The liberal and flawed roots of tiresome synodal grievances

One of the things I have learned in my 65 years of being a Catholic is that the meaning of the term “Church reform” in the post-Vatican II era is almost always a cognate for “liberalization”. Why this is so and how it came to be this way is a story too complex to rehearse here. But it is sufficient to simply note this fact with an eye toward its ongoing significance for our “new way of being Church” in our brave new era of “synodal listening”.

Nor do we need to spend time here analyzing the typical laundry list of issues that the so-called reformers wish to address. From women’s ordination to contraception to LGBTQ everything, the central intellectual impulses are all the same: what the Church has taught for centuries has been wrong, or at least wrong now for our “times”, and needs to be changed in deeply constitutive ways to fit into our “new cultural paradigm”.

Left unarticulated and largely ignored in this avalanche of Newspeak verbiage is just how expressive the Catholic iteration of liberal modernity is to the central thesis that animates all of the variegated versions of modernity. This is what I call the “teleology of transgression,” wherein all that came before via the pathways of culture and tradition are recast as oppressive restrictions on our freedom from which we now need to liberate ourselves. Thus, all that came before, especially in the moral, spiritual and religious domain, must be erased entirely if one is a pure secularist, or must be simply redefined and reshaped, if one wishes to retain some religious identity, in order to conform to the new ordo of liberative transgression.

The late Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce (1910-1989) recognized this aspect of liberal modernity long ago and noted that the central dogma of this new regime of corrosion can be encapsulated in the phrase, so often heard in the halls of the liberal academy, “Today one can no longer believe … (fill in the blank with whatever is to be erased)”. What is being expressed by modernity in such forms of thinking is not so much a well thought out program for the future so much as a mere assertion that we must never “go back” to a society rooted in the sense of the sacred. In this sense we are all, once again, Marxists—insofar as culture and reason are now viewed as subsets of politics, and not as things given to us by God and are thus metaphysically prior to the State and thus have an independent status from the State.

And for del Noce, this is, once again, the very essence of the Totalitarian spirit. The universality and normativity of reason are lost in such a view since everything is viewed through the lens of this narrative of liberation from everything that came before … including the normativity of nature itself as the modern world rebels against the last constraint of all… the form of our own biology.

And del Noce further notes that this spirit of transgression is linked at the hip to the idolatry of science and materialistic reductionism. He observes there is a direct connection between our culture’s subservience to scientism and the gods of a false eroticism devoid of the binding connections of love. It is not without reason that ours is now a pornified culture that really is much more than a moral weakness that indulges the vice of lust. It also bespeaks an entire anthropology and philosophy about the spiritual significance of all of our bodily desires. But more than that even, since we are a unity of body and spirit, the pornification of our culture is also expressive of a deep deficit of meaning in absolutely everything that we do. In other words, pornography isn’t really about “dirty pictures” but stands instead as the chief sacrament in our enchanted world of Matter and Mammon. Therefore, as del Noce concludes in The Crisis of Modernity, the entire sexual revolution is really an expression of the deep philosophical principles that govern modernity and that “an enormous cultural revision will be necessary in order to really leave behind the philosophical processes that have found expression in today’s sexual revolution.”

It is no accident that the Catholic modernizers are obsessed with the erotic realm. One implication of all of this is that for those who swim in such waters, the psychological coin of the realm is a state of perpetual grievance and moral outrage. Everything is now read through the filtering lens of a fractious kind of perpetual grievance toward a vague sense of “what has been”, and which is therefore really rather undifferentiated in its focus and stands instead as a kind of existential “posture” that is simply constantly angry at everything. And, in most cases, anger toward anything that stands in the way of erotic fulfillment.

We saw this entire transgressive dynamic once again on display this past week when one of the extra-synodal committees established by Pope Francis to look at various hot-button issues in the Church issued a preliminary report on its proceedings just as the Synod on synodality was beginning. Once again, the reporting of Jonathan Liedl at The National Catholic Register, has brought this to our attention and helped us to connect the dots. As Liedl notes, the committee reports that going forward moral theology must be reformed in a manner that moves away from concepts of moral absolutes and the objective truths of certain moral laws, and toward a “new paradigm” that focuses instead on subjective dispositions and the vagaries of “experience” and individuated “circumstances”.

Liedl quotes the press release as follows: “Ethically speaking, it is not a matter of applying pre-packaged objective truth to the different subjective situations, as if they were mere particular cases of an immutable and universal law,” … “The criteria of discernment arise from listening to the [living] self-gift of Revelation in Jesus in the today of the Spirit.”

Even beyond the cringe inducing use of the phrase “in the today of the Spirit”, this is paradigmatic expression of the moral theory known as proportionalism. And it stands in a direct line of opposition to the teaching of Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (see pars 71-75), not to mention the entirety of the Catholic natural law moral tradition, both of which do indeed speak of moral absolutes and of the binding nature of moral truth on our consciences. And as an expression of opposition to what has come before in the Tradition–a “before” it clearly seeks to erase and transgress–it is a foundationally uncatholic stance vis-à-vis the normativity of Revelation as expressed in Scripture and Tradition. Revelation itself now becomes part of the oppressive past insofar as it gives us a “pre-set pattern of answers that illegitimately imposes itself on our idiosyncratic freedom” and must be recast instead as part of the plasticity of historicity and subjectivity.

And, of course, if one opposes such proposals, one is accused of “opposing needed reforms” as if reform can only go in the direction of liberal modernity. We see this posture as well in the various reactions to the report from the committee devoted to the issue of ordaining women to the diaconate. Cardinal Fernandez, in issuing the report, made it clear that the stance of Pope Francis is that ordaining women to the sacramental diaconate is not going to happen. But, on cue, this elicited the usual condemnations that it represents yet another insult to women, and that it will perpetuate the ongoing disenfranchisement of women, as well as their marginalization in the Church as second-class citizens.

Leaving aside the particulars of that debate, the salient feature here is that in both instances–moral theology and the ordination of women–the expectation of so many synodal enthusiasts is one of transgressive change. The overall tonality is one of perpetual grievance at an institution whose very identity resides in the preservation and transmission of God’s Revelation in Christ, for precisely doing just that. And please do not tell me that I am begging the question here since the very issue is whether such “reforms” are in fact out of sync with Revelation. Because if the putative reformers are correct then what they are really saying is that “today it is no longer possible to believe…” in a manner that makes it clear that the entire edifice of Catholic teaching is not up for grabs.

In other words, this is not really a focus on this or that particular “issue” considered in the light of Scripture and Tradition, but is instead a focus on radically reconfiguring what Scripture and Tradition mean in the first place. This reconfiguring is to be done from within the spirit of grievance from the perspective of those who are allegedly aggrieved.

Too many synodal enthusiasts are proceeding with a concept of the Church as a joyless landscape of oppressive structures and teachings that must be deconstructed and replaced with something more in keeping with the liberative praxis of secular liberalism. The goal is negation via transgression and the chosen pathway to this goal is the manicured and curated pristination of nonsense.

By way of contrast, I attended a diaconal ordination here in Rome the other day at St. Peter’s Basilica. Only men were being ordained, of course, and they were being ordained by a man of dreaded and oppressive hierarchical status in a building representative of the patriarchal hegemony of the Church down through the ages. The liturgical trappings, from the music to the vestments, were Roman/medieval and contained not a single hint of the rainbow religion of sexual inversion. Oh, the horror of it all!

And yet, somehow, despite such egregious affronts to the decorous rubrics of modernity, the prevailing ethos throughout was not transgressive grievance, but unalloyed joy. The joy of being Catholic. The joy of participating in things ancient yet somehow, and for that very reason, new in an evergreen way. The joy of friends, relatives and teachers who saw in these young men examples of heroic Christian idealism and sacrifice. The joy of seeing the true liberation caused by the eschatological in-breaking of eternity, for however brief a moment, through the ancient practice of the laying on of hands. The joy of fellowship in Christ the Lord who comes to us in word and sacrament in a manner that liberates our freedom precisely by binding it to the Truth of God.

Only adolescents live in a world of perpetual grievance where all “rules” are viewed as impositions on a freedom construed as the ability to do whatever one damn well pleases. Only adolescents rebel against all that came before in the mistaken notion that the world is now to be reinvented for the sake of their personal fulfillment. Only adolescents kick against the goad of the past in order to open up a future that, strangely, still ends up eventually looking like the past.

Joy. Joy is what the Church needs more of these days. And less grievance. Less transgression. Less adolescent petulance and more adult sobriety.

In the diaconal ordination, there is a point where the archbishop hands the newly ordained a copy of the Gospels and says to each:

Believe what you read.
Teach what you believe
Live what you teach.

Amen. Perhaps someday we can have a Synod devoted to those ideas. Perhaps this is all true reform actually means or has ever meant. And perhaps it is the only real source of true Christian joy. Perhaps.

Catholic World Report