There is a gaping divide between the issues debated around the thirty-five tables of the synod on synodality – according to its official reports – and what is happening outside the Vatican walls, in real life, “in our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel.”
The words quoted are from Benedict XVI, in the memorable letter that he wrote to the bishops on March 10 2009.
“The real problem at this moment of our history,” that pope wrote, “is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.”
From this stems what he indicated as “the overriding priority,” for the whole Church and in the first place for the successor of Peter: “to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God whose face we recognize in a love which presses ‘to the end’ (cf. Jn 13:1) – in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.”
There is not a trace of this “priority” in the synod. And this just as the results have been made public of a survey that registers a real and proper collapse of the Catholic religion in Italy, the nation of which Pope Francis is the primate.
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