Synodalism Marches On: Martyrs Need Not Apply

Martyrs are now passé—for the Synodalist Church, that is. 

Martyrs spilled their blood for Truth come down from Heaven. For the Synodalist, there is no truth, only transactional process.

Who would die for that?

For the Synodalist, truth is an antediluvian embarrassment—and so are martyrs.

To the chagrin of faithful Catholics, the Synodal Church marches forward. Any religion worth its salt cringes at the sandbox therapeutics of this comedy parading as Catholicism.

Our one consolation is that its only appeal lay in the tony salons of the outré theological gentry. They pride themselves as standing aloof from the smelly Catholic hoi polloi who still clutch their rosaries and prayer books, standing on confessional lines in heartfelt contrition. Synodalists and their fellow travelers such as America, The National Catholic Reporter, and the elite Catholic universities have been birthing a New Christianity, one not shackled to a spent millennial past. These Bright Young Things (forgive me, Mr. Waugh) are no longer victims to a literal Gospel which takes God at His word. Part of their sparkle is a proud new revision of the Gospel page, unimpeded by the rude objectivity of the past.

Salt of the earth Catholics find these exercises bewildering, to say nothing of deeply offensive. But, of course, they are the Voiceless in an apparent time of breathless games of Synodal Listening. George Orwell is instructive here, when, in Animal Farm, he memorably writes, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The snooty insouciance of the Synodalist Elites find the common Catholic rather amusing—each one blinded by something called Supernatural Faith to which they pathetically cling like starving prisoners clutching their crusts of bread.

Still, because the Synodalist apparatchiks enjoy the official approbation of the hierarchical Church, many an unsuspecting Catholic will be unsettled. Add to this the current reigning fog of muted doctrinal clarity and carefully designed moral ambiguity and we see how Synodality compounds the unsteady gait of many a faithful Catholic.

The Synodalist agenda becomes more and more hallucinatory with each passing iteration. Thinking men look at this exercise as juvenile, unbefitting a once mighty institution as the Catholic Church. This brand of prattle more befits padded rooms than the hallowed corridors of the Vatican Palace. Take a moment and sample the indigestible theological newspeak of Sr. Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ, Undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops:

Synodality is not a program to be implemented, not a project with a 2028 deadline, not one more meeting. It is about our deep identity as church, rooted in the mystery of the Trinity. It is not about being another church but about being the church in a different way—to move from one culture to another: from a culture of clericalism, hierarchicalism and institutional self-sufficiency to a culture of listening, co-responsibility, discernment and genuine exchange.

Notice the clever manipulation: weaving classic Catholic vocabulary (e.g., the Trinity) with destabilizing antinomian insertions. The net result is a Catholicism so porous that it bears little resemblance to the Church God founded.

This is a New Church, where apodictic declarations of Faith are tagged with the old charge of anathema. It is a Church where certainty is viewed as weakness and ambivalence is rewarded as trailblazing. In the world of Synodality, morality is unhinged from objective truth, resulting in a bonhomie much more preferable than brittle moral absolutes. 

In a Church of such a breezy laissez-faire credo, any viewpoint is embraced except one of ironclad moral and doctrinal certitude. In a Church such as this, the saints and martyrs of the millennia have no place.

After all, what sane man would die for “accompaniment.”

What place would St. Isaac Jogues and his companions have in such a Church? They suffered sadistic martyrdoms because they knew the Huron and Iroquois religions were false and only the saving waters of the Church’s grace would relieve the burden of their paganism. Modern churchmen would consider this sacrifice embarrassing and unnecessary. If every religion is a path to God, then these heroic martyrs died in vain. Their sacrifice would be seen by Sr. Nathalie Becquart and her Synodalist fellow travelers as quaint and quite unnecessary, standing in the way of the Spirit blowing where He will.

What place for a St. Athanasius who stood contra mundum for the sake of an unchanging Faith? For the Synodalist this would be a rigid clinging to an unwelcome discussion better left to each according to his inner light. This great Saint suffered exile four times and an alleged excommunication by Pope Liberius. For the Synodalist, this whole Athanasian episode was an embarrassing kerfuffle—time wasted over theological irrelevancies which only stood in the way of ongoing “genuine exchange” and more libations of listening.

The heroic martyrs of Elizabethan England? Why did they die at all? The newest Archbishop of Westminster welcomed Dame Sarah Mullally, so-called Archbishop of Canterbury (she, that champion of abortion and various LGBTQ+ enthusiasms) with the welcome arms of an old friend. This is Madame Mullally, who claims the throne of a heretical church for which thousands of English martyrs surrendered their lives in undying fidelity to the True Church.

Why, then, their sacrifice? Why, then, their brutalizing sufferings? Were they deluded? Did the modern Synodalist credo of “live and let live” escape them? Were they, indeed, the guilty parties for dying, giving the wrong impressions that all religions are not equal? Couldn’t their grisly deaths have been avoided if they only grasped a “culture of listening”? Are we now to register embarrassment at the heroic testimony of Sts. John Fisher, Thomas More, Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and hundreds of other heroic souls? Are they rather guilty of sin for resisting the heresy of Elizabeth and Henry rather than entering into a more sensible mode of engagement?

What of Sts. Agnes, Cecilia, and Agatha? All submitted to the monstrous tortures of official Rome rather than give incense to the Roman gods. Doesn’t their sacrifice seem terribly unnecessary as groups of South American bishops participate in ceremonies honoring Pachamama? In the logic of Synodality, they must be accused of error for not leaving well-meaning pagan Romans alone to the noble lights of their own path of authenticity?

What of the insolence of St. Polycarp, who shouted to Marcion the harangue, “You, Marcion, the first born of Satan!” Wasn’t this diatribe of St. Polycarp against the gnostic Marcion the sin of “institutional self-sufficiency” and the violation of the “grammar of peace”?

What of the Ugandan martyrs, relegated to bestial tortures because they would not submit to the illicit and unnatural advances of their king? Weren’t they laboring beneath an overly literalist interpretation of the moral law? Or, in the words of one prominent Jesuit editor, weren’t they the victims of a pathetic incomprehension that same-sex attraction is not immoral at all, “not an intrinsically disordered act, but rather a merely differently ordered act”? If these noble Ugandans had only had the wise counsel of this Jesuit priest, they could have avoided terribly ghastly deaths.

Or what of St. Louis IX of France, who traveled to the Holy Land to wrest the holy places from the death grip of Islam? Or St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade from the field of Vezelay in 1146 because he recognized the worthy cause of protecting Catholic Europe from the scourge of Islam? Or St. Pope Pius V, who rallied the armies of Catholic Europe to defeat Islam at Lepanto? 

Were all these benighted fools to be pitied because they did not appreciate the Synodalist vison of “only friends, not enemies”? Do they deserve our pity as we watch clerics stumbling over themselves for a single passing nod of approval from Islamic mullahs?

Synodalism is nothing more than the rapid unraveling of the salvific Faith that the Word Incarnate brought “for us men and for our salvation.”

It certainly has no room for martyrs.

Or for Catholics like us.