Müller: Synodal mea culpas, a litany of woke indoctrination

“At the beginning of the synod on synodality, which is no longer a synod of bishops alone, but a mixed assembly that does not even represent the entire Catholic Church, there will be a penitential celebration culminating in repentance for sins that have just been invented (by men!).” This is how Cardinal Gerhard Müller commented to kath.net on the initiative of the Penitential Vigil on 1 October, announced by the Secretariat of the Synod.

The Vigil which punctually took place (see here), confirming the cardinal's analysis, with a plethora of logorrhoeic ‘requests for forgiveness’, which must have deafened even the ears of the Eternal Father. The testimony of an abuse victim unheard for years (no, it was not the sisters abused by Rupnik), a prosopopoeia for the NGOs saving lives in the Mediterranean, a reflection by a consecrated woman from the community that was Father Paolo Dall'Oglio's, S.I.

Then the parade of cardinals: Czerny asking for forgiveness ‘for having transformed creation from a garden into a desert’, for discrimination ‘against indigenous peoples’, for the ‘globalisation of indifference’ in the face of the tragedies of the migratory phenomenon; O'Malley for sexual abuse (perhaps the only real sin, as well as a canonical crime, on the list); Farrell for the sin against the dignity of women and their exploitation ‘especially in consecrated life’ (sic! ), for all the times ‘that we have judged and condemned before caring for the fragility and wounds of the family’. Farrell's allusions become even more explicit when he asks for forgiveness for ‘having stolen hope and love from the younger generations, when we have failed to understand the delicacy of the passages of growth, of the stages of identity formation’ and for the use ‘of the death penalty’, which by now seems to have become a sin regardless.

López Romero's plea for forgiveness ‘for having turned our heads away from the sacrament of the poor, preferring to adorn ourselves and the altar with guilty preciosities that take bread away from the hungry’ was disarmingly good-natured; nor could we fail to mention the preference to remain ‘within our ecclesial spaces, sick with self-referentiality, resisting going out, neglecting the mission in the geographical and existential peripheries’. Then it is Fernández’s turn, who asks forgiveness for all the times we have not been able to proclaim the Gospel as ‘a living source of eternal newness, perhaps indoctrinating it and risking reducing it to a pile of dead stones to be thrown at others’; and for when ‘we have given doctrinal justifications for inhuman treatment’. Schönborn closes his ideological litany with a mea culpa ‘for the obstacles we put in the way of a truly synodal, symphonic church [...], preferring to listen to ourselves, defending opinions and ideologies that hurt communion’, and for having ‘stifled plurality’.

Invocations for forgiveness, which the Pope, shortly afterwards, in his speech, claimed as his ideas; ideas that ooze with sick ideology, sins, as Müller rightly said, that are the fruit of men's imagination, like the idols that inspired their ‘repentance’: immigrationism, environmentalism, pauperism, etc. Ideologies indeed, which also reveal the hypocrisy of those who point the finger at the embellishment of the altars, but then get photographed, notes Müller, together with ‘billionaire oligarchs or “philanthropists” who first shamelessly exploit the great masses of the people and then are celebrated as their benefactors with a few alms’.

Far from being a genuine plea for forgiveness, ‘the proposed catalogue of alleged sins against Church doctrine, misused as a missile, or against synodality, whatever is meant by that, appears to be a checklist of Christianly ill-concealed woke and gender ideology’, ‘theologically absurd inventions of the synodal “agitators”’, interspersed with real sins, such as those of sexual abuse, ‘to deceive people in good faith’.

The ex-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's criticism of the ‘request for forgiveness’ expressed by Tucho, becomes even more stinging: ‘The teaching of the Church is not, as some anti-intellectuals in the episcopate, who like to refer to their pastoral talents because of their lack of theological training, think, an academic theory about the faith, but the reasonable exposition of the revealed word of God (1 Pet 3:15), which wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth through the one mediator between God and men.’

The unrealistic ideology of these singular penitential litanies is clearly manifested in the absence from the list of the serious shortcoming of today's pastors: their complicity with the powers of this world and their words watered down by curialese, when not openly heterodox, which have contributed to the desertification of the Church. The Church, not the environment. The proponents of the ‘synodal church’, Müller urges, ‘are more concerned with gaining influential positions and getting their non-Catholic ideologies across than with renewing faith in Christ in people's hearts. The fact that church institutions in once entirely Christian countries are disintegrating (empty seminaries, dying religious communities, broken marriages and families, mass resignations from the Church: several million Catholics in Germany) does not shake them to their core. They stubbornly pursue their agenda, which aims at the destruction of Christian anthropology, until the last one turns off the light and the church coffers are empty'. Bankrupt curators in cassocks.

The renewal of the Church does not pass through an ideological pseudo-synod, but through the confession of Jesus Christ: ‘There will only be a renewal of the Church in the Holy Spirit if the Pope courageously and loudly confesses Jesus in the name of all Christians and says to Him: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16)’. The exact opposite of what was said in Singapore. For those words - by the way - forgive us, Lord.