As to the greatest threat to the Church today there can be no doubt. It is synodality.
Synodality represents the full maturity of the modernism condemned by Pope St. Pius X over a century ago. Quite simply, modernism and synodality venture to make the concrete Depositum Fidei into a malleable mass of subjective impressions. Here, Hegelian dialectic supplants creedal exactitude. More mincing souls would find that description too harsh or overbearing, but it expresses the truth. No less than the former prefect of the Holy Office, Gerhard Cardinal Müller, summarized the whole synodal enterprise with a damning indictment titled The Seven Sins Against the Holy Spirit: A Synodal Tragedy. Against the faint of heart I stand with this titanic Catholic intellect.
Overintellectualized approaches to this question only lead to abstract solutions offered by pipe-smoking theologians in their cosseted faculty lounges. The Son of God, however, never dealt in abstractions, which is why the Creed is expressed with such thunderous clarity. Heresy always hides in the shadows of so-called lacunae. Synodality is not heresy, because it does not possess the gravitas of heresy. This makes it more perilous, for it is not as obvious. Synodality does not take truth seriously. It is more comfortable in the gnostic demi-monde of privileged knowledge available to an anointed few. Try eavesdropping on synodal “dialogues.” Better yet, force yourself to read the official documents launching the new synodal year. There you will find the true gnosis despised by St. Irenaeus in his Adversus Haereses. Today, it would go by the less elevated term word salad: an accumulation of sounds meaning nothing. Kinda like a California consciousness-raising exercise.
Therein lies the problem: meaning. Meaning is the reward for embracing the truth. It is terribly specific, like a slap across the face. Enemies of truth hide in the tall grass of manufactured meanings, allowing them cover in worlds made of their own fancies. Lewis Carroll mocked it in Alice in Wonderland. George Orwell terrified us with it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. And Aldous Huxley called it a Brave New World. Each of these authors sounded dire warnings against departing the uplands of truth for the redoubts of invented words — and worlds.
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