Fortsetzung von hier und hier
"Die unvermeidliche Fokussierung auf die Sexuallehren der Kirche, so wichtig sie auch sind, verführt uns leicht zu einer engen Debatte über bestimmte Vorschläge. Der grundlegende Konflikt zwischen diesen widerstreitenden Tendenzen findet, wie Ratzinger betonte, nicht auf der Ebene einzelner Lehren statt, sondern "im Bereich ihrer philosophischen Voraussetzungen“. Die Tiefe dieser Meinungsverschiedenheit lässt sich leicht verbergen, vielleicht sogar vor den Streitparteien, durch die gemeinsame Nutzung bestimmter Begriffe, die jedoch auf völlig unterschiedliche Weise verwendet werden. Nur wenn die Meinungsverschiedenheit auf philosophischer Ebene bearbeitet wird, besteht Hoffnung auf eine echte Lösung. "Gibt es im Laufe der historischen Zeit eine erkennbare Identität des Menschen mit sich selbst?“ fragt Ratzinger. "Gibt es eine menschliche ‚Natur‘? Gibt es eine Wahrheit, die in jeder historischen Zeit wahr bleibt, weil sie wahr ist?“ Von diesen Fragen hängen die Natur Gottes und die Struktur der Realität ab.
Die Frage, ob etwas in mehr als einem bedingten oder funktionalen Sinne wahr ist – ob wir immer noch einer ontologischen Auffassung von Wahrheit zustimmen – liegt den vielen Fragen zugrunde, die der Synodale Prozess aufwirft. Was beabsichtigt die Kirche mit der Übernahme der Nomenklatur der LGTBQ-Bewegung? Wie kann die Kirche diese Sprache übernehmen, ohne sich damit abzufinden, daß diese Bewegung die Ontologie durch die Identität ersetzt? Wie kann sie diese Vorstellung von Identität bekräftigen, ohne stillschweigend das biomedizinische Regime der assistierten Reproduktionstechnologien und der kommerziellen Leihmutterschaft sowie das massive wissenschaftliche Experiment mit pubertätshemmenden Hormonen und geschlechtsangleichenden Operationen zu unterstützen – ganz zu schweigen von den tiefgreifenden Veränderungen in Recht, Sprache, Familie und politische Struktur – notwendig, um sie normativ zu machen? Progressive wie James Martin, S.J., versuchen vergeblich, solche Fragen von der Frage der LGBTQ-Inklusion abzugrenzen, aber sie bilden ein nahtloses Gefüge. Wie kann diese Nomenklatur mit der vom Konzil gelehrten hylomorphen Auffassung der menschlichen Natur oder mit der Schöpfungslehre, wie sie immer verstanden wurde, in Einklang gebracht werden? Vermutlich glaubt die Kirche immer noch, daß Männer und Frauen real sind. Oder ist die Idee der unveränderlichen menschlichen Natur faschistisch?"
Quelle: M. Hanby, firstthings
Die unvermeidliche Fokussierung auf die Sexuallehren der Kirche, so wichtig sie auch sind, verführt uns leicht zu einer engen Debatte über bestimmte Vorschläge. Der grundlegende Konflikt zwischen diesen widerstreitenden Tendenzen findet, wie Ratzinger betonte, nicht auf der Ebene einzelner Lehren statt, sondern "im Bereich ihrer philosophischen Voraussetzungen“. Die Tiefe dieser Meinungsverschiedenheit lässt sich leicht verbergen, vielleicht sogar vor den Streitparteien, durch die gemeinsame Nutzung bestimmter Begriffe, die jedoch auf völlig unterschiedliche Weise verwendet werden. Nur wenn die Meinungsverschiedenheit auf philosophischer Ebene bearbeitet wird, besteht Hoffnung auf eine echte Lösung. "Gibt es im Laufe der historischen Zeit eine erkennbare Identität des Menschen mit sich selbst?“ fragt Ratzinger. "Gibt es eine menschliche ‚Natur‘? Gibt es eine Wahrheit, die in jeder historischen Zeit wahr bleibt, weil sie wahr ist?“ Von diesen Fragen hängen die Natur Gottes und die Struktur der Realität ab.
Die Frage, ob etwas in mehr als einem bedingten oder funktionalen Sinne wahr ist – ob wir immer noch einer ontologischen Auffassung von Wahrheit zustimmen – liegt den vielen Fragen zugrunde, die der Synodalprozess aufwirft. Was beabsichtigt die Kirche mit der Übernahme der Nomenklatur der LGTBQ-Bewegung? Wie kann die Kirche diese Sprache übernehmen, ohne sich damit abzufinden, daß diese Bewegung die Ontologie durch die Identität ersetzt? Wie kann sie diese Vorstellung von Identität bekräftigen, ohne stillschweigend das biomedizinische Regime der assistierten Reproduktionstechnologien und der kommerziellen Leihmutterschaft sowie das massive wissenschaftliche Experiment mit pubertätshemmenden Hormonen und geschlechtsangleichenden Operationen zu unterstützen – ganz zu schweigen von den tiefgreifenden Veränderungen in Recht, Sprache, Familie und politische Struktur – notwendig, um sie normativ zu machen? Progressive wie James Martin, S.J., versuchen vergeblich, solche Fragen von der Frage der LGBTQ-Inklusion abzugrenzen, aber sie bilden ein nahtloses Gefüge. Wie kann diese Nomenklatur mit der vom Konzil gelehrten hylomorphen Auffassung der menschlichen Natur oder mit der Schöpfungslehre, wie sie immer verstanden wurde, in Einklang gebracht werden? Vermutlich glaubt die Kirche immer noch, daß Männer und Frauen real sind. Oder ist die Idee der unveränderlichen menschlichen Natur faschistisch?
The questions raised by the synodal process concern not only human nature but the nature of the Church. What is the Church in the imagination of the synodal masterminds? Is it fundamentally an ontological and sacramental reality, or a sociological and political one? Is the communio of the Trinity the ontological basis of the Church’s identity as the “People of God,” as the order of Lumen Gentium suggests? Or is the “ecclesiology of the People of God” the “context” for communio, which is “made real” through the style, structures, and events of the synodal way—which is to say, through a political process? (This is what the International Theological Commission implies in its study on synodality.) Is “the Church as a whole, in her essential mystery . . . a reality that ontologically and temporally preceded the individual particular Churches,” as John Paul II’s Communionis Notio teaches? If so, then the Church has a theological and sacramental nature that transcends its location in space and time, and the “People of God” therefore includes the whole communion of saints, and the sensus fidelium finds its fullest expression in the Vincentian Canon: what is believed everywhere, always, and by all.
If, by contrast, the sensus fidelium is the religious equivalent of public opinion and can be discerned by a shoddy, unscientific imitation of the polling and data collection procedures of the social sciences, then the Church is reduced to a mere sociological and political reality, a Church of pure administration, if not of cynical manipulation. Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, this is exactly how it appears in Faggioli’s many tracts on synodality, as when he says that the term “Synodal Church” simply “means ecclesial processes that are less centered on the clergy and more open to the leadership role of the laity, especially women.” This characterization may make synodality seem like a bureaucratic undertaking, he acknowledges. But don’t worry—he assures us that “synodality is about sacramentality and the Church as a sacrament,” and that “synods and councils have always had a liturgical core.”
All these questions—and there are many others—are finally questions about the true nature of things, indeed about whether the very notion of “true nature” is to be regarded as an anachronism in a world dominated by the natural and social sciences, where “nature” is whatever is observed and therefore each observed thing is as “natural” as any other. Yet this is precisely the sort of question that seems to be systematically precluded by the synod’s methodology of “radical inclusion,” as if the foundations of the “listening Church” could be built only atop the ruins of the “thinking Church.”
These questions can be postponed by the time-honored method of separating pastoral and doctrinal concerns. But it is obvious that this distinction is not sustainable, since every pastoral action must take place within a horizon of meaning and with reference to some conception of what is true. The distinguishing of the pastoral from the doctrinal invites the sort of dishonesty that one finds in James Martin’s variation on this tactic. The rhetorical move is simple: Insist that you have never denied Church doctrine, while writing, speaking, and acting as if it were false, and you can effect a de facto transformation of the Church’s understanding of itself, or of God, or of human nature, without ever raising the question of truth at all. Succeed on a large enough scale—flood the internet with enough half-baked columns, or tweet early enough that your comrades in Rome can enjoy your sallies with their morning coffee—and voilà, you have a paradigm shift, or at least the illusion of one. The tactic may well succeed in bringing about structural change in the Church, but it will fool no one who is not desperate to be fooled.
It strains credulity to believe that this project can be spiritually serious, as its protagonists piously insist, and so intellectually unserious at the same time. The entire tradition of the discernment of the spirits, spanning the Institutes of John Cassian to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, sought above all to disentangle the voice of God from the spirit of the age—the world, the flesh, and the devil, in the older terminology. Not only is the synodal process utterly lacking in the ancient rigor of those exercises—and this at a time when the spirit of the age is omnipresent, its voice thrum-thrum-thrumming through media that are more interior to me than I am to myself—but it positively invites their conflation. Consider just one of the questions posed to small groups and discussed for all of two minutes during the diocesan phase of the synodal process: “From your small group sharing, name one insight where you heard the voice of the Holy Spirit today?” Combine it with other questions—“How is God speaking to us through the voices that are in our midst?” “How is God speaking to us through voices we sometimes ignore, including those on the peripheries?” “What space is there to listen to the voices on the peripheries, especially cultural groups, women, the disabled, those who experience poverty, marginalization, or social exclusion?”—and the conclusion is unavoidable that the synodal process has been engineered in advance to determine “where the Spirit is leading us.”
It is neither convincing nor reassuring for Austen Ivereigh to insist that discernment takes place only among the bishops at the final stage of the process, as if no discernment had gone into the synod’s methodology, the formulation of its questions, or the selection of its administrative personnel. Was the synod designed at random? That might explain the farcical nature of some of its proceedings or the poor quality of its writers and administrators, but it is hardly grounds for believing that the Holy Spirit has spontaneously moved the universal Church to select the cause of LGTBQ inclusion as the most important problem facing the world and the Church. But then the point of such proclamations is not to persuade us that the results of these deliberations are true, delivered straight from the Holy Spirit to Ivereigh’s pen. As with the revelation that Ivereigh himself was one of the authors of the first global synod document, and its ridiculous exhortation to approach its pages as “on holy ground,” the point is political. We’re reminded who is in charge, and we are instructed that criticism of the Sodalitium Franciscanum is really criticism of the pope himself, and so is tantamount to a rejection of Vatican II.
The many questions provoked by the unfolding of the synodal process and the political and sociological lexicon of its lay champions boil down to the question of the relationship between auctoritas and potestas, which finally turns on the question of truth. Once historicism and sociologism have annihilated the transcendent basis of truth, reducing “truth” to the sum of antecedent conditions and “what we have the power to effect,” authority becomes just another expression of the will to power. One cannot throw every truth up for grabs—“male and female he created them,” for example—while holding onto the truth of papal primacy from Pastor Aeternus, without treating the pope as a Hobbesian sovereign and basing his authority on his power rather than the reverse. Authority without truth is finally not authority at all.
Historians will almost certainly look back on this period and conclude that neither the legacy of Pope Francis nor the authority of future popes was well served by Francis’s friends, whatever the near-term success of the synodal process in transforming Faggioli’s beloved “systems of ecclesial governance” or, more to the point, in shoring up progressive control over them. Doctrine reduced to doctrinal policy is as fragile as any other policy, dependent on the will of the administration in power. Progressives understand this—one reason, no doubt, that they are always so anxious to see policy realized in their control over personnel and procedures. Mere “doctrinal policy” can effect changes in structure; it can even compel obedience, to the cheers of the Sodalitium Franciscanum; but it cannot bring one to believe as true what one knows to be false. Power can compel, but it cannot oblige. It cannot elicit the assent of faith, or that consent—con-sentire, a “thinking with”—that is at once a showing forth of truth and one’s own act in yielding to it. This power belongs exclusively to the authority of truth, which, as Dignitatis Humanae says, “cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” The point is not the democratic one that consent confers authority, as James Martin seems to hold, but rather the ontological one that true authority—the authority of truth—elicits consent.
It is by the criterion of truth that the results of the Synod, and its adequacy as an interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, will ultimately be judged. “The greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council,” in the words of John XXIII, was “that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously,” a doctrine, he added, that “embraces the whole of man, composed as he is of body and soul.” The Conciliar Church still believed in this traditional conception of human nature. It is difficult to see how a conclusion that contradicts or obscures this doctrine, especially as it pertains to “the whole of man,” could claim either to represent the spirit of the Council or to be a coherent interpretation of the “signs of the times,” signs that are more foreboding today than they were in the 1960s. No one imagines that the 2020s are the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. That is one farce we seem to have been spared.
Unfortunately, the synodal process seems blind to the meaning of our historical moment. Del Noce used to speak with frustration of the sort of Catholic who sought to assimilate to the faith the “partial truth” of Marxism: “The demonstration that atheism is essential to Marxism leaves him utterly indifferent.” Similarly, because neo-modernism is an essentially political phenomenon, no amount of evidence seems able to convince its proponents that our world is not essentially the world of 1968 . . . or of 1933. The Catholic neo-modernist is a historicist, but not a good one. He is always arriving on the scene of history half a century too late, intent on “engaging” a world that no longer exists—unable to see the world as it is now, where the forces of a new totalitarianism, more total if less outwardly violent than the old, march under a rainbow flag rather than a swastika. Meanwhile, the very world the neo-modernist praises as “egalitarian” and “democratic” rebels against Being itself, perfecting the technological means to bring about its revolution and subjecting an entire generation to a vast and unaccountable science project.
This is hardly a novel observation, or even a Christian one. Writing in 1958, with the atrocities of “progressive” science still fresh in her memory, Hannah Arendt observed, “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.” Lewis, Huxley, Hans Jonas, Del Noce, and Ratzinger are among the many to have made similar observations and prophecies over the past century. Arendt’s future is our present. Powerful forces within the Church would have the Church accompany the world as it barrels toward a post-political and post-human future. This neo-modernism only vindicates Ratzinger’s concern for the “destructive effects” that follow upon the eclipse of God and truth, confirming Arendt’s conviction that totalitarianism and thoughtlessness march together. At some point, in the face of so many warnings and so much evidence, so many atrocities and so much time, one has to ask whether this thoughtlessness is deliberate.
Though Pope Francis launched the synodal process, he has not yet passed judgment on it. I would not wish to predict that judgment. Processes by their very nature tend to elude the control of those who initiate them, unleashing forces that cannot easily be recalled. Events in Germany raise the possibility of a discrepancy between the unfolding of the synodal process and the pope’s intention in launching it. We should not assume a consonance of the synodal process with the will of the pope, any more than we should assume an identity between the pope’s vision and the radical agenda being advanced under cover of his name. Faggioli himself has written that “the 82-year-old pope’s conception of ecclesial synodality no doubt has its limits and ambivalences.” Even at this late hour, we may yet discover what those limits and ambivalences are. There remains the possibility that the pope might imitate Paul VI, who enraged the spirit of the age by rejecting the recommendations of his own Pontifical Commission on Birth Control. This pope could still make clear that the spirit of the age speaking through synodal questionnaires, focus groups, and functionaries is not the Spirit of Truth.
It is wisdom as old as Plato’s Republic and as tragic as Lear’s Cordelia: A ruler’s true friends are not his flatterers, but those who speak the truth, even at risk to themselves. What is true of kings is even more true of popes, whose authority is derived from the very Truth their office was instituted to serve. Were the pope to put down the revolution being advanced in his name—were he even to disappoint the expectations of the highly curated “People of God”—he might yet discover who his friends really are and who his true friends always were. Nevertheless, in the face of the bleak choice confronting Pope Francis, it seems inevitable that the farcical conduct of the synodal process will end in tragedy: that the synodal way, far from being our “walking together,” will almost certainly accelerate our pulling apart. Blondel was right: “This is manifestly abnormal, since there cannot be two Catholicism
The questions raised by the synodal process concern not only human nature but the nature of the Church. What is the Church in the imagination of the synodal masterminds? Is it fundamentally an ontological and sacramental reality, or a sociological and political one? Is the communio of the Trinity the ontological basis of the Church’s identity as the “People of God,” as the order of Lumen Gentium suggests? Or is the “ecclesiology of the People of God” the “context” for communio, which is “made real” through the style, structures, and events of the synodal way—which is to say, through a political process? (This is what the International Theological Commission implies in its study on synodality.) Is “the Church as a whole, in her essential mystery . . . a reality that ontologically and temporally preceded the individual particular Churches,” as John Paul II’s Communionis Notio teaches? If so, then the Church has a theological and sacramental nature that transcends its location in space and time, and the “People of God” therefore includes the whole communion of saints, and the sensus fidelium finds its fullest expression in the Vincentian Canon: what is believed everywhere, always, and by all.
If, by contrast, the sensus fidelium is the religious equivalent of public opinion and can be discerned by a shoddy, unscientific imitation of the polling and data collection procedures of the social sciences, then the Church is reduced to a mere sociological and political reality, a Church of pure administration, if not of cynical manipulation. Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, this is exactly how it appears in Faggioli’s many tracts on synodality, as when he says that the term “Synodal Church” simply “means ecclesial processes that are less centered on the clergy and more open to the leadership role of the laity, especially women.” This characterization may make synodality seem like a bureaucratic undertaking, he acknowledges. But don’t worry—he assures us that “synodality is about sacramentality and the Church as a sacrament,” and that “synods and councils have always had a liturgical core.”
All these questions—and there are many others—are finally questions about the true nature of things, indeed about whether the very notion of “true nature” is to be regarded as an anachronism in a world dominated by the natural and social sciences, where “nature” is whatever is observed and therefore each observed thing is as “natural” as any other. Yet this is precisely the sort of question that seems to be systematically precluded by the synod’s methodology of “radical inclusion,” as if the foundations of the “listening Church” could be built only atop the ruins of the “thinking Church.”
These questions can be postponed by the time-honored method of separating pastoral and doctrinal concerns. But it is obvious that this distinction is not sustainable, since every pastoral action must take place within a horizon of meaning and with reference to some conception of what is true. The distinguishing of the pastoral from the doctrinal invites the sort of dishonesty that one finds in James Martin’s variation on this tactic. The rhetorical move is simple: Insist that you have never denied Church doctrine, while writing, speaking, and acting as if it were false, and you can effect a de facto transformation of the Church’s understanding of itself, or of God, or of human nature, without ever raising the question of truth at all. Succeed on a large enough scale—flood the internet with enough half-baked columns, or tweet early enough that your comrades in Rome can enjoy your sallies with their morning coffee—and voilà, you have a paradigm shift, or at least the illusion of one. The tactic may well succeed in bringing about structural change in the Church, but it will fool no one who is not desperate to be fooled.
It strains credulity to believe that this project can be spiritually serious, as its protagonists piously insist, and so intellectually unserious at the same time. The entire tradition of the discernment of the spirits, spanning the Institutes of John Cassian to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, sought above all to disentangle the voice of God from the spirit of the age—the world, the flesh, and the devil, in the older terminology. Not only is the synodal process utterly lacking in the ancient rigor of those exercises—and this at a time when the spirit of the age is omnipresent, its voice thrum-thrum-thrumming through media that are more interior to me than I am to myself—but it positively invites their conflation. Consider just one of the questions posed to small groups and discussed for all of two minutes during the diocesan phase of the synodal process: “From your small group sharing, name one insight where you heard the voice of the Holy Spirit today?” Combine it with other questions—“How is God speaking to us through the voices that are in our midst?” “How is God speaking to us through voices we sometimes ignore, including those on the peripheries?” “What space is there to listen to the voices on the peripheries, especially cultural groups, women, the disabled, those who experience poverty, marginalization, or social exclusion?”—and the conclusion is unavoidable that the synodal process has been engineered in advance to determine “where the Spirit is leading us.”
It is neither convincing nor reassuring for Austen Ivereigh to insist that discernment takes place only among the bishops at the final stage of the process, as if no discernment had gone into the synod’s methodology, the formulation of its questions, or the selection of its administrative personnel. Was the synod designed at random? That might explain the farcical nature of some of its proceedings or the poor quality of its writers and administrators, but it is hardly grounds for believing that the Holy Spirit has spontaneously moved the universal Church to select the cause of LGTBQ inclusion as the most important problem facing the world and the Church. But then the point of such proclamations is not to persuade us that the results of these deliberations are true, delivered straight from the Holy Spirit to Ivereigh’s pen. As with the revelation that Ivereigh himself was one of the authors of the first global synod document, and its ridiculous exhortation to approach its pages as “on holy ground,” the point is political. We’re reminded who is in charge, and we are instructed that criticism of the Sodalitium Franciscanum is really criticism of the pope himself, and so is tantamount to a rejection of Vatican II.
The many questions provoked by the unfolding of the synodal process and the political and sociological lexicon of its lay champions boil down to the question of the relationship between auctoritas and potestas, which finally turns on the question of truth. Once historicism and sociologism have annihilated the transcendent basis of truth, reducing “truth” to the sum of antecedent conditions and “what we have the power to effect,” authority becomes just another expression of the will to power. One cannot throw every truth up for grabs—“male and female he created them,” for example—while holding onto the truth of papal primacy from Pastor Aeternus, without treating the pope as a Hobbesian sovereign and basing his authority on his power rather than the reverse. Authority without truth is finally not authority at all.
Historians will almost certainly look back on this period and conclude that neither the legacy of Pope Francis nor the authority of future popes was well served by Francis’s friends, whatever the near-term success of the synodal process in transforming Faggioli’s beloved “systems of ecclesial governance” or, more to the point, in shoring up progressive control over them. Doctrine reduced to doctrinal policy is as fragile as any other policy, dependent on the will of the administration in power. Progressives understand this—one reason, no doubt, that they are always so anxious to see policy realized in their control over personnel and procedures. Mere “doctrinal policy” can effect changes in structure; it can even compel obedience, to the cheers of the Sodalitium Franciscanum; but it cannot bring one to believe as true what one knows to be false. Power can compel, but it cannot oblige. It cannot elicit the assent of faith, or that consent—con-sentire, a “thinking with”—that is at once a showing forth of truth and one’s own act in yielding to it. This power belongs exclusively to the authority of truth, which, as Dignitatis Humanae says, “cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” The point is not the democratic one that consent confers authority, as James Martin seems to hold, but rather the ontological one that true authority—the authority of truth—elicits consent.
It is by the criterion of truth that the results of the Synod, and its adequacy as an interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, will ultimately be judged. “The greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council,” in the words of John XXIII, was “that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously,” a doctrine, he added, that “embraces the whole of man, composed as he is of body and soul.” The Conciliar Church still believed in this traditional conception of human nature. It is difficult to see how a conclusion that contradicts or obscures this doctrine, especially as it pertains to “the whole of man,” could claim either to represent the spirit of the Council or to be a coherent interpretation of the “signs of the times,” signs that are more foreboding today than they were in the 1960s. No one imagines that the 2020s are the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. That is one farce we seem to have been spared.
Unfortunately, the synodal process seems blind to the meaning of our historical moment. Del Noce used to speak with frustration of the sort of Catholic who sought to assimilate to the faith the “partial truth” of Marxism: “The demonstration that atheism is essential to Marxism leaves him utterly indifferent.” Similarly, because neo-modernism is an essentially political phenomenon, no amount of evidence seems able to convince its proponents that our world is not essentially the world of 1968 . . . or of 1933. The Catholic neo-modernist is a historicist, but not a good one. He is always arriving on the scene of history half a century too late, intent on “engaging” a world that no longer exists—unable to see the world as it is now, where the forces of a new totalitarianism, more total if less outwardly violent than the old, march under a rainbow flag rather than a swastika. Meanwhile, the very world the neo-modernist praises as “egalitarian” and “democratic” rebels against Being itself, perfecting the technological means to bring about its revolution and subjecting an entire generation to a vast and unaccountable science project.
This is hardly a novel observation, or even a Christian one. Writing in 1958, with the atrocities of “progressive” science still fresh in her memory, Hannah Arendt observed, “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.” Lewis, Huxley, Hans Jonas, Del Noce, and Ratzinger are among the many to have made similar observations and prophecies over the past century. Arendt’s future is our present. Powerful forces within the Church would have the Church accompany the world as it barrels toward a post-political and post-human future. This neo-modernism only vindicates Ratzinger’s concern for the “destructive effects” that follow upon the eclipse of God and truth, confirming Arendt’s conviction that totalitarianism and thoughtlessness march together. At some point, in the face of so many warnings and so much evidence, so many atrocities and so much time, one has to ask whether this thoughtlessness is deliberate.
Though Pope Francis launched the synodal process, he has not yet passed judgment on it. I would not wish to predict that judgment. Processes by their very nature tend to elude the control of those who initiate them, unleashing forces that cannot easily be recalled. Events in Germany raise the possibility of a discrepancy between the unfolding of the synodal process and the pope’s intention in launching it. We should not assume a consonance of the synodal process with the will of the pope, any more than we should assume an identity between the pope’s vision and the radical agenda being advanced under cover of his name. Faggioli himself has written that “the 82-year-old pope’s conception of ecclesial synodality no doubt has its limits and ambivalences.” Even at this late hour, we may yet discover what those limits and ambivalences are. There remains the possibility that the pope might imitate Paul VI, who enraged the spirit of the age by rejecting the recommendations of his own Pontifical Commission on Birth Control. This pope could still make clear that the spirit of the age speaking through synodal questionnaires, focus groups, and functionaries is not the Spirit of Truth.
It is wisdom as old as Plato’s Republic and as tragic as Lear’s Cordelia: A ruler’s true friends are not his flatterers, but those who speak the truth, even at risk to themselves. What is true of kings is even more true of popes, whose authority is derived from the very Truth their office was instituted to serve. Were the pope to put down the revolution being advanced in his name—were he even to disappoint the expectations of the highly curated “People of God”—he might yet discover who his friends really are and who his true friends always were. Nevertheless, in the face of the bleak choice confronting Pope Francis, it seems inevitable that the farcical conduct of the synodal process will end in tragedy: that the synodal way, far from being our “walking together,” will almost certainly accelerate our pulling apart. Blondel was right: “This is manifestly abnormal, since there cannot be two Catholicisms
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