers.
To me, synodality is about learning how to discover the greater reality of God through his Church. A call to mutual re-discovery of the richness of the sacraments while at the same time setting down these massive defensive walls we have built up. Not everyone in the Church has the same experience. We can enrich our understanding of Catholicism by opening up to see how God transforms others in situations we find unusual or uncommon in America. I look to the propaedeutic stage of seminary formation as a sign of hope. I look to the pastoral teams in the Diocese of Turin as a sign that a city needs clergy to bring the sacraments to the elderly, to the migrants, to the youth and not necessarily a copy/paste parish every five miles. These are positive signs.
"Second verse, same as the first,
A little bit louder and a little bit worse"
The Farce will be with you. Always.
and with your wordcloud.
As the Synod has been transformed from an event into a process, I guess that boredom, tedium, apathy and irrelevance are now permanent features of Church governance. It reminds me of the long unreadable documents from my trade union days in the 1980s. Only the hard core old Stalinists had the zeal and endurance to study them.
Thank you Luke for this article!
I really hope this article is the result of Luke typing "Write a moderately sympathetic summary of the Instramentum Laboris for the Synod on Synodality in 2024" in ChatGPT and that he didn't actually have to read through this sophomore sociology textbook himself.
If he did, he deserves a raise, JD.
I can’t wait to see how the final canon law decision on the Diocese of Steubenville, OH gets rationalized against this:
“If the synodal Church wants to be welcoming, then accountability and transparency must be at the core of its action at all levels, not only at the level of authority. However, those in positions of authority have a greater responsibility in this regard. Transparency and accountability are not limited to sexual and financial abuse. They must also be concerned with pastoral plans, methods of evangelisation, and how the Church respects the dignity of the human person, for example, regarding the working conditions within its institutions.”
I don't see, even in teeny-tiny letters, the word apostolic. The absolute crux of the matter is that I don't see how we can be both an apostolic Church and a synodal Church. In fact, I can't even see the point of trying the second if we are agreed on being the first.
I think that the word cloud is very telling. Especially God with a lowercase 'g'.
Just to say that I think the word cloud converts all words to lowercase
We are in So.Much.Trouble.