The Amazon Synod As Sign Of The Times

I frankly haven't been paying much attention to the Neo Gnostic Amazon Synod going on at the Vatican these days. Most of the commentary on it has been all too predictable--handwringing or platitudes, but nothing terribly incisive. Today at First Things, however, Douglas Farrow, a Professor of Theology and Christian Thought at McGill University, gets to the heart of the matter in an article that wastes no time getting to the point: THE AMAZON SYNOD IS A SIGN OF THE TIMES. I have long maintained, although not at this blog, that the crisis in American and the West generally is closely connected to the crisis in what used to be the Catholic Church (if you object to that statement, please read on). I don't mean that in a general sense, although that general cultural sense is also true. I mean it in a very specific sense in that the same globalist actors--prominently, George Soros, are at work both within society generally as well as now within the Catholic Church itself. Or, within what used to be the Catholic Church. Farrow is no bomb thrower. He has considered what he needs to say carefully. Herewith some excerpts to give you an inducement to read the whole article:


The Synod of the Amazon is a sign of the times. So its Instrumentum laboris says. Who could disagree? And what times these are! Some are saying hopefully that the Synod of the Amazon will change the Church forever, that the Church will never be the same again. Others are saying that the Synod is an instrument of apostasy. In the grim humor of Dom Giulio Meiattini, “if there is still something Christian in this Instrumentum laboris, that is, a few words and expressions here and there, there is no need to worry: it is undoubtedly biodegradable!”

Biodegradable Christianity—now there is a sign of the times, a sign of our times. For our times are times in which even the faith of the Catholic Church threatens to disappear into the wetlands of our own confused and decaying cultures. ...

The real problem here is not, as some suggest, the expensive German plumbers who, after all, are doing the flushing for free. The real problem is the Great Apostasy, now several centuries in the making, which has at last produced a global union of such plumbers—a union now so powerful that it can elect popes and conduct its dirty business in the name of the Church itself.

[Let me spell out what Farrow is saying--it's more apparent in the full article where, in addition to references to Germans, he also references the river Rhine--surely a reference to the famous book re the second Vatican Council, "The Rhine Flows Into The Tiber." Farrow is saying that Vatican II was the culmination of several centuries of apostasy in the making. The Rhine--German neo-gnosticism--flowed into the Tiber--the Roman Church. The V2 clergy drank deeply and are now drunk. They are apostates. The inmates are running the asylum.]

...

I will venture two observations of my own, briefly and bluntly.

The first is that it is one thing to say with Thomas Aquinas that grace presupposes nature and quite another to say that, “as Pope Francis has affirmed, ‘Grace supposes culture’ (EG 115).” ...

To say that grace presupposes nature is to say that the redemptive and perfective gifts of God ... presuppose the gift of creation, which already has its proper purposes and powers, its own order and goodness. It is in rescue of creation, which because of sin has been subjected to futility, and in realization of ”the glorious liberty of the children of God,” that new graces are extended, word of which is given through the gospel.

To say that grace presupposes culture, on the other hand, is not merely to say that it belongs to the human being, as a social animal, to have and to generate culture, and that the gospel comes to human beings as those who are already inculturated. It is not merely to say that the gospel can and should take hold of a culture, affirming in it what conforms to divine design, while contesting that which does not. ... it is to say something more than that and indeed other than that. It is to say that in these peoples, lands, and cultures we find discrete foundations for talk of God and his gospel. We find in them the seeds of new gospels.

“Grace supposes culture” means that the culture in question is somehow divinely authored and designed, therefore good and revelatory in itself. Or at least that it is an appropriate response to divine design, hence good and revelatory—the fact notwithstanding that all culture, as Scripture and tradition have it, is the product of fallen people in whom the imago dei, so far from being on the way to perfection, is badly distorted and in danger of disappearing, but for Christ’s redemptive work. 

Let us leave aside ... the general absence of Scripture and tradition and the appalling misuse of both where they do appear. Or rather, let us admit that this is to some extent deliberate. For Scripture and tradition are the very font of the “petrified doctrines” that must be overcome. They constitute the very space that must be broken up. It is no accident ...

Let us notice instead ... that the maxim “grace supposes culture” is indeed a teaching of the current pontiff, a teaching that is being developed in this way, at this time, with his approval.

The kairos, the culture of encounter, being lauded in the Pan-Amazon Synod is a Bergoglian kairos and culture. The church “called to be ever more synodal,” to be “made flesh” and “incarnated” in existing cultures, is a Bergoglian church. And this church, not to put too fine a point on it, is not the Catholic Church. It is a false church. It is a self-divinizing church. It is an antichristic church, a substitute for the Word-made-flesh ...

So where does that leave us? It leaves us, quite frankly, with the question of how both the true Church and the false can have the same pontiff, and what is to be done about that fact. ... But it is the question raised by the Synod of the Amazon, which is indeed a sign of the times.