It should be no surprise that a political “blue wave” tsunami once again swept across our nation, which has been flirting with socialism for at least a century or more. Partially I attribute this to the fact that only a miniscule percentage of the American people knows or understands its history. I fear that this same lack of appreciation for what we received from our forefathers, also known as tradition, has greatly infected today’s Catholic Church. In fact she has trended away from tradition. In the spirit of ecumenism, the past 60 years have brought Catholic worship, praxis, pedagogy, and even doctrine ever more into line with Protestant sensibilities. The naive presumption driving this ecumenical drift was that ‘democratizing’ Catholic practice and governance would encourage the Protestant world to meet this ‘revised’ Catholicism half way, somewhere in the middle.

And how did that work out, now that we have had six plus decades to evaluate the ‘progress?’ Well, the most likely candidate to rejoin the Catholic fold were the straight-laced Anglicans who, instead, responded by bolting sharply to the left: ordaining women ‘priests,’ embracing LGBT ideology, and New Age pantheism alongside the Methodists and other main line denominations. Rather than ecumenical convergence, Catholics and Protestants have competed in a race to the bottom as congregations shrank and churches emptied out, often repurposed as night clubs, yoga centers, and lately even mosques.

A Dutch bishop, Right Rev. Rob Mutsaerts recently spoke about this self-defeating phenomenon. “For decades Catholic institutions have frequently attempted to answer secularisation by becoming more intelligible to secular culture. But if the medicine increasingly resembles the disease, people eventually ask why they need the medicine.” It is become increasingly ironic that in this moment of existential crisis the ‘ecclesial wizards’ in Rome, a.k.a. the Curia, have decided that the answer to the plethora of cumulative ills piling up over the past 60 years should be to implement a whole new governing process called synodality; i.e., let’s just overturn the entire 2,000 year governance structure of the Catholic Church to make it more “inclusive” and better at “listening.” Part of that process includes placing women in positions of authority over the clergy, a revolutionary break with 2,000 years of Apostolic Tradition.