4 Ways to Spin a Synod

I don't really have the energy to write anything on the recent disastrous synod.  But, there seem to be 4 basic reactions:

Realist Untrusting and Frank Conservative:  The synod is a disaster from start to finish; it makes us look like Anglicans;  the final text clearly purposely leaves out orthodox teaching and has all the seeds necessary to provide for different so called pastoral approaches and indeed teaching in different countries which will provide for routine reception of Holy Communion by the divorced and remarried in plain contravention of the teaching of Christ and His Church; Thomas More and John Fisher and indeed John the Baptist died in vain.  [Cardinal Burke]

Hardball mainstream force of will Conservative:  The liberals have been routed;  there is nothing in the final text about reception of communion or homosexuality;  any attempt to claim that the Kasper side has prevailed is unjustified by the plain words of the texts;  exterminate.  [Cardinal Pell]

Light fluffy we love the Pope everything is great listening mainstream:  we had a wonderful experience of Church;  we need to listen;  there is no change in teaching;  everything must change;  it's all about love and mercy;  we must move forward.  [Archbishop Eamon Martin]

You're all a bunch of hating haters and Canon Law sucks liberals:  we must quickly seize the spirit of the synod;  the Church has been out of touch;  people can make up their own minds;  people aren't called to heroic sanctity;  the Pope must deliver, that's why we put him in office.  [Cardinal Kasper]



I think this piece in the Catholic Herald is rather good so I've quoted it in full below:

At the synod’s mid-point, Pope Francis delivered an address in which he called for a “synodal Church”, indicating that he desired more synods, with more authority, in the life of the Church.
By the end of the synod, the Holy Father might have changed his mind. He closed the synod with the most scathing speech of his pontificate to date, denouncing some of his brother bishops for “a facile repetition of what is obvious or has already been said”; of “burying their heads in the sand”; of “indoctrinating” the Gospel “in dead stones to be hurled at others”; of hiding “behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families”; of giving into “conspiracy theories and blinkered viewpoints”; of using “language which is archaic or simply incomprehensible”; of being like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son, or the jealous labourers in the parable of the workers in the vineyard; perhaps suffering from a “fear of love and showing that love concretely”.

Papa Bergoglio is a better man than me, because the idea of spending several weeks in the company of men so characterised would put me off the synodal path entirely.
Yet if the Church is going to have more frequent synods, there are some things that will have to be corrected.

Synods are purely advisory to the pope. Yet they are widely viewed as deciding matters, meaning that bishops advise, but do not have real responsibility for their decisions. The synod final report scrounged together enough votes to pass the sections on Holy Communion for the civilly divorced and remarried by a rhetorical fudge. It reaffirmed the need to proceed in accord with the “comprehensive criteria” of St John Paul II. But it did not quote that criteria specifically. So is the teaching of John Paul upheld, as Cardinal Pell insisted? Or are pastors and their penitents free to reject his definitive articulation of the Catholic tradition in certain cases, as Cardinal Schönborn said?

Did the Wall Street Journal get it right, with its headline, “Bishops Hand the Pope a Defeat on His Outreach to Divorced Catholics”? Or was Il Messaggero right, which led with “Yes to Communion for the divorced: The host for those who are remarried, but it must be evaluated on a case by case basis”?

If the bishops could actually decide – as they do in the case of ecumenical councils – they would have to be clear, not seek to achieve consensus in confusing ambiguities. But then synods could not proceed as they do now, with Archbishop Blase Cupich floating ideas about conscience well outside the Catholic tradition on Friday, bishops discussing the matter on Monday and Tuesday, with everyone waiting with baited breath for a first draft of a final report to emerge on Thursday afternoon to see if the synod is going to declare John Henry Newman wrong about conscience.

Not to worry, in this case the Thursday conscience language was not fully Cupichine, but still not fully Catholic, so the synod fathers, having stayed up late on Thursday night like students cramming for an exam, offered various amendments on Friday morning, wondering if the central drafting committee would, according to entirely unknown criteria, accept the amendments or not. That news was delivered on Saturday morning with the presentation of the revised text which, after a solid five hours of deliberation, the synod fathers voted upon.

Meanwhile, the media is waiting to tell Catholics the world over who won the synod, the conservatives or the liberals. The process certainly is successful in terms of generating interest, but it is ill-suited to arriving at contested truths, let alone truths pertaining to, in this case, the Eucharist, the source and summit of the Christian life.

One of the most prominent cardinals at the synod announced to his brothers in the language group discussions that the synod had been a catechetical catastrophe. Not for what it taught about anything in particular, but because it suggested to the Church and the world that Catholic teaching was determined by parliamentary methods, the basic procedures of which were made up on the fly.
The Holy Father anticipated this danger in his opening address, specifically saying that a synod is “neither a convention … nor a parliament or senate, where people make deals and reach compromises.”

That is, though, how it often appears in the mainstream media, from which most Catholics get their news about the Church. There are Christian communities which have wrapped themselves up for years in synods, in which the outcome of Church teaching and discipline is the result of parliamentary manoeuvring.

The Holy Father denounced many of the synod fathers as being Pharisees rather than good pastors. If the dynamics of this synod return in more frequent future synods, it may be less that the fathers are Pharisees than that the process is to akin to party politics.

As I was saying before I was interupted...

There's lots and lots and lots of stuff to read about the Synod starting shortly in Rome.  I am trying to maintain a balanced opinion.  For those looking to read something relatively straightforward and mainstream you could do worse than start with Fr Vincent Twomey. 

Vatican's gay lobby revealed

Hat tip to Crescat

Three graces

Check out these beautiful paintings of Popes Benedict, John Paul II and John Paul I.

They're by the Vatican's newest official court artist, Natalia Tsarkova, an ebullient Russian woman with a pet owl. An Orthodox believer in the heart of Rome, Natalia Tsarkova paints her classical-style portraits in a flat filled with Vatican memorabilia by the walls of the Holy See.

How Pope Francis got elected (and Scola didn't)

Giacomo Galeazzi in La Stampa gives us the inside (well his) angle on how the conclave unfolded.  Full article below and here.  One question I'd have is his suggestion that some cardinals wouldn't vote for Scola because of his links with Communion and Liberation. But Bergoglio is also very linked with CL so hard to see why they'd vote for him.  Anyway - full text below:

Already on Tuesday it looked as though things could get complicated for the cardinals’ top favourite, Scola. A few moments after the extra omnes and the meditation in the Sistine Chapel, Bergoglio surprisingly and very suddenly obtained the largest number of votes. At the first ballot, however, the votes were too scattered for cardinals to get a truly indicative picture. Still, it was a warning sign to the Archbishop of Milan, who was credited with such chances of victory yesterday, that just minutes from the Proto-Deacon’s announcement, an unfortunate statement by the Secretary General of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) expressed "the feelings of the entire Italian Church in welcoming the news of the election of Cardinal Angelo Scola as the successor of Peter."

Scola's path to the Holy Throne was blocked by the confluence of two alliances and of two distinctly different evaluation systems: the non-European one (South America in particular), on the one hand, planned on bringing the papacy out of the old continent for the first time. On the other hand, there was the Curia group led by the nemesis-allegiance of Bertone and Sodano, who are inexorably hostile to Scola. The reason, according to certain voices in the Holy See, are a series of "ancient envies and rivalries”. Bertone has never forgotten the advice that Scola gave to the Pope during a meeting in Castel Gandolfo during the upheaval over the pardon granted to Holocaust-denier Bishop Williamson: his replacement at the helm of the Secretariat of State. Sodano, on the other hand, found himself on opposing sides from Scola in various power struggles for the control of Catholic institutions. Ruini himself, while esteeming Scola, gave no indications to vote in his favour to the conclavists, like the Australian Pell, who asked to visit him before the Conclave. In short, the 28 Italian voters did not all row in the same direction and so they dashed their chances of installing one of their compatriots to Peter's Throne 35 years after Luciani.

Not even among the residential Italian archbishops was there a complete consensus for Scola, and therefore the votes that many European voters cast in his favour no longer sufficed. Furthermore, the conclavists near the community of Sant'Egidio (Sepe, for example) could not look kindly upon Scola's involvement in a movement so different from theirs as the Communion and Liberation (CL) one. In the last few hours there were signs that Scola's strong candidacy was a giant with clay feet. In other words, everybody recognized his exceptional stature as a Bishop and intellectual, but then, digging a little deeper, beyond the circumstancial phrases, separations and reserves began to crop up. Most of all, the idea of an "overseas flight" became more prevalent, which was undermining the opportunity to fall back on a Italian pontificate, as most of the Church's growth is in South America, Africa, and Asia. "There cannot always be a shepherd upstream with a flock downstream", summarized an African cardinal in the congregation.

Also, shortly before the start of the Conclave, the Sodano-supporter Lajolo had publicly voiced the Curia’s annoyance at the protagonism displayed by the American group, and few picked up on the Dean's party's approval for a more sober style. A low-key profile: the etiquette adopted by Bergoglio for the entire duration of the sede vacante period. Very little exposure, minimal public outings and appearances at the General Congregations like all the other peons of the College of Cardinals, even though, in the papal election of 2005, he had obtained more votes than anyone else except for Ratzinger. And Benedict XVI has never made any secret of his consideration for the austere Jesuit who has "cleansed" the Argentinian Church from its involvement with the military regime.

For Bergoglio, now as eight years ago, the fatal place was Domus Sanctae Marthae; but this time with the opposite result. What happened yesterday at 13:30 in the Domus mattered more than the Sistine Chapel early result-less ballots. The black smoke episodes were followed by the domestic meetings in the residence of the voters. Bertone and Re spoke with Bergoglio guaranteeing their support. Earlier, the conclavists ate and slept in the chapel frescoed by Michelangelo, but, since 2005, it is customary for them to return (by shuttle or on foot) to the hotel renovated by John Paul II for their meals and overnight rest. During lunches and dinners, the cardinals discuss freely and the bridge-builders spring into action offering a possible reconciliation between the various factions. Eight years ago, it was in the refectory of Sanctae Marthae where the match ended in Ratzinger's favour. "From the Last Supper onwards, in the Church the important things are decided at the table", explained one of Ratzinger's electors with a smile.

In the 2005 conclave, after the first three votes, Bergoglio addressed a speech to the diners destined to immediately change the fortunes of that Papal election. He explicitly asked his forty supporters to stop voting for him. In short, cardinals decided who was to dress in white and appear once again on the balcony of St. Peter’s, over a plate of pasta or a digestif. The hours spent in the Sanctae Marthae residence, between lounges, confessionals and the “in-house” Chapel, gave cardinals excellent opportunities to informally agree on the discarding of candidates with fewer votes, to give an advantage to the papabile who had received the most votes in the first three ballots.

Time to annoy some traddy Catholics

Well I know I shouldn't be encouraging bad behaviour but if you've a spare moment pop along over to Fr Z's site for a spot of commenting.  My first comments below and Fr Z's reactive reply in red.


Folks when you talk about “binning the Novus Ordo” you’re talking about putting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in a bin! [No. That is NOT what is being said. They desire that the Novus Ordo not be used and that the Usus Antiquior be used instead.] It’s hardly the language or sentiment one would expect of Catholics. It’s called the Ordinary Form for a reason. It’s the main form in ordinary use and the sooner you accept that it isn’t going away the better for you. As for calling protestants heretics and schismatics, it’s time to grow up! [And it is time to curb your hysteria and revive your critical thinking skills.]

My second comment below:


Well pardon my hysteria and lack of critical thought process in understanding “bin” to mean “a receptacle in which to deposit rubbish” as per the Oxford English Dictionary and therefore not an appropriate term to employ in connection with the rite commonly used for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. If a bishop or a Catholic newspaper said it was time to bin the Extraordinary Form this blog would be all over them like a rash.

Lobbing around words like schismatic and heretic, well it’s not Catholic. Go read Unitatis Redintegratio and if you don’t like what it says run off and frolic with your friends in the SSPX.

"Catholic" politicians

Does Enda Kenny have any sense of himself as a member of the Catholic Church?  Does any "Catholic" politician?  I take Kenny as an example based on this recent behaviour.  After all the years of Vatican II, after endless references to "the People of God" and being told that the Church was more than the bishops I see no evidence that the message has got through.  If anything, there was a far greater sense in the past of lay people being part of the Church.

For example, read this recent news article about the new coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh:


THE Taoiseach Enda Kenny today welcomed the announcement of the appointment of Monsignor Eamon Martin as Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh and successor to Catholic primate Cardinal Sean Brady when he retires.

"It's a matter entirely for the Catholic Church but I think the fact that the new appointment has some experience of the area of children protection and security obviously is very welcome," he said [always has to get the dig in.]

The Taoiseach said that he had "very good relations with the Catholic Church", adding that he was due to meet Cardinal Brady this afternoon to talk about what he described as "a very long agenda as part of the structure dialogue that I have with the churches. I'm very happy to engage with the [Catholic] church. We have lots to talk about".

Does this sound like someone who is actually a member of the Catholic Church that he's talking about?

And how delusional is he if he thinks he has "good relations" with the Church?  Perhaps his sense of separatedness is in preparation for when he introduces direct abortion legislation and can no longer receive Holy Communion.

The film's as close as Flannery will probably get

Good coverage in tomorrow's Irish Catholic of Fr Tony Flannery story.   Elaborates on the way that Fr Flannery has sought to shift the focus on to ordination of women, homosexuality etc and away from his heterodox views of Catholic priesthood.  Notes that he has a Dublin PR company working for him. 

Irish Catholic has sources in Rome which confirm that:

1) chief concern is his views on priesthood;

2) that this is the reason they don't want him leading/involved with the Association of Catholic Priests;

3) that he has never been threatened with excommunication and there is no question of excommunication, noting that in other cases, including bishops, excommunication has only been applied where a priest has taken part in a simulated ordination ceremony for women.

Tony Flannery defenders

If you fancy a bit of a laugh head over to the Irish Times letters page where you will find a sad collection of the usual suspects writing in support of Fr Tony Flannery.  It's unusual to find them all on the same day.  Ach, I'll save you the bother.  Best one is Pat Buckley, which takes prizes for self-importance and self-delusion.

A chara, – No priest has been excommunicated for the rape of children, nor has any bishop or cardinal for covering up those crimes.  Fr Tony Flannery, however, is being threatened with excommunication for speaking on the possibility of women priests (Front page and Opinion, January 21st). This is not the Good News of Jesus Christ, but more bad news from an institution drunk on power and bereft of genuine spiritual authority. The church,the people of God, deserves better.Time to listen to the Spirit and stand up and together for a long overdue change. Our liberation is at hand! – Is mise,

SOLINE HUMBERT (Priestess of some sort I recall)


Sir, – Fr Tony Flannery informs us that he has been threatened with excommunication from the church, an institution to which he has dedicated the greater part of his life. Apparently the Roman authorities wish him to conform with their views on such matters as the role of women, homosexuality, and that old chestnut contraception. To my knowledge he is the first Irish cleric to be so threatened in many decades. I take it then that our ecclesiastical authorities regard Fr Flannery’s views on sexual morality as a more grave crime than that committed by any other cleric over the years. – Yours, etc,

Fr IGGY O’DONOVAN (Please let him be next)


Sir, – Twenty-six years ago they came for me and no one did anything. Today they have come for Fr Tony Flannery. Tomorrow they will come for you. – Yours, etc,

Bishop PAT BUCKLEY (If by "came for me" means letting me stay in parish property rent free for 26 years.  One can imagine the horrors as the Nazis smashed in the doors of the cowering Jews and announced "it's all right lads, you can stay where you are as long as you like."


Sir, – The organisation We are Church Ireland expresses its unconditional support for Fr Tony Flannery in his assertion of his right of conscience not to be forced by an abuse of his vow of obedience to submit to the secretive demands of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Front page and Opinion, January 21st).  We welcome the statement of support of his Irish Redemptorist Order and the Association of Catholic priests of Ireland and Austria.  It is now up to the rest of the people of God,both non-ordained and ordained, to express their support for Tony Flannery and to that end We are Church Ireland is organising a peaceful vigil outside the Papal Nunciature, Navan Road, Dublin on January 27th at 3pm and encourages all concerned for the future of the Irish church to attend. – Yours, etc,

BRENDAN BUTLER (Think his organisation shoud be called "I am Church".  Anyway, I am calling on all Catholics who do not support Tony Flannery to stay away from the Nunciature on Sunday afternoon - we'll see who has the greater number.)

Rationabile Obsequium makes the excellent point that Tony Flannery and the media have been spinning and distorting the case to make the central issues ordination of women, homosexuality and contraception, all of which are liberal/media friendly issues.  While these are indeed important issues, the matter which the CDF has focussed on is Tony's rejection of priesthood as understood by the Church.  The New York Times covers it:

In the letter, the Vatican objected in particular to an article published in 2010 in Reality, an Irish religious magazine. In the article, Father Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, wrote that he no longer believed that “the priesthood as we currently have it in the church originated with Jesus” or that he designated “a special group of his followers as priests.”


Instead, he wrote, “It is more likely that some time after Jesus, a select and privileged group within the community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves, interpreted the occasion of the Last Supper in a manner that suited their own agenda.”

Father Flannery said the Vatican wanted him specifically to recant the statement, and affirm that Christ instituted the church with a permanent hierarchical structure and that bishops are divinely established successors to the apostles.

This appears in the New York Times article, and indeed appeared in the Irish Times article.  But then the Irish Times decided that was the wrong angle to take so they changed it.

Fr Ray Blake makes the good point that the whole case represents the failure by the Irish bishops and the Redemptorist Order to deal with their own business and that the Holy See shouldn't have to deal with small fry like this.

Woman performs the Heimlich Maneuver at the Vatican

A woman was saved at St Peter's Square by an alert police woman using a form of the Heimlich Maneuver.  She apparently was choking with indignation and had misundersood the first aid instruction to "loosen her clothing".  A third lady assisted by applying pressure with an umbrella a number of times.

It is understood that the woman was upset that the Pope was not using the fanon while praying the Angelus.