Cardinal Walter Brandmüller has put his finger on precisely the problem with “synodality”. The issue is not whether bishops should listen to priests and laity, of course they should. The real issue is whether consultation is quietly being transformed into co-government. Brandmüller, one of the Church’s most distinguished historians, argues that a Catholic synod has traditionally been an assembly of bishops exercising the magisterial and pastoral ministry they possess by virtue of Holy Orders. What concerns him about the new model is the introduction of structures in which bishops, clergy and laity increasingly appear as participants with an equal voice, resembling democratic or Protestant ecclesial structures, but the Catholic Church is not a parliament. Episcopal authority belongs to the sacramental and hierarchical constitution Christ gave His Church. So lay consultation *can* therefore be thoroughly Catholic, but lay co-government is another matter entirely! And Cardinal Brandmüller identifies the deeper danger: secularisation. Once we begin imagining the Church primarily through the categories of representation, participation, equality and institutional process, we risk forgetting what the Church actually claims to be: not merely a human organisation, but a supernatural society constituted by Christ. That is why the endless inability to define precisely what “synodality” means is no trivial semantic problem. Before restructuring the Church around a concept, surely Catholics are entitled to ask exactly what that concept means. thecatholicherald.com/articl…

Continuing to deny the reality of evil in general, undeserved suffering in particular, in the face of what encroaches in one’s own life betrays a hysteria to keep the world ordered at all cost.  --Cyril O'Regan hubs.la/Q04wVDLs0

“It’s Time to Clean the Stables”: Dr Larry Chapp’s Warning to Pope Leo XIV as we talk about just how bad "Synodality" is! youtu.be/wesDxp8e0fQ?si=G-eO… via @YouTube