Sorry about the relative silence. I’m in the very last stages of finishing this book. This morning I wrote the last section of primary text. Today I’m going to revise one last section, collate everything into a single file, gather all the research and idea notes I’ve made by hand and on the computer, and then start going through the entire manuscript, adding what’s missing, correcting errors, making the voice consistent and correct for the age level. And, oh, cut. I think it’s waaaaay too long. That will be today and tomorrow, then this weekend I’ll write the two introductions go through the whole thing again on Monday, and then push SEND on Tuesday morning and be..freeeee…
…until the revision notes come in, that is….
But, as we say in Instagram Land, I just wanted to pop on here and contribute something to this week’s Synod discussion.
I do have thoughts on the mindset that puts this out there and actually thinks this is what Catholics need and want right now – and this offers any meaningful contribution to alleviate all the countless ways that human beings are suffering right now – but I can’t take time away from my work to pull that together in a coherent fashion.
Translation: I would really love to but I am going to be self-disciplined for once and tend to my work instead of spending fun hours searching the Internet for appropriate and hopefully hilarious gifs and memes in response to this corporatist obtuseness.
So all I can do is link to some posts I’ve written over the past few months on this thing.
The great concerns that course through the surface of these documents are inclusion and listening. If you’ve been paying attention to Pope Francis over the years, this will be no surprise. No one should feel left out. God loves everyone, and the Church must be a witness to this in word, action and structure.
The centering of this message and the almost palpable anxiety that frames it interests me a great deal, historically. I have spent a lot of time pondering the before-and-after situations, the framing and the straw men arguments. There’s a lot to unpack, and it’s not just about Church – it’s about culture, too.
What you can probably see is that new-stuff-in-the-Spirit talk annoys me. More than that, it raises my hackles and makes me suspicious. What I’m touching on in this blog post – how contemporary calls to Catholics to live the moral life, as reflected in today’s Gospel, are detached from the deep well of Catholic tradition and experience – is a feature, not a bug, of this Synod talk. It’s not a good thing – not because we want to be closed to the Spirit – but because the rhetoric diminishes our necessary engagement with the deep, Spirit-formed life of the Church as it’s been lived over the centuries, all over the world. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but it worked fairly well, raised up lots of saints, created massive and creative and responsive institutions that ameliorated the suffering of millions.
I’d much prefer, if trying to figure out how to make the Church a more powerful witness to the Gospel in the world today, to begin there – the Gospel and then the richness of two thousand years of experience and wisdom (and mistakes) – than just constantly being pointed to some ambiguous “new” thing that the “Spirit” is going to guide me towards.
Because you know what? All that talk, reducing authority to the person of the guy holding the microphone at the moment, all that ignore the past, trust the Spirit talk comes across to me as trust us more than anything else. Which in turn sounds like a call, not so much to clarity, but to rationalization.
I trust Jesus, Scripture and the warp and woof of Catholic tradition – which is ambiguous at times, which shifts and develops, but actually, if you can stop being so rigid and ideological about the whole thing, is actually very consistent and clear on the fundamentals – like how to live your life as a disciple of Jesus: sacrificial love, self-denial, detachment, simplicity and then even more sacrificial love.
No matter what your station in life or where your home is or what you do for a living – it’s the same for all of us.
We don’t find more Jesus in chasing the clout of the new. No, in obeying Jesus in humility and openness, informed by the richness and truth of Catholic experience, every day – every hour – we find something, well – new.
We don’t do good stuff because The Synod or the Pope Wants Us To. We don’t do it even because we feel moved by emotions we’ll label the Spirit today.
We follow Christ because we are baptized and he calls us.
Catholic life and practice shifts, changes, ossifies and is reformed and renewed. It’s the Holy Spirit at work in all of that.
But it’s a Spirit whose actions must be carefully discerned and sifted as we engage with it and work so hard to be faithful and, most importantly, to bring the power of the Gospel, Spirit-led, into a hurting world.
Because, as we have seen time and time again, in ancient and recent history, as well as in our own lives: all that heady, optimistic Spirit-talk? As we see all around us, constantly and consistently:
Is there anything in life easier to weaponize, because we are yearning so deeply, than the promise of something new, coming to us via the warm assurances of those who identify the movement of the Spirit – good! – with whatever they want to happen next?
Resistance to “new” can, indeed, be resistance to the Spirit. It can also be fidelity to Christ. Whether that thing is “new” or not has absolutely nothing to do with the authenticity of the moment, idea or expression. “New” as I said before, is not a meaningful category for discernment in either a positive or negative sense, and neither is “old.”
In God’s time, they are meaningless terms.
Things that might not make sense (12/18)
- The Church must be a listening Church
but…
- No, no, no. Not to you.
What a pity if, when the good, self-sacrificing, faithful people come to the church once a week to lay their worldly cares and troubles before the altar of God, looking for solace and peace for one brief hour, after the long days of toil and weariness, of temptation and maybe sin and discouragement, what a pity, if, when they come for bread — the bread of life — we give them a stone! — and if, when they are longing to lift up their hearts to God, as in the Preface we bid them to do, we rather drag them down to material things, to money, money and schemes for raising money.
Maybe substitute meetings, meetings and meetings about more meetings for that last phrase…eh?
Charlotte was Both 
Thank you!
>Soooo…. when is the Heirarchy going to start listening to those faithful desiring the Latin form of the Mass? …. As noted above: listening, but “No, no, no. Not to YOU.”
<Trenchant comment: "Is there anything in life easier to weaponize …than the promise of something new"
Indeed. weaponized to what end???…. weaponized as a vehicle to shove heterodox 'reforms' down the throat of the masses.
Seems to me there are only three options here:
1- avoid the process like the plague; but this will only give the weaponizers what they want.
2- hope the thing collapses of its own weight. Would be nice but the clerical powers have more than enough of our money (despite what they'v squandered) and their microphones to keep this thing afloat.
3- turn out overwhelmingly within and without the process, crying out for greater solemnity, mining of the Church's historical spiritual riches, greater accountability for church finances, orthodox proclamation of sexual morality, and times of prayer and fasting.
Parish life is not for me. Tried to make it work for so long. Now realizing every parish is accountable to people like these bishops and their spokesman. They don’t know the Gospel. They have been institutionalized. God has given them their offices. It is up to him to hold them responsible for neglecting to communicate his grace to the flock. I have concluded my part is to shield myself and others as much as I can from their drunken escapades. The Catholic Church in America has abusive fathers. It is time for me to remove myself from their presence as much as possible and pursue God apart from them, frequenting the Sacraments as necessary. They are an impediment and not a help to pursuing a life lived in a state of grace. Yes there are good ones out there, but the life of the Church in this country has become toxic and abusive, and Pope Francis is intent on accelerating this phenomenon, as witnessed by among other things Traditiones Custodes. The literature on how adult children come to terms with neglectful parents is apropos.
like sheep without a shepherd”…
-when Jesus’was awakened on the boat of stormy Galilee, he didn’t say “well, now, What does everyone think?”
-when Paul wanted to ensure he got things aright, he didn’t say “well, What does everyone think?” He went to Peter and James (gal,1:18-19).
Hard to believe that some want us to go from an apostolic church to a Baptist convention.
But worse than that… The ones with the microphone will decide which voices get listened to.
Every hospital is murdering patients. First Remdesivir to destroy the kidneys and cause pneumonia, then a ventilator to destroy the lungs. The VAST MAJORITY of “covid deaths” have been murders. (About seven out of eight.)
How many American bishops have called out the hospital administrators, the doctors, the nurses, for these murders? NONE. NOT ONE. ZERO.
Bishops are sending seminarians–YOUNG MALES–to seminaries that require injection with the same Satanic concoction that has been killing approximately one famous athlete DAILY.
It is now universally understood that two-thirds of bishops actively concealed the rape of young males for decades. Soon it will be universally understood that ALL bishops remained silent as old people, little children, and YOUNG MALES were murdered in hospitals and RAPED with needles in schools, pharmacies, and clinics. It will be universally understood that the bishops maintained silence out of fear of Bergoglio. It will be universally understood that, from top to bottom, the “church of the new springtime,” the “listening church,” stood by during the largest genocide since the creation of the Earth.
Over the top rhetoric with no credible data or evidence.
Really, ‘the largest genocide since the creation of the earth’?
Madness.
In my own diocese, the bishop, the diocesan newspaper, and many priests have heavily promoted vaccination from Day One. This has led to an us-and-them attitude among parishioners regarding who’s vaxxed and who is not. And the vaxxed,of course, are the superior beings. This talk of open-mindedness, inclusivity, listening, and dialogue is mighty big talk, but let’s see how many bishops will apply it when it comes to the vaccination discussion.
I’d prefer “faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance” as a list of seven.
The disheartening problem at the heart of the Seven Flirty Words posted by the USCCB–and “synodality” in general–is that they are going to be the ends, not means. Process is institutionalized and becomes a reflecting pool for the participants.
I mean, it’s already an “-ity,” or condition. Once they embrace it, they’re already there!
Voila: inertia and continuing decline.