LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2024: #5

Imagine that, in 1939, there were synods of the sort meeting now. Imagine further that Synod-1939 had spent a month arguing about one or two tweaks in canon law, the vesture of clerics, and the organization of dioceses in missionary countries, while ignoring the prevalence of eugenics in the thinking of many of the world’s great and good, various raging nationalisms, the rape of Nanking, the Ukrainian terror famine, the T-4 German program euthanizing the disabled, and the massive outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany that had just resulted in the pogrom known as the Kristallnacht. What would history have ultimately said about such an exercise in ecclesiastical self-referentiality? Today’s essays caution against the unhappy possibility that Synod-2024 may suffer such a fate, decades from now, if it continues down a path of self-absorption driven by campaigns for institutional and theological “paradigm shifts.” XR II    

Where, Oh Where, Are the Life Issues?

by George Weigel

Paragraph 2 of the Synod-2024’s Instrumentum Laboris (Working Document) dips its toe into ecclesiology, although the buzzwords would likely have puzzled the more biblically sensitive authors of Lumen Gentium (The Light of the Nations), Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: “This synodal and missionary People of God proclaims and bears witness to the Good News of salvation in the different contexts in which it lives and walks. Walking together with all the peoples of the earth, shaped by their cultures and religions, it dialogues with them and accompanies them.”

Fine. But does it convert them? Does the Church “accompany” people indefinitely in whatever direction they happen to be going? Does the Church’s evangelical mission include pointing out the direction along which we might “live and walk” in order to attain eternal life? Does the Church’s “dialogue” with the world include challenging and, when necessary, confronting the world about what is death-dealing in its various cultures? (One imagines that, in sixteenth-century Mexico, a Franciscan “dialogue” with Aztec priests about their liturgical practice of human sacrifice would not have yielded encouraging results, except, perhaps, for enlarging that band of what the Te Deum calls the “white-robed army of martyrs.”)  

Deepening the meaning of “dialogue” and “accompaniment” to include witnessing to the truth and calling others to conversion is becoming an ever more urgent matter, as that part of the world, usually called “developed” but perhaps more properly called “decadent,” sinks deeper into the quicksand pits of what Pope John Paul II described in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) as a “culture of death.” Acknowledging that at Synod-2024 would surely be a useful example of reading the signs of the times. Yet neither the culture of death nor the Catholic antidote to it—the Gospel of Life, which joyfully proclaims and witnesses to the inalienable dignity and infinite value of every human life from conception until natural death—are referenced in the Instrumentum Laboris. Similarly, two of the crucial life issues, abortion and euthanasia, are absent from the IL. It can sometimes seem as if the Synod, for all of its talk of “accompaniment,” is actually taking place somewhere other than amidst suffering humanity in October 2024: that what’s going on here in Rome is unfolding in a kind of synodal Twilight Zone. 

It has been noted, more than once, that a pontificate that began with stern papal warnings about the Catholic Church becoming self-referential and inward-focused has led the Church into a synodal process that is intensely self-referential and almost entirely inward focused. This irony has become acute at Synod-2024, which is being conducted in what seems to be almost complete detachment from the crisis-beset world of this historical moment: a moment in which the devastation caused by the culture of death is intensifying by the minute, causing untold human suffering and deeply distorting social solidarity. 

The Death Racket

Seven years ago, Fr. Tim Moyle, a Canadian pastor, wrote the following blog post, which turned out to be a grisly preview of what was coming in the True North Strong and Free:

Tonight I am preparing to celebrate a funeral for someone (let’s call him “H” to protect his privacy) who, while suffering from cancer, was admitted to hospital with an unrelated problem, a bladder infection. H’s family had him admitted to the hospital earlier in the week under the assumption that the doctors there would treat the infection and then he would be able to return home. To their shock and horror, they discovered that the attending physician had indeed made the decision not to treat the infection. When they demanded that he change his course of (in)action, he refused, stating that it would be better if H died of this infection now rather than let cancer take its course and kill him later. Despite their demands and pleadings, the doctor would not budge from his decision. In fact he deliberately hastened H’s end by ordering large amounts of morphine “to control pain” which resulted in his losing consciousness as his lungs filled up with fluid. In less than 24 hours, H was dead.

Let me tell you a bit about H. He was 63 years old. He leaves behind a wife and two daughters who are both currently working in universities toward their undergraduate degrees. We are not talking here about someone who was advanced in years and rapidly failing due to the exigencies of old age. We are talking about a man who was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. We are talking about a man who still held onto hope that perhaps he might defy the odds long enough to see his daughters graduate. Evidently and tragically, in the eyes of the physician tasked with providing the care needed to beat back the infection, that hope was not worth pursuing.

Again, let me make this point abundantly clear: It was the express desire of both the patient and his spouse that the doctor treat the infection. This wish was ignored.

Things have gotten demonstrably worse in Canada ever since, as was evident in a recent article in the London-based Spectator, entitled “A chillingly seductive glimpse of assisted dying.” If I may borrow from the Church of England’s Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, this penetrating essay should be “read, marked . . . and inwardly digested” by every participant in Synod-2024. It offers what is indeed a deeply disturbing look into today’s Canadian death racket, demonstrating how Canada’s legal provision for “Medical Assistance in Dying”—which goes by the Orwellian acronym MAID—corrupts not only the law but the consciences of individuals, family relationships, and the medical profession. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of this must-read testimony:

A few weeks ago, I was present when my aunt, a Canadian citizen born in the UK, chose to die. . . . My aunt was 72 and in the early stages of motor neurone disease. She had lost the use of one arm but though frail, was living independently and had perfect mental acuity. She was an artist who had worked in the theatre for 40 years designing beautiful and elaborate costumes. For several decades following her divorce she had lived determinedly alone and was not prepared to become an invalid. She made the decision to die freely and against the wishes of her family. She was, by any measure, the perfect candidate [for MAID].

It was frighteningly easy to organise. Having been diagnosed with a terminal condition in February, she had received instant pre-approval. She made a phone call on a Sunday afternoon (yes, you can dial-a-death at weekends but try getting a regular medical appointment) and arrangements were made for her to die on Tuesday at 7 p.m. 

And so it happened. The doctor “seemed unmoved” by the author’s reciting the prayers for the dying as the lethal syringe penetrated his aunt’s arm, although the attending nurse told one of the relatives present that hearing the prayers had “got to her.” Some flicker of conscience, perhaps even of long-dormant Christian belief, seemed to ignite for a moment. But once the aunt had been “put down,” as the author “advisedly” described the process, it was back to business as usual in the death racket. 

In 2022, there were 13,241 MAID deaths in Canada. Last year, MAID was the fifth most common cause of death in that country, and it is expected to climb to fourth in the Death League tables this year, as fatalities from Covid decline. 

Canada is not alone. 

Many Synod participants are, or should be, aware of the “Sarco pod,” which has recently come into use as an instrument for assisted suicide. The pod was deployed a few weeks ago in a Swiss wood and several of those involved were subsequently arrested: not for assisting in a suicide, but because the pod doesn’t (yet?) meet Swiss product safety standards. 

The new Labor government of Sir Keir Starmer in Great Britain has promised a “free vote” (i.e., a vote not subject to party discipline) on “assisted dying.” 

In the United States, physician assisted suicide is legal in ten states (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington) and the District of Columbia, as it is in New Zealand and in all six states of Australia. European countries permitting the practice include Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. 

The trend lines are thus all in the wrong direction. And in countries like Canada, with single-payer (state-run) health care, the increasingly popular acceptance of MAID or its equivalents will further valorize the use of physician-assisted suicide in order to lower health care costs and cope with budgetary pressures. Of course, the notion that MAID or its equivalents constitute a form of “health care” indicates how far down the slippery slope to Orwell’s brutal world of Newspeak the West has slid.

Which brings up another dimension of the culture of death being virtually ignored at the Synod: the daily slaughter of innocents through abortion, a practice that counts some 73 million victims per year, or about 200,000 per day. The largest and most active pro-life movement in the world, the United States, has recently been betrayed by the presidential candidate who leads what had been for decades the pro-life party, while the opposing party celebrated abortion-on-demand as a kind of civic sacrament at its August national convention. Both parties have enthusiastically embraced in vitro fertilization, which is another assault on life through its creation of a vast number of “spare” embryos—human creatures at a very early stage of development—who are either discarded as unwanted “biological material” or left frozen in cryogenic suspended animation.

The ubiquity of abortion throughout the world is another indicator of the corruption of the medical profession and its twenty-first-century distance from the original Hippocratic Oath. That abortion is also Big Business in the United States—and often unregulated Big Business—is another moral, social, and cultural travesty. Anyone who imagines that a terrible coarsening of the human spirit hasn’t followed the widespread acceptance of abortion as ex post facto contraception should reconsider.

The Sounds of Synodal Silence

Immediately prior to the opening of Synod-2024, Pope Francis called out Belgium for its embrace of the culture of death, a rebuke that did not go down well with the secularists who govern that country, as the prime minister called in the papal nuncio for a dressing-down. Prime Minister Alexander De Croo’s woke aggravations notwithstanding, that courageous papal affirmation of the dignity of life was entirely welcome, as was the pope’s praise for the late Belgian King Baudouin (who refused to sign a euthanasia law) and the pope’s various other condemnations of abortion over the years. (Although one may respectfully wonder if comparing the procurement of an abortion to “hiring a hit man,” as the pontiff is wont to do, is the most evangelically or even psychologically effective way to raise the issue.) 

Yet this pontificate has also seen the two Rome-based institutions created precisely to advance the Gospel of Life—the Pontifical Academy of Life and the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Lateran University—gutted. Thus the absence of any consideration of the life issues in the synodal Instrumentum Laboris was not surprising, and the remanding of such issues to a study group considering “controversial” questions of Catholic moral teaching—about which more will be said in a future LETTER—was not reassuring.

The culture of death and its sundry rackets are shredding the already fragile moral fabric of humanity. It must be hoped that brave souls among the Synod members will defend the Gospel of Life and bear witness against the culture of death in the synodal general assemblies, and that a forthright acknowledgment of the gravity of these issues and the Church’s evangelical responsibility to address them finds its way into the Synod’s Final Report. Otherwise, the sounds of silence from Synod-2024 on these life-and-death matters are going to do grave damage to the Church’s mission. And those sounds of silence will certainly be a matter for consideration at the Great Assize. 

Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary

October 9, 2024

Today’s diary entry is a bit of a grab bag of topics: all of which, it seems to me, are related on a foundational level. And their connection is a view of the Synod as a revolutionary opportunity to reinvent the Church from the ground up. I might even go so far as to suggest that one of the dynamics at work in Synod-2024 is an attempted coup d’église by Catholic progressives, a coup aimed at changing Catholic teaching on a range of moral and sacramental matters without the messiness of transparency or the meddling interference of collegial collaboration with the world’s bishops.  

This would be the final assault on the hill that was John Paul II/Benedict XVI, via the pathway of press conferences and the secretive study groups run by apparatchik sock puppets of the Roman Curia and the Synod General Secretariat.

One had hoped that this would not be the case, since the Instrumentum Laboris had nothing in it concerning these “hot-button issues” which, as just noted, had been assigned by the pope to extra-synodal study groups whose work will not be done until the summer of 2025. But now we see Synod members publicly commenting on the study group that dealt with women’s ordination and openly questioning its negative findings, which may or may not be what the pope wanted to happen. But this entire flap raises a more basic question: Why else have yet another study of an issue that many had thought to have been settled? One does not talk to death a topic that one thinks is closed. As we approach the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, shall we have a study group to explore whether Arius was right after all?

The Synod members have indicated that they wish a fuller report from all the study groups, and so will devote the afternoon of October 18 to getting a broader briefing on their “tentative” findings thus far. So much for the idea that the Synod will not get bogged-down in the muck of debates over hot-button issues. So much for the idea that the Synod is about a more synodal Church of shared collegial governance between the pope and the bishops—the only true teaching of Vatican II on the topic—and that all it seeks is a less centralized Church. So much for the idea that the Synod is not a “parliament” of political factions all jostling for the inside rail. Instead, this begins to seem like the long-dreamed-of “Vatican III” (although this would be “Vatican III Lite”), where the Church is to be “unburdened by what has been.” 

Along these lines, the study group dealing with thorny moral theological issues has effectively lobbied for an end to Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) and the Church’s millennia-old natural law moral theology, in favor of an approach that doesn’t begin with moral commandments and absolutes but rather with the “lived experiences” and subjective conditions of individuals in their concrete circumstances. They argue that there cannot be a predetermined, one-size-fits-all set of objective moral truths that is applicable in all cases, and that the Church therefore needs a—here we go!—“paradigm shift” in her moral theology.  

But the putative paradigm shift is nothing more than the old proportionalist fever-dream of a Church of guilt-free contraceptors and various kinds of fornicators. Because one can hardly imagine that the paradigm shift spoken of here is intended to greenlight climate change deniers and those who challenge papal teaching on the use of plastic straws and other single-use petroleum-based products. One also cannot imagine that this new paradigm means that we are now free to believe that national borders matter, or that ecclesial “indietrism” is a legitimate option.

No. This is about sexual morality pure and simple. And it is part and parcel of the desire to embrace the new, alternative rainbow religion and its gnostic anthropology. Fr. James Martin, S.J., founder of Outreach, is a voting member of the Synod and is, as they say, “working the process.” Fr. Brian Gannon, the executive director of Courage (which encourages chaste living in its ministry to those who experience same-sex attraction) is not. That speaks volumes.   

The General Relator of the Synod, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J., of Luxembourg, who is a public dissenter from Church teaching on homosexuality, has stated that we have not yet implemented the ecclesial vision of Vatican II, and that the Synod now gives us an opportunity to do so. Left unspecified, as usual, is exactly what that theological vision is, or why it is that—apparently—the last two popes were theological rubes who missed the Vatican II party boat. The good cardinal has spoken vaguely about getting out of the “pyramidal” model of ecclesial authority and into something more relational and communal. Which is, of course, more 1970s ecclesial argot: code for dissent from settled Church teachings.  

Finally, and on an extra-synodal topic that is nevertheless related to all this, one of the new cardinals whom Pope Francis will create on December 8, Archbishop Jean-Paul Vesco, O.P., of Algiers, stated in a 2022 interview that the Church, following the promptings of Pope Francis, should abandon the kind of evangelization that seeks to convert people to the faith, in favor of the path of “fraternity” that seeks instead to live the Christian faith as a confessional witness within the context of a culture of dialogue. As Christians, he said, we are united “first” to all other people “fraternally,” and that this is the basis for our human solidarity. Christ, apparently, is merely one among many “religious” toppings on the ice cream cone of fraternal global solidarity.  

The cardinal-elect believes that such an approach is “revolutionary.” And indeed it is. It is revolutionary in the sense that it goes against everything Christ explicitly taught in his missionary mandate to his disciples, to go into all the world and make disciples of the nations. It is also directly contrary to two millennia of explicit Catholic teaching and praxis; it demeans the witness of the martyrs who proclaimed the gospel in hostile lands; it is incongruent with the teaching of Pope Francis himself, who called the Church to be “permanently in mission”; and it contradicts the stated intention of the Synod to be an instrument of renewal in the service of evangelization and mission.   

So why is this man now to be a cardinal? Why is Cardinal Hollerich the General Relator of the Synod? Why is Fr. Martin so visibly platformed? Why is Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., another dissenter on the topic of homosexuality, to be a cardinal? Because he is the best Dominican the Church can find to honor? I think not.  

This entire synodal affair begins to seem as dry as the Covid-empty holy water fonts in churches throughout Rome. And just as sterile. 

But the rain has stopped, and I took a lovely walk along the Tiber with my wife, Carrie, this morning. 

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Image by Ввласенко, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.