The very destruction of the Catholic Church is looming, according to representatives of its arch-conservative and traditionalist wing. Some six weeks ahead of the start of the key phase in Pope Francis’ most important project, well-known opponents of his are laying out their arguments in a book – and are once again taking a firm stand against the Synodal Path reform project of the Catholic Church in Germany. A conference organised by them also plans to address conspiracy theories surrounding the “Deep Church”, “Deep State” and “Great Reset”.
Doomsday
Their doomsday scenarios have been triggered by the World Synod called by Francis in 2021, for which a first central meeting will take place in the Vatican throughout October. The topic of the Synod – “synodality” – probably didn’t really get anyone excited initially. But it has since become clear what explosive power lies behind the rather technical term of the “Synod on Synodality”: the approximately 350 participants are to discuss, among other things, how the Church is to deal with LGBTQ issues, ordained ministries for women and celibacy.
“A plan is afoot to reform Holy Mother Church,” the authors Jose Antonio Ureta of Chile and Julio Loredo de Izcue of Peru have warned in their recently published book entitled “The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box”. If this “plan” is fully implemented, it could subvert the very foundations of the Church, they add.
The authors identify two dangers: the World Synod could overturn Church hierarchies and grant new rights to people who, according to Catholic teaching, live in sin, such as homosexuals. Ureta and Loredo de Izcue consider both those dangers to be close to heresy.
They have received support from Curia Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, an avowed critic of Francis.
“Synodality and its adjective, synodal, have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding,“ Burke writes in a foreword to the book, published by the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP).
Communist
In Germany, TFP says it is concerned with the “moral crisis that is shaking the remnants of Christian civilisation”. The values of tradition, family and property form “a protective wall against Marxist, socialist and communist ideology”.
Pope Francis himself has addressed the fiercely conservative opposition to the World Synod. At his usual meeting with members of the Jesuit order in Lisbon at the beginning of August, he threw down the gauntlet to conservative Catholic groups in the US without naming them, accusing them of a well-organised attempt to spread a backward-looking ideology in the Church.
TFP and the authors of the new book focus particularly on the Synodal Path process of the Catholic Church in Germany. It “concentrates and revives the most extreme claims of German progressives”, Ureta and Loredo de Izcue wrote. The process, they added, was elitist but influential.
Extreme
The Vatican has in fact so far rejected demands made by the Synodal Path. Nevertheless, the TFP authors paint a black picture: in view of extreme ideas from Germany, damaging compromises could be made at the World Synod along the lines of “women may not become priests, but we will abolish celibacy”. The authors insisted that no proposal of the Synodal Path should be implemented. Otherwise it would no longer be the holy, Catholic and apostolic church founded by Jesus Christ.
Repeatedly, Ureta and Loredo de Izcue refer to German Curia Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, whom Francis removed from his post as the Vatican’s top guardian of the faith in 2017. “They dream of a different Church that has nothing to do with the Catholic faith,” Mueller said of proponents of the World Synod in an interview with Catholic broadcaster EWTN last October. “They want to abuse this process to shift the Catholic Church – and not just in another direction, but towards the destruction of the Catholic Church.”
Cardinal Mueller’s name is appearing on guest lists. He will be one of the keynote speakers at the two-day “Rome Life Forum”. The “strategy conference” will take place shortly after the central Vatican meeting in Rome. The World Synod threatens to formalise heretical teachings on the family, claims organiser Life Site News, a conservative Catholic website that grew out of the Canadian anti-abortion movement.
According to Life Site News, the conference aims to expose “the evils of the Deep Church and the Deep State” and their involvement in the “Great Reset Agenda”.
The idea that secret elites in the state and Church want to seize power clearly comes from the realm of conspiracy narratives. Perhaps Cardinal Mueller, of all people, can help to objectify the debate: he will be at the central World Synod gathering in the Vatican – because Pope Francis has personally appointed him as a participant.
*Originally reported by KNA Germany.
