But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil.” (Matthew 5:37)
Almost two years ago, Francis opened his Synod on Synodality by telling the world that he intended to “create a different church”:
“The Holy Spirit guides us where God wants us to be, not to where our own ideas and personal tastes would lead us. Father Congar, of blessed memory, once said: ‘There is no need to create another Church, but to create a different Church’ (True and False Reform in the Church). That is the challenge. For a ‘different Church,’ a Church open to the newness that God wants to suggest, let us with greater fervour and frequency invoke the Holy Spirit and humbly listen to him, journeying together as he, the source of communion and mission, desires: with docility and courage.”
As discussed in a previous article, Francis and the Synod leaders have now built their different church, which they call the Synodal Church. The distinction between the Catholic Church and the Synodal Church is not merely one of semantics or perspective: the two churches are fundamentally different in almost all important respects.
The Synod’s 2021 Preparatory Document clearly set forth this objective of creating a new church:
“The meaning of the journey to which we are all called is above all that of discovering the face and form of a synodal Church, in which ‘everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of truth’ (Jn 14:17), in order to know what He ‘says to the Churches’ (Rev 2:7).’”
The Synod participants had to go through a process of “discovering the face and form of a synodal Church.” From the inception of the Synod on Synodality they have told us that the Synod’s purpose is to form a new church, the Synodal Church. Thus, it seems that we have little excuse for imagining that the Synodal Church is the Catholic Church.
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