Posted on 08/09/2023 6:03:32 PM PDT by ebb tide
The symbolic image of the synod on synodality, convened in plenary session this October, is a tent that is enlarged. To finally “welcome and accompany” even those who “do not feel accepted in the Church.”
And who are the first on the list of these excluded, in the “Instrumentum laboris,” the document that acts as a guide for the synod? “The divorced and remarried, people in polygamous marriages, or LGBTQ+ Catholics.”
For years now in the Church these human typologies have been at the center of discussion. In Germany they have comprised a whole autochthonous “synodal way,” with the stated aim of revolutionizing the Church’s doctrine on sexuality.
But the resistance to this tendency is also strong, in those who see it as a surrender to the spirit of the time, which brings into question the very foundations of the Christian faith.
The contribution that follows is on this critical side. It was offered for publication on Settimo Cielo by the Swiss theologian Martin Grichting, former vicar general of the diocese of Chur.
Who closes his reflection by quoting Blaise Pascal in his polemic with the Jesuits of his time. They are pages, he writes, “that comfort us even in the current situation.”
*
THE CHURCH AND “INCLUSION”
by Martin Grichting
The “Instrumentum laboris” (IL) of the Synod of Bishops on synodality puts the Church under accusation on account of the fact that some – it says – “do not feel accepted” by it, “such as the divorced and remarried, people in polygamous marriages, or LGBTQ+ Catholics;” (IL, B 1.2).
And it asks: “How can we create spaces where those who feel hurt by the Church and unwelcomed by the
community feel recognised, received, free to ask questions and not judged? In the light of the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, what concrete steps are needed to welcome those who feel excluded from the Church because of their status or sexuality (for example, remarried divorcees, people in polygamous marriages, LGBTQ+ people, etc.)?”
So it is the Church itself, it insinuates, that is responsible for the fact that such people feel “hurt,” “excluded,” or “unwelcomed.” But what does the Church do? It does not teach anything of its own invention, but proclaims what it has received from God. So if people feel “hurt,” “excluded,” or “unwelcomed” by the central contents of the Church’s teachings on faith and morals, then they feel “hurt,” “excluded,” or “unwelcomed” by God. Because his word establishes that marriage is made up of a man and a woman and that the marriage bond is indissoluble. And his word has established that homosexuality lived and practiced is sin.
However, it is clear that the organizers of the synod do not want to say this in a manner so clear. For this reason they take aim at the Church and try to drive a wedge between it and God. If God, in fact, accepts everyone, it is the Church that excludes. Yet Jesus Christ said: “And whosoever shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he were cast into the sea” (Mk 9:42). It is curious that the synodal leaders seem to have forgotten this non-inclusive word of Jesus. And so it seems that it is only the Church that “hurts” people and makes them feel “not welcome” or “unwelcomed.”
However, this thesis has grave consequences. If for two thousand years the Church has behaved in a manner fundamentally different from the will of God on essential questions of doctrine on faith and morals, it can no longer elicit faith on any question. Because then what is still certain?
What the IL suggests dismantles the whole Church. But this also raises the question of God. How can one think that God would create the Church – the body of Christ living in this world, to which God gives his Spirit of truth as assistance – when at the same time he has let this same Church and millions of believers lose their way on essential issues for two thousand years? How could one still believe in a Church of this kind? If it is so constituted, isn’t everything it says provisional, reversible, erroneous, and therefore irrelevant?
But is the Church actually “exclusive,” that is, excluding, in the way it has behaved for two thousand years on the questions raised? No, for two thousand years it has lived inclusion. Otherwise today it would not be widespread throughout the world and today would not comprise 1.3 billion believers. But the Church’s tools of inclusion are not – as the IL claims – the “recognition” or “non-judgment” of that which contradicts God’s commandments. The “tools” with which the Church includes are the catechumenate and baptism, conversion and the sacrament of penance. For this reason the Church speaks of God’s commandments and the moral law, of sin, of the sacrament of penance, of chastity, of holiness and of the vocation to eternal life. These are all concepts that are not found in the 70 pages of the IL.
Of course, the words “repentance” (2 times) and “conversion” (13 times) are found in the IL. But if one takes into account the respective context, one notices that these two terms in the IL almost never refer to man’s turning away from sin, but signify a structural action, that is, of the Church. It is not the sinner who must repent and convert; no, it is the Church that must convert – “synodally” – to the “recognition” of those who profess that they do not want to follow its teachings and therefore God.
The fact that the directors of the synod no longer talk about sin, repentance, and the conversion of sinners leads one to think that they now believe they have found another way to take away the sin of the world. All this recalls the events described by Blaise Pascal, born precisely 400 years ago, in his “Provincials” (Les Provinciales, 1656/1657). In them Pascal addresses the Jesuit moral theology of his time, which undermined the moral teachings of the Church with a casuistry made up of sophisms, almost to the point of turning them into their opposite. In his Fourth Letter, he cites a critic of Etienne Bauny who said of this Jesuit: “Ecce qui tollit peccata mundi,” behold him who takes away the sins of the world, to the point of making their existence disappear with his sophisms. These aberrations of the Jesuits were later condemned repeatedly by the ecclesiastical magisterium. Because they are certainly not the ones who take away the sin of the world. It is the Lamb of God. And so it is also today, for the faith of the Church.
For Blaise Pascal, the way in which deception and manipulation took place in the Church had something about it that was frightening, and therefore also violent. In his Twelfth Letter he left to us lines that comfort us even in the current situation:
“When force meets force, the weaker must succumb to the stronger; when argument is opposed to argument, the solid and the convincing triumphs over the empty and the false; but violence and verity can make no impression on each other. Let none suppose, however, that the two are, therefore, equal to each other; for there is this vast difference between them, that violence has only a certain course to run, limited by the appointment of Heaven, which overrules its effects to the glory of the truth which it assails; whereas verity endures forever and eventually triumphs over its enemies, being eternal and almighty as God himself.”
Ping
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