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December 2024 Contents
A New Pentecost or a New Babel? Deciphering the Synodal Vision
By Anthony Stine, Ph.D
The Synod of Synodality’s 2024 session in Rome ended on October 27, with a Mass attended by most of the participants of the Synod. That Mass was preceded by unusual news: unlike with past Synods, the Holy Father would not be publishing his own Apostolic Exhortation based on or in response to the final document issued by the Synod, as he had done in years past with previous Synods. Instead, Pope Francis signed the Synod’s final report, putting behind that document the authority of his papacy and all that comes with it. That single act sent shockwaves throughout the Church, as the document itself embraces some unprecedented areas of alleged reform for the Catholic Church.
The Synod’s final document did not, as rumored, call for the ordination of women. In fact, on a surface read, the most egregious topics of discussion are either omitted or mentioned in less problematic language. An article appearing on the SSPX News website observed:
We are almost relieved that the final text of the synod avoided the worst. It is a small consolation that should not obscure the fact that this session did, after all, outline a shift, under the control of the bishops, toward a greater supervision of the laity. The session also contemplated a change in the relationship between the Holy See and the local Churches that could ‘eventually upset the current balance of the Catholic Church, which is highly centralized in the Holy See, where many things are decided,’ as noted by the head of Le Figaro’s religion section.[i]
Decentralization of the Church is very much key to understanding not only the document’s goal, but also the lack of consensus of the Synodal Church to address the issues of the Synod itself. All the issues are cloaked in ambiguous language, and the decentralization scheme in the document relies on a fundamental redefinition of who is a member of the Church. The Synod document relies on the concept of The People Of God to determine who is a member of the Church, which is defined as those with a proper baptism. According to this view, the baptized are the people of God,[ii] and the people of God are the Synodal Church.[iii] This includes Protestants.[iv] The membership question is wrapped in ambiguity to allow for conservative Conciliar readings of that definition, as well as for revolutionary readings.
Homosexuality is never explicitly addressed in the final document. Some activists aligned with Fr James Martin, SJ, have expressed concern over the lack of an explicit endorsement of sodomitical relations.[v] Sodomy is a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance, and one that Fr James Martin has a peculiar interest in for a priest. Other pro-Sodomy activists have correctly pointed out that the final text uses the language of inclusion in an ambiguous manner that can and almost certainly will be used to push the envelope of acceptance of sodomitical relationships in the Church. New Ways Ministry, the heretical organization that had been condemned by the US Bishops numerous times since the 1970s until Pope Francis became pen pals with its foundress,[vi] published an article on its website in the aftermath of the Synod making just that case. According to New Ways Ministry:
“A wide array of issues, concrete proposals and even a few truly beautiful sections came to light. It is an imperfect document, and yet, I perceive in it the Catholic faith that has consoled and encouraged me. Pockets of true hope exist in the muddle of jargon and citations. “Here’s the paradox: The assembly envisions a church in which I can see myself, yet the assembly’s vision cannot see me, as a bisexual Catholic, and my queer siblings, in its vision of church. Or, at least, it refused to name us directly in that vision.”[vii]
The document never calls persons active in same-sex sexual relationships to conversion. No mention is made of the necessity to live a chaste life in accordance with the scriptural outline for the laws of God. Instead, the document says the bombshell of decentralization of the Church that includes the People of God, which most Catholics will assume means Catholics, but elsewhere states that membership in The Church only requires baptism.
Decentralization of the Catholic Church is frequently how the new formulation of the hierarchy is envisioned, but as Mr. Morrison notes in his LifeSite News article, back in 2017 the Theological Commission’s study of Synodality exposed the concept of Synodality as an inversion of Catholicism. The hierarchy is, under the Catholic Church, understood in a pyramid form, with the laity at the bottom, priests and bishops making up the body, and the pope at the top of the pyramid. According to The Theological Commission study of 2017, the pyramid is inverted, with the pinnacle of the pyramid now resting on the bottom of the pyramid and the laity at the top.[viii] Mr. Morrison describes the reality of the situation in this way:
For the past three years, Francis and his Synodal architects have tried to persuade the world to accept this “inverted pyramid” as the true model for their Synodal Church. This would not be so problematic if they also made it clear to the world that the Synodal Church is an ape church set up in opposition to the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, though, they have successfully duped many observers into believing that the Catholic Church is the same as the Synodal Church.[ix]
[i] https://fsspx.news/en/news/womens-diaconate-issue-synod-48523?utm_source=SSPX+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=ad88aa4b73-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_02_03_03_48_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-fdc5b5a4cb-%255BLIST_EMAIL_ID%255D&mc_cid=ad88aa4b73&mc_eid=ed7577ebec
[ii] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2024/documents/20241027-omelia-conclusione-sinodo.html#:~:text=Conclusion%20of%20the%20Ordinary%20General,(27%20October%202024)%20%7C%20Francis&text=Today’s%20Gospel%20presents%20us%20with,began%20to%20shout%20after%20him.
[iii] ibid
[iv] This is a point made by Mr Robert Morrison in a piece for LifeSite news. https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/the-synod-on-synodality-is-an-inversion-of-the-true-church/
[v] For some expressions of this disappointment, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/26/vatican-synod-women-deacons-married-priests-lgbtq/
[vi] https://www.newwaysministry.org/2024/10/12/new-ways-ministry-brings-transgender-intersex-ally-catholics-for-dialogue-with-pope-francis/
[vii] https://www.newwaysministry.org/2024/11/09/the-synod-document-failed-lgbtq-people-it-also-includes-the-tools-for-our-inclusion/
[viii]https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20180302_sinodalita_en.html
[ix] https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/the-synod-on-synodality-is-an-inversion-of-the-true-church/
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Justice, Monarchy, Political Theology: Civic Duty in the Middle Ages
By Robert Keim
Did Politics Exist in the Middle Ages?
Politics, understood broadly, is present wherever human beings live and work together. The term derives from Greek polis, meaning “city” or “community,” and suggests “that which pertains to public life.” In the modern West, however, the term “politics” is so strongly associated with democratic elections that we must be careful when projecting it back into the societies of Christendom. For us, “politics” may conjure memories of demagogic, wildly expensive, and sometimes highly unedifying cycle of rallies, debates, interviews, advertisements, and so forth by which candidates persuade ordinary citizens to vote for them. If this is what we call politics, then the answer to the above question is “no”: politics did not exist in the Middle Ages.
Even if we decouple political experience from modern elections, we can still say that for a large portion of the Middle Ages, politics was not a distinct field of study and was not perceived as an independent sphere of human life. Medieval philosophers and theologians saw politics as something akin to what modern thought calls sociology: What is the nature of human society? How should it be structured and governed? What is its purpose? These were “political” questions for medieval culture, and they were thoroughly interwoven with spiritual and ecclesiastical questions.
Scholarship in this field became more recognizably political in the High Middle Ages, after Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics were rediscovered. These treatises were quite different from the book that served as the principal political text in the early Middle Ages—namely, the Bible. During the High Middle Ages, political sociology started to look more like what we might call political science: it was more secular, explored the notion of the State as a governmental entity, and spoke more directly to issues of power, consent, and representation. Nonetheless, politics was still bound up with the authority of the Church, the primacy of justice over absolute power, and the eternal destiny of mankind.
And make no mistake: the era of liberal electoral democracy—in which rights supplant duties, votes supersede doctrines, and rulers answer to citizens rather than to God—was still a long way off.
Justice in Medieval Culture
To fully understand the nature of politics and civic duty in the Middle Ages, we must consider the virtue of justice, to which modernity assigns an increasingly narrow and dubious meaning. Nowadays, justice is prominent in the domain of criminal prosecution and in controversial social movements. In the past, it permeated all of society, functioning as a conceptual aqueduct by which metaphysical, psychological, and pragmatic principles of the highest importance were introduced into the messy business of communal life. Justice is traditionally summarized as “rendering unto others that which is their due,” and if we take this definition to its logical conclusion, we can see why it was the preeminent civic virtue and the very foundation of human society:
[Justice] applied to relationships between individuals and between the individual and the community, regulating these relationships according to the orderly equilibrium of the cosmos and the preconditions of human happiness. If we extend “others” to heavenly beings or to God Himself, justice becomes a spiritual and religious reality that brings the human soul into harmony with divine goodness and transcendent truths.[i]
Continuing the aqueduct analogy, we can imagine justice as a political lifeblood that arrives from on high and sustains the polis as it is distributed, through various channels and means, to every member of the community. Like water, it is a shared resource that flows both vertically, through the social hierarchy, and horizontally, among members of similar social standing. And again like water, people thirst for it, desire it, depend upon it—but don’t always know how to find it.
The notion of “rendering to others their due” is simpler in theory than in practice, and we should ask how justice, understood in terms of civic duty and political authority, actually played out in medieval culture. Since “medieval culture” is shorthand for a large number of related cultures that inhabited all of western Europe over the course of a thousand years, we will answer the question by briefly examining justice in two antecedent cultures—namely, the Roman and the Germanic—from whose convergence medieval civilization emerged.
[i] Robert Keim, “Was Medieval Warfare a ‘Very Great Good’?” https://viamediaevalis.substack.com/p/was-medieval-warfare-a-very-great, 17 Sept. 2024.
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Trump’s Triumph: The Resurgence of Populism and the Fall of the Establishment
Stephen Kokx
A week before this year’s election, I wrote a blog for LifeSite News predicting that Donald Trump was going to win in a landslide. I based my argument on the following ten facts.
The first was that the GOP had increased its number of registered voters in crucial swing states over the past four years. Second, early and mail-in voting trends were giving Republicans significant leads ahead of Election Day. Third, Hispanic and black men — reliably Democratic voting blocs for decades — were unenthused about backing Harris. Fourth, Trump was holding multiple rallies in swing states and even ones he wasn’t likely to win, which suggested his internal data showed he was so far ahead he could be a little risky. Fifth, almost all major polls, even those from liberal organizations, indicated Trump was winning nationally as well as in key battleground states. Sixth, Democrats had no end game; their message was simply that Trump is a fascist, a tactic that implied they knew they were losing. Seventh, multiple Democrats, as well as liberal media personalities, were saying that Trump was connecting with voters and that he even ‘looked presidential’ during the last week of the campaign. Eighth, the betting markets had put Trump as the odds-on favorite to win. Ninth, there was no plausible explanation for a possible steal for Harris as Trump had already made his lead ‘too big to rig.’ Tenth, no ‘October Surprise’ could derail Trump’s campaign, especially with early voting already underway.
It turns out I was right for once. Black men, Hispanics, and white males turned out for Trump in massive numbers. Independents broke his way as well, far more than they did for Biden (allegedly). Harris’ base collapsed, in other words, and Trump capitalized by realigning our politics in such a way that the GOP has become the party of the working class while Democrats are now out of touch with ordinary voters and lacking an identity.
Looking at the numbers
Trump’s victory is difficult to quantify. Nothing like it has ever happened before in American politics, maybe even the world over the last 100 years. He lost his first re-election bid (again, allegedly). Then, he was impeached — twice. After that, he was nearly thrown in jail and then almost assassinated (twice). Richard Nixon can’t hold a candle to what Donald Trump has done.
Trump had been given a mandate to implement his America First agenda. Not only did he win the popular vote, he swept every swing state and surpassed the whopping 74 million votes he obtained in 2020.
What’s telling is that Trump repeated his victory of bellwether counties. A bellwether county is considered to be a reliable predictor of how the rest of the country will vote — a place like Calhoun County, South Carolina or Ottawa County, Ohio, for example. Trump apparently won 15 of 17 bellwether counties this year and was victorious. In 2020, he won 16 of 17 but lost. [i]
Also odd about this year’s election cycle is that despite Trump winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, every Senate GOP candidate in those states was defeated, except Pennsylvania. In other words, voters in those locations pulled the lever for Trump but for some reason voted for a Democrat to represent them in the U.S. Senate. How does that make sense? In Arizona GOP candidate Kari Lake received more votes than Kamala Harris but lost to her Democratic opponent. This is largely unprecedented in recent history and either signals a swing towards Trump’s populist message and a growing disdain for the establishment GOP, or there is something else going on beneath the surface. Either way, I’m not sure we are getting the full story here.
[i] https://x.com/rallynate/status/1854453719414251757
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Leo XIII and the Republics
By Phillip Campbell
The late 19th century was a time of political transformation in Europe. The traditional monarchical order of the West had been upended with the French Revolution of 1789 and its ensuing chaos, and though the crowned heads of Europe had been restored at the Congress of Vienna, republican movements continued agitating for revolution throughout the following decades. The upheavals of 1848, the Italian and German unifications, and the emergence of the anti-clerical Third Republic in France continued to alter the structure of Europe’s states until, by the late 1800s, the continued existence of monarchy was being openly debated in Europe’s intellectual circles.
The Church’s initial experience of republicanism was hostile. As republicanism emerged from the zeitgeist of anti-clericalism espoused by the French revolutionaries, the popes of the early 19th century were understandably wary of republicanism; Gregory XVI’s 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos, for example, equated republicanism with religious indifferentism and moral license while Pius IX—who was once driven out of Rome by republican radicals—quashed all republican movement within the Papal States and condemned the notion that the Church “ought to come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”[i] Gregory XVI and Pius IX equated republicanism with persecution, libertinism, and the guillotine.
By the late 19th century, however, the continued march of republicanism had broadened the discussion. Pope Leo XIII took a more nuanced view than his predecessors, believing that the republican structure of government must be distinguished from the particular principles espoused in a given republic. For Pope Leo, the primary consideration was whether a government respected the Church’s rights to carry out its mission. In his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei on the Christian constitution of states, Pope Leo considered the statements of his predecessors and argued that no particular form of government is condemned, so long as the sphere of the Church’s activity is not circumscribed. Any governmental structure is workable under the right conditions:
The right to rule is not necessarily, however, bound up with any special mode of government. It may take this or that form, provided only that it be of a nature of the government, rulers must ever bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world…if judged dispassionately, no one of the several forms of government is in itself condemned, inasmuch as none of them contains anything contrary to Catholic doctrine, and all of them are capable, if wisely and justly managed, to insure the welfare of the State. Neither is it blameworthy in itself, in any manner, for the people to have a share greater or less, in the government: for at certain times, and under certain laws, such participation may not only be of benefit to the citizens, but may even be of obligation.[ii]
To understand how Leo applied this policy in practice, we will briefly examine his relationships with two particular republics during his long pontificate: France and the United States.
France
Leo XIII held the chair of Peter from 1878 to 1903. During this time France was under the governance of the Third Republic, ushered in following the fall of the Second Empire after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The Third Republic had a distinctively anti-clerical orientation, largely due to strong royalist sympathies among the clergy which made them suspect in the eyes of the state. A series of laws throughout the 1880s restricted clerical influence in education and the military, culminating in the Law of Associations (1901), which gave the state authority to liquidate religious orders, resulting in the closure of thousands of Catholic schools, confiscation of assets, and expulsion of religious communities from France. A law of separation of church and state followed in 1905, entirely secularizing French society.
[i] Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, 17-19; Syllabus of Errors, 80. See also Emiliana P. Noether, “Roman Republic,” Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions, available online at https://sites.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/romanrep.htm
[ii] Leo XIII, Immortale Dei 4, 36
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