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Pope Francis has just triggered a seismic revolution. An earthquake has rocked the Catholic Church.
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Buona sera! Thank you for joining me in Rome.
Pope Francis has just made history. The pontiff of surprises has just triggered a seismic
revolution. The tectonic plates have shifted. An earthquake has rocked the Catholic Church.
When I relocated to Rome over four years ago, a very wise businessman told me: “You have a ringside view of history. You are going to watch history in the making.” He was right.
On Saturday, I watched history being made as Pope Francis orchestrated the greatest
revolution since the Protestant Reformation. And he did it without firing a single shot,
without provoking a single schism.
He did it not by making cosmetic changes that would upset conservative Catholics. He did it by diving down deep into the bowels of the Church and by rewriting the very DNA of the Church’s processes of doing theology and making decisions.
Bravissimo, Papa Francesco! You did it! By George, you did it! Francis’ revolution changed
what was considered to be the Church of Perpetual Stability and transformed it into the
Church of Perpetual Synodality.
“It’s a revolution that no one notices,” one cardinal told CNN, after the Final Document
produced by the Synod on Synodality was released on Saturday.
“Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives,” the Italian novelist and journalist Italo Calvino wrote in 1957. He was right. Conservatives focus on outcome.
Hot-headed, impulsive, and bad revolutionaries focus also on outcome. It ends badly. The great revolutionaries, the real revolutionaries focus on process. A lasting revolution is about process. Because once you change process, a change in outcome is only a matter of time.
It was Karl Marx who first called for “substituting permanent war for permanent
revolution.” The final Synod document calls for permanent revolution. Catholic apologists
once triumphantly trumpeted that the Roman Catholic magisterium had never changed, and would never change.
It is the main reason why Anglicans tossed around in the whirlpool of synodality swam the Tiber believing they had found a safe harbor in Rome. On Saturday, Pope Francis created the Church of Permanent Revolution.
“Revolutions are always verbose,” wrote the Bolshevik–Leninist Leon Trotsky. The final
document from the painfully long synodal process is excruciatingly verbose. Francis
accomplished his revolution with 28,000 words of mind-numbing verbosity.
And he did it with a masterstroke of epoch-making symbolism. Normally, after a synodal
document is issued the pope takes it and distills into a post-synodal apostolic exhortation.
The working document has no magisterial weight. The post-synodal apostolic exhortation has the weight of the ordinary magisterium. Which means, Catholics are bound to obey it.
Francis made history by short-circuiting the entire process. He simply shrugged his papal
shoulders and declared that the final document produced by an odd assortment of 368
Catholics was magisterium. Many of these individuals hold views contrary to established
doctrine. Virtually none of them are heavyweight theologians or biblical scholars or
canonists or Church historians. Yet their democratic vote has decided the future of the
Catholic Church.
And how will achieve it? Well, by openness and listening to the experience of
people.
Openness is a key buzzword of the synodal revolution. Look at paragraph number 60 on
women deacons in the final document.
Here’s what the document states: “Additionally, the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.”
But, but, but ... we thought previous popes had definitively, even infallibly, ruled out women deacons! In May, Pope Francis was specifically asked about women deacons.
“Concerning the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, for a little girl growing up
Catholic today will she ever have the opportunity to be a deacon and participate as a clergy member in the Church?” “No.”
At the final press conference of the Synod, a journalist pressed Cardinal Hollerich on the
diaconate for women. In what sense does the question remain open especially after Pope Francis himself said it was a closed matter, she asked. Hollerich replied: “This is a very delicate problem. So when the pope says he is signing this document that he makes it his own, that means also that passage the pope has said he has made this proposal his own. And who am I to contradict the Holy Father? I fully accept what the Holy Father says. The Holy Father hasn’t said women will be ordained deacon. He has not said women will not be ordained deacon. He just said it remains open. It has to be studied.”
I hope you saw the look of mischief on the cardinal’s face particularly when he asked: “Who am I too contradict the Holy Father?” And, I suspect you did spot the obfuscation that would earn the admiration of Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes, Prime Minister. The Holy Father hasn’t said women will be ordained deacon. He has not said women will not be ordained deacon. He just said it remains open.
Welcome to the new Church of Perpetual Synodality, the Church of Endless and Everlasting Discussion, the Church of Permanent Revolution, the Church of Vox Populi Vox Dei – the Church where the voice of the people is the voice of God.
I asked the popular British author Deacon Nick Donnelly what he thought of the final
document. He said: “This is worse than the Protestant Reformation, because at least the
Protestants believed in the universal, absolute, objective moral norms revealed by God in
Scripture and Tradition.”
Donnelly added: “I never imagined I’d see a new religion attempt to pass itself off as the
Catholic Faith, when it contradicts it on so many different levels.” A few days ago Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who was the Vatican’s former doctrine watchdog, described the synodal process as “A hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
Why are Deacon Donnelly and Cardinal Müller accurate in their diagnosis? Because the
Church of Permanent Revolution has revolutionized the most fundamental way of doing
Christian theology. All Christians have always believed that our faith is divinely revealed and not man-manufactured.
The great debate of the Reformation was the interpretation and authority of Divine
Revelation viewed through the deposit of Scripture and Tradition. Both Catholics and
Protestants did theology by fiercely debating scripture and tradition with each other. The
disagreement was whether tradition and scripture are on the same level or whether Scripture supersedes Tradition in magisterial authority.
But now, for the first time in history, the Catholic Church has officially jettisoned divine
revelation in favor of a new category, which the Synod defined as “experience,” which, in
turn, is acquired by listening – especially to the experience of the voices of the marginalized.
Father James Martin, the Jesuit friend of Pope Francis who is attempting to normalize
homosexual relationships in the Catholic Church, was triumphant. Why? Because the final
document declares that from now on synodality is to become a “constitutive dimension” of the Church.
Paragraph 15 of the final document states this unambiguously: “With this document, the
Assembly recognizes and bears witness that synodality, a constitutive dimension of the
Church, is already part of the experience of many of our communities.”
As I read through the document over the weekend, I was haunted by the parable of the wise builder and the foolish builder from the gospel according to St. Matthew. The wise man built his house on the rock. The rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit – but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock.
The foolish man built his house on shifting sands. It didn’t even need a tsunami – a mild
thunderstorm was enough for it to collapse like a house of cards. Jesus begins the parable by telling us very clearly that the rock on which we are supposed to build our house is His words, His teaching, His Gospel.
When St. Paul writes to the Corinthians he echoes Jesus’ message giving them lessons from the history of Israel. They all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.
That's the top story for today. For more news that matters to you, please go to SoulsAndLiberty.com. I'm Jules Gomes. God Bless you and thank you for watching.