Synodality: Self-Discovery over Salvation
New Oxford Review's Symposium on the Greatest Threats to the Church
From NEW OXFORD REVIEW, December, 2025
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.
Can synodality simply be called rationalism? Sadly, no. Even that ruinous venture, tumbling down the rabbit hole of reason without truth, makes at least some attempt at reason. Not synodality. It swims in the brackish waters of self-congratulatory newspeak. It substitutes the truth with titillating soundbites attractive to the unhinged cognoscenti, helpful to the more serious crowd whose mission is to forget the divine mission of Christ’s Church.
In the teeth of a culture careening toward moral collapse, the Church should be bellowing, “And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them!” Instead, Church officials hand us Fiducia Supplicans and swing open the Holy Doors in Rome to a gang declaring war on God’s designs. Rather than leave science to do its careful work in arriving at evidence-based conclusions, the Vicar of Christ blesses hunks of ice as he invokes a newly minted moral category called “climate justice.” All the while, he is deeply doubtful about taking any action against the indubitable injustice of the suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass.
Observe the two-tiered world of synodality. The “made for public” façade of everlasting dialogue without truth. Beneath it lurks the hardfisted suppression of anything deemed “inflexibly” Catholic. In the free-floating carousel world of synodality there no longer exist penalties, because every sincerely held position is sacred — save one: that which was once considered sacred, such as the moral law and the Church’s irreformable doctrines.
Synodality redefines faith as a journey into self-realization rather than a steep climb up the hill of Calvary. Instead of lovingly pondering the riveting truths of divine revelation, it invites the sterile invention of new paths of meaning.
Synodality trumpets that we have no answers, only endless self-discovery. A major archdiocese recently commissioned a study as to why it is dying. Eschewing that blunt term, in true synodal fashion, it renames its dire situation “a changing landscape.” It reports that since 1998:
Mass attendance is down 53 percent
Baptisms are down 61 percent
Marriages are down 75 percent
Funeral Masses are down 56 percent
This assessment becomes more frightening when the archdiocese discloses that it has only 127 priests under age 50, and by 2044 it will have fewer than 131 pastors for its 212 parishes.
Any clearheaded onlooker would call that fact sheet a death march. Not the synodalist, who sees it as one more step toward the Omega Point of greater dialogue. In the light of such rattling news, what does the archdiocese recommend? Teaching the faith more clearly? No. Greater emphasis on sacramental confession? No. More prayer and sacrifice and a return to traditional acts of piety? No. The Rosary and increased devotion to the Mother of God? No. Invocation of our guardian angels and prayers to St. Michael the Archangel? No. What does it suggest? Synodality. And then more synodality. And after that, yet more synodality. This is like quenching thirst with saltwater.
This cul de sac is not surprising. This is the synodality which recently advertised a photo of a few octogenarians of a dying religious order giddily signing its death certificate as they smiled gleefully into the camera.
Synodality causes the world to look upon the Church as guilty of a profound lack of seriousness. Once, even our enemies marveled at the martyrs who accepted death rather than compromise one iota of the Church’s sacred patrimony. Now they see a Church whose stock and trade is compromise.
Without fear of appearing unappreciative of “ambiguity,” I say that synodality is the greatest menace the Church faces in the 21st century. The present Catholic intelligentsia as well as the greater number of higher clerics might disagree, but — post hoc, ergo propter hoc notwithstanding — the current collapse of the Church on every continent seems to have happened on their watch.
Put bluntly, synodality is in the business of promoting parlor games rather than saving souls.
Hmmm. Saving souls. When was the last time a Catholic heard that phrase? It’s one more fatality of synodality.
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