When the Synod on Synodality opened, a question arose: Is the Holy Spirit there? The organizers don’t doubt it for a second, like Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod, in the editorial of the last issue of the review Theologia.
“It is the very serious matter of a synod to which all the Church is summoned at different levels, with the aim of involving the greatest possible number of the baptized, in order to listen to their voice and to recognize in it and through it the voice of the Holy Spirit” (p. 4).
Shrewd observers, like Stefano Fontana in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana of July 10, are more skeptical. For they note that “all contributes to strengthening the suspicion of a planned direction, as was the case for the synod on the family,” where civilly remarried divorced people were given permission to receive Communion on a case-by-case basis.
On this point, we recall the admission of Bruno Forte, Special Secretary of the two Synods on the Family. He admitted that the Pope had said to him, “If we speak explicitly about Communion for the divorced and remarried, you cannot imagine the ‘mess’ that they [the rigid traditionalists] will make of it. So we won’t speak of it directly; ensure that the premises are there, then I myself will draw the conclusions.” –Draw the conclusions, or in more concrete terms: pull the strings, for those in charge of the Synod are like puppet masters.
Consequently, Stefano Fontano was indignant: “How is it possible to nominate his supporters, according to political criteria, all while claiming that their words must be considered the voice of the Holy Spirit? Can the Holy Spirit breathe without communicating His gifts of wisdom, knowledge, and fear of the Lord? Does the practice of planned appointments truly express wisdom, knowledge, and fear of the Lord?”
In an address on synodality on October 17, 2015, Pope Francis affirmed: “The sensus fidei [sense of the Faith] prevents a rigid separation between Ecclesia docens [the Church, teacher of bishops] and Ecclesia discens [the Church, as taught to the priests and the faithful], for the flock also possesses its own intuition for discerning the new paths that the Lord opens to the Church.”
In this case, why manipulate the synodal fathers in view of obtaining the desired results? And why establish in advance how the flock must express its “intuition,” in the desired sense? As if the sheep must not have sensed so much as submitted.
Subtle steering, manipulation, Jesuit maneuvers…, this Synod, like its precedents, brings to mind the words of a French nursery rhyme that we sing to children to send them off to sleep:
Thus they do, do, do, the little puppets.
Thus they make, make, make, three small turns and then they’re off.
But it is dangerous to take the children of the good God for docile puppets.
The following is an editorial by Fr. Alain Lorans, SSPX.