When the Children Misbehave, the Grown-Ups Must Step In.

Especially when the patriarch isn’t willing.

Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco explains why he signed a letter that should never have had to be written.

From First Things.

[T]his week I signed A Fraternal Open Letter to Our Brother Bishops in Germany together with seventy other cardinals and bishops from around the world (and the number of signatories is still growing). Because the German Synodal Path departs radically from settled Church doctrine and ancient and well-established discipline, it threatens to cause a schism in the Church, even beyond Germany itself. Our expression of concern is prompted by this threat, especially when we hear leading voices of the Church in Germany rejecting the authority of Scripture and Tradition, in particular with regard to the unbroken teachings of the Church on matters of sexual morality, gender ideology, the sacraments, and the exercise of authority in the Church.

While they display a patina of religious ideas and vocabulary, the German Synodal Path documents seem largely inspired not by Scripture and Tradition — which, for the Second Vatican
Council, are “a single sacred deposit of the Word of God” — but by sociological analysis and contemporary political, including gender, ideologies. They look at the Church and her mission through the lens of the world rather than through the lens of the truths revealed in Scripture and the Church’s authoritative Tradition.

From the Fraternal Open Letter.

Synodal Path content also seems to reinterpret, and thus diminish, the meaning of Christian freedom. For the Christian, freedom is the knowledge, the willingness, and the unhampered ability to do what is right. Freedom is not “autonomy.” Authentic freedom, as the Church teaches, is tethered to truth and ordered to goodness and, ultimately, beatitude. Conscience does not create truth, nor is conscience a matter of personal preference or self-assertion. A properly formed Christian conscience remains subject to the truth about human nature and the norms of righteous living revealed by God and taught by Christ’s Church. Jesus is the truth, who sets us free (Jn 8).

While in no way lessening the devastating consequences of the Synodal Path, which will tear the Church apart should its proponents be successful, your correspondent cannot resist pointing out what an embarrassment these clowns are, ‘sixties relics perpetually living in the Age of Aquarius. They have to be stopped; unfortunately the one man who can do it thus far has shown no inclination to do so.

With thanks to RBG.