Opinion
Featured Image
Bishop Marian Eleganti

(LifeSiteNews) — The following essay is by Swiss Bishop Marian Eleganti, who served as an auxiliary bishop of Chur from 2010 to 2021. In this presentation, Bishop Eleganti takes aim at the Synod on Synodality, asserting that it is not about establishing a “new modus operandi for the Church” but presenting “for the umpteenth time” the doctrinal innovations long desired by “inner-Church” politicians. After condemning the scandal of predatory homosexuality amongst the clergy, he likens the ongoing synodal processes to the COVID inoculations, writing that they “act as carriers that transport the harmful substances or heresies and are toxic themselves.”  

The alleged Synod on Synodality 

The Church has not been on the wrong track for 2000 years to be enlightened and corrected in our days by a synodal process in the 21st century. For that, we need neither a third Vatican Council nor a slimmed-down substitute event called the “Synod on Synodality.” 

I thought, as the title says, that the topic to be discussed would be “synodality” as a supposed new modus operandi of the Church. But no: instead, it is again about the same synodal leftovers warmed up for the umpteenth time since the ‘70s: democracy, participation, involvement in power, women in all offices and the diaconate of women or priesthood of women; revision of sexual morality regarding extramarital sex, remarriage, and homosexuality: doing away with priest-centeredness in liturgy, etc. We all know this.

The repeated proposals are poured over and over into new bottles on which the labels “Listening,” “Inclusivity,” “Welcoming,” “Diversity,” [and] “Equality” are now pasted into a kind of marketing campaign that sells yesterday’s produce as fresh and sells it politely to the man or woman. They are all nice-sounding, emotionally positive terms, but they are empty phrases in relation to the truth or correctness of a position that is at stake. When it comes to theft and speeding, we are exclusive. Apparently, it is only in doctrine that we must not be. 

Besides, in the Gospel and the words of Jesus, there is clearly “exclusivity.” There people are excluded from the wedding hall or are thrown out of it to a place where weeping and gnashing of teeth prevail. These are the words of Jesus.  

I would remind them of Matthew 25 (the Final Judgment). Now God is sold to us as the all-inclusive love which approves everything and blesses what people do because all are children of God. Such a God ceases to be the Truth and Justice which are often exclusive, excluding error, and sin, and those who do not refrain from the latter. At least, this is what Jesus says. But they do not stop even before Him. 

Apart from that, the synods since 2014 have also brought the aforementioned issues into play, and the majority of them have been badly negotiated, which is why they are being put back on the grill again until they are finally eaten [Translator’s note: a German-language idiom]. 

This has nothing to do with a Spirit-filled process of reform. It is nothing else than the inner-Church politicization of these topics in contrast to the discernment of the Spirit, which is not even being undertaken in this regard or has already been undertaken and concluded, e.g. in the question of women’s priesthood. Otherwise, one would have to reject positions that obviously contradict Church teaching and tradition and not continue to promote them. That would be real discernment. Discerning, however, only appears to happen because the agendas have been set from the beginning (cf. The Synodal Way in Germany and its bad copies in other countries such as Switzerland) and are now to be advanced universally and the opposition is to be softened after a long so-called reform backlog under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Any child can see this. 

The hypocrisy is boundless. For 60 years I have been experiencing and hearing only old familiar things ad nauseam in this regard because things get neither better nor more convincing by repetition. What have been perfected are sophistry and semantics. [Bishop] Bätzing has become exceptionally good at this. The wrong ones are dismissed. The Rock of Peter is a shifting dune that goes along (syn-odos), hardly at all or hesitantly but does not really create clarity. And that clarity that his predecessors and the previous ecumenical councils created is no longer accepted. This is also true for texts of the Second Vatican Council, e.g. on the priesthood and the episcopate. Instead, one pretends that this continues to be a matter of doctrinally open questions. 

RELATED: Top Synod cardinal calls for ‘change of cultural paradigm’ on homosexuality in latest scandalous remarks

We have forgotten that the Church is a “teaching” Church (ecclesia docens), a “mater et magistra,” “mother and teacher” of truth and morality or faith, not a sleepwalker to be taken by the hand by the spirit of the age. She has always been led by the Holy Spirit through the times and does not contradict herself in her teaching, e.g. in the judgment of homosexuality, a great evil in the clergy of the last 50 years, which is still not tackled but all the more successfully covered up, including at the very top in the Vatican. Although all studies have shown that the majority of sexual assaults in the clergy have homosexual connotations, the scandal is “framed” and “glossed over” with the term “clericalism” or “abuse of power.” The latter (abuse of power) is, of course, also in play, but only a necessary, but not a sufficient, explanation for the phenomenon of the predominantly male victims of the clergy, who, in contrast to general civil society, are in the majority not children or girls, but rather adolescent males or young adult men. 

They look the other way and, together with secular society, they try to establish and approve homosexuality also within the Church as a variant of creation willed by God. Even more women in Church leadership positions will not fix [the problem]. They are not more innocent beings than men (cf. the doctrine of Original Sin) and should not see themselves as a cure for every evil in the Church or be presented as such, only to abolish the priesthood reserved for men and promise a Church supposedly purified of clericalism, a sheer illusion. 

The secular world and its customs are definitely not a source of revelation through which the Spirit of God speaks to us, as is claimed. For between the spirit of the world and the spirit of God there is enmity and little intersection, as [St.] Paul and [St.] John explain clearly. 

The teaching of the Church is unchangeable because it is true, e.g. about the binary, sacramental marriage between a man and a woman. It cannot be overturned by the deception of a footnote. 

Innovations in doctrine are not to be expected, but they are to be expected in the communication of the faith. Historically, such innovations in the faith were always heresies that led to new divisions (cf. Protestantism). It is the same today. Important councils, such as Trent, have reacted to false doctrines and provided clarity, whereas nowadays synodal processes, like the nanoparticles in mRNA vaccines, act as carriers that transport the harmful substances or heresies and are toxic themselves. 

When will there be an apology from the Vatican for the abuse of power in regard to the compulsory vaccination and vaccination propaganda, which propagated vaccinations as a moral duty in contradiction to its own agency, although today, visible to all and also well documented for the informed, they could neither prevent the transmission of the virus nor the infection by the same, which was known by the Pfizer C.E.O., who was received with prominence by the Pope? The division of society and the discrimination against the unvaccinated, including by the Church and the Vatican (right to bodily integrity and fair employment conditions), is an open topic, and the role of the Vatican thereby lately an inglorious and fatal one. Silence does not help. 

Come Holy Spirit! I do not expect anything good from the coming synod, wrongly titled “On Synodality.” I just don’t trust it anymore. The confusion that the Synods have already instigated since 2014 is unmistakable and makes me pessimistic about the discernment of the Spirit at these events. The spirits that have been called are, as can be seen in Germany, as difficult to tame as a crocodile can be made into a pet. Why? Because they do not come from God. To constantly talk about the Holy Spirit and to claim Him for yourself is nothing else than propaganda and (self)deception and basically an instrumentalization of God. I do not do that; I simply give my opinion here. 

The text by Bishop Marian Eleganti was originally written in German and then translated, with his permission, by LifeSiteNews. 

16 Comments

    Loading...