Letters

Vatican synod – heat and light

Not all changes are reforms

Mon Oct 23 2023 - 00:08

Sir, – There has been a great deal of heat and very little light coming out of the Vatican synod on synodality. Even the name is incomprehensible and designed to confuse and obfuscate. This is, of course, quite deliberate, but there is an easy, step-by-step way of deciphering precisely what is happening.

Step one is to understand that the church is mirroring the world instead of the other way around, and the world is governed by midwits who have spent just enough time in universities to think themselves educated.

These people then colonise administrative and bureaucratic positions and use their office to “make a difference”. This generally involves sidelining and “reinterpreting” the directives of whatever constitution they are supposed to be serving until the goals of that constitution are eventually run into the sand.

It rarely occurs to such people that the difference they make is more often for the worse than the better.

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Step two – which the church is currently engaged upon in the synod – is to present the now moribund constitution as in need of being made “fit for purpose” for modern times. Suitable “voices of the dispossessed” will be included to prove the need for such upgrading, and the curious homogeneity of these voices is just the proof that things needed rejigging in the first place. A discreet veil is invariably drawn over the counsel of people like Bishop Fulton Sheen that to marry the spirit of the age is to become a widow in the next because our midwitted friends always know better, so we’ll just plough ahead regardless.

Step three is the creation of a parallel constitution – or magisterium, in the case of the church – which bears little or no relation to that which it replaces.

Within church circles, this is a difficult wheeze to pull off since the magisterium is, supposedly, immutable. That which is established cannot be disestablished. This is not a major problem, however, since, if we just act like there’s a whole new order in place, we can, by course of dealing, effectively create one.

Step four is, of course, the inevitable collapse of the new, improved, inclusive and diverse programme. We have already witnessed some of this over the last few decades with liberal priests and nuns abandoning their vows to marry and go back into the world because they hadn’t managed to “make a difference” within the church big enough to satisfy their goals, though not before doing substantial damage to the institution first.

This is nothing to what will happen in the future.

With its newfound emphasis on matters like global warming, ecology and migrant rights, the church seems to be set on a course of establishing itself as the state church of whatever new world order is in the process of developing. Big mistake, and not only for the reason Bishop Sheen warned against. The head of any state church is always the prince of that state. Perhaps our prelates might consider who the prince of this world actually is. I’m sure one or two of them must have been present in seminary the day they taught theology. – Yours, etc,

DAVID SMITH,

Swords,

Co Dublin.