In these pages in November 2021, as the Synod on Synodality was launch-ing, I noted the vagueness of the not-ion of “journeying together”, as it was expressed in the Synod’s Preparatory Docu-ment. Specifically, I complained that the jour-ney has “no defined terminus”. Thus, I asked, “If we do not know where we are going, how do we know when we have arrived?” In January 2023, my question has been answer-ed, at least by one prominent American prelate. The “journey” is a path towards con-flagration of the Church. And we will know we have arrived when the Church collapses in a heap of ashes next to the charred ruins of the American Episcopal Church.
The decline in overall church membership and attendance in the United States has been well documented over the past several years. The Gallup Organisation has found that church membership has plummeted from about 70 per cent in 2000 to about 47 per cent in 2021. The percentage of people who do not identify with any religion (the “nones”) has increased from about 8 per cent in 2000 to 21 per cent in 2021. Not surprisingly, church attendance has followed a similar decline. According to a Brigham Young University/Deseret News survey, the number of respondents who “never/seldom” attend church services increased from 50 per cent in 2019 to 57 per cent in 2021. Some of this decline is related to the Covid pandemic. But data for 2022 seem to demonstrate that recovery to pre-pandemic attendance levels is not happening.
Weekly Catholic Mass attendance is also in decline in the US according to the Survey Centre on American Life at the University of Chicago. In Spring 2022 64 per cent of White Catholics and 67 per cent of Hispanic Catholics reported attending weekly Mass “infrequently” or “never”. The most precipitous declines, however, are in the so-called “Mainline Protestant” churches, of which the Episcopal Church (TEC) may be a bellwether. By its own count, TEC active membership declined from about 2.3 million in 2000 to about 1.5 million in 2021. Similarly, attendance at TEC churches declined from about 658,000 per week in 2010 to about 293,000 in 2021. These numbers have caused Episcopal clergyman and theologian Dwight Zscheile to surmise that the denomination will cease to exist by 2050. The status is “not one of decline as much as demise within the next generation”, he has said.
Why single out the Episcopal Church? Because as interpreted by some Catholics, the Synod on Synodality is the vehicle for making the Catholic Church in the US look a lot like TEC. The Episcopal Church, as much as any denomination in the US, is characterised by its wholesale abandonment of the historic Christian understandings of same-sex marriage, sex outside marriage, divorce, abortion and a whole host of theological doctrines. Simply stated, TEC has become a caricature of itself, predictably and enthusiastically embracing the extreme-left agenda on every moral, social and political issue. Historic Christian doctrine has been replaced by contemporary secular morality. As interpreted by some, this is precisely what the Synod on Synodality should accomplish for the Catholic Church.
On January 24, 2023, the US Jesuit magazine America published an essay by Cardinal Robert W McElroy, bishop of the Diocese of San Diego, entitled “Cardinal McElroy on ‘radical inclusion’ for LGBT people, women and others in the Catholic Church”. Ostensibly an interpretation of the Vatican’s Working Document for the Continental Stage: Enlarge the space of your tent, Cardinal McElroy uses the example of access to the Eucharist to suggest that the Church should effectively abandon its entire teaching on sexuality and marriage, in favour of, well, the sexual morality of the Episcopal Church. The Synod on Synodality has become the set dressing for an agenda that Cardinal McElroy and others have already determined should be imposed upon the Church. It’s an exercise in conclusions searching for a process.
Couching his concern in handwringing about polarisation in the Church, Cardinal McElroy asserts a thoroughly polarising agenda. Calling for “bringing the peripheries to the centre”, he advocates a scheme that would place a large percentage of the Catholics who actually still attend Mass beyond the periphery. Condemning marginalisation in the Church, he suggests a path for Catholics who adhere to the Church’s moral doctrine to be marginalised. Calling for “radical inclusion”, he promotes an exclusionary vis-ion of the Church.
Cardinal McElroy asserts that Catholic teaching on sexual morality should be supplanted by “radical inclusion” of the typical alphabet soup of deviations from Catholic moral doctrine. Revealing that “sexual activity” is profound, he has no interest in defending the Church’s teaching. Rather, he condemns those who do as contributing to “structures of exclusion from the Eucharist”. Catholics who adhere to the Church’s teaching constitute a “demonic mystery” of “profound and visceral animus”. No kind of consensual sexual activity, it seems – regardless of whom it is between or how it is practised – should be the grounds for excluding anyone from the Eucharist.
The Episcopal Church in America has already been practising this “radical inclusion”. Its average Sunday service attendance per church is 50 people. Communion is offered to everyone, but no one comes. The space in the tent is fully enlarged, but the tent is empty. Synodality for the win.
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