To vary Oscar Wilde, the Church’s liturgical life often imitates art by being strikingly appropriate to a particular moment. That was certainly true on Monday of the Third Week of Lent, 2023—a day when the Scriptures of the eucharistic liturgy invite us to ponder the greatest of the capital sins, pride, through the story of Naaman, the Syrian general, and Jesus’s confrontation with his fellow Nazarenes. This year, Monday of Lent III immediately followed the concluding meeting of the German “Synodal Way.” And while there are many reasons why institutional German Catholicism is hurtling into apostasy, and may go off the cliff into schism, pride is one of them.
