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.
The official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano recently published under the “Women Church World” section, an article calling for a fundamental reshaping of canon law and Catholic doctrine to uncouple the power of Church governance from the sacrament of Holy Orders, rooting it instead in baptism. In that piece a Synodal adviser, Rafael Luciani, demands that women be given full governing power over ecclesial bodies. “The question is not peripheral, but a requirement for the whole Church, born from an increasingly deep awareness of the implications of baptismal theology … speaking of full participation is neither a concession nor a mere claim of power, but an intrinsic requirement of the very nature of the Church,” Luciani states. “As long as reflection remains anchored to the question of the subject of potestas, which does not recognize unordained persons as full subjects in the various spheres of ecclesial governance, the reform of the Church … will remain incomplete.” (Life Site News, Nov. 2, 2026)
Let’s be clear, those are the revolutionary demands of ‘ecclesial Jacobins’ intent on ‘democratizing’ under the guise of synodality what Christ clearly set up as a hierarchy. The Church has held numerous synods in her long history, and the synod by definition is an explicit gathering of the clergy, usually bishops, to deal with particular issues. Synods were never intended to be lay conferences or general invocations. In fact, the thinly disguised conciliarism that Bergoglio’s ‘Synod on Synodality’ represents was condemned as a heresy by the First Vatican Council (Pastor Aeternus).
Christ empowered the apostles, as his first bishops, to govern and administer His Church. He deliberately set this up as a male hierarchy which excluded even His own sinless mother from the sacramental ministry. St. Paul was equally clear as to women’s roles. “As in all the churches of the holy ones, women should keep silent in the churches, for they are not allowed to speak, but should be subordinate, even as the law says… For it is improper for a woman to speak in the church.” (1 Cor. 14:34-36) The real gift of women to the Church is something far greater than preaching or executive power, it is their ability to provide holy priests to the Church through the exercise of their maternal vocation.
In all honesty it must be admitted that the current Church’s problems stem mostly from the fact that we post Vatican II Catholics, and I include myself, have been so poorly catechized that we do not recognize the many little abuses we often overlook or take for granted. Nor is it the laity alone but most of the clergy which have been catechized according to a modernist mentality. Many think, for instance, that it is permissible to pick and choose which doctrines to accept or reject according to one’s personal taste. For example some 90% to 95% of Catholic couples have used contraception at some point because they have never heard from the pulpit that this is a grave moral evil. Rates of co-habitation before marriage among Catholics barely differ from what is seen in the secular culture at large. Subjective morality has become the flavor of the day, which may explain why sparse confession lines are inversely proportional to overflowing Communion lines in most parishes. As one modern Pontiff put it, ” It is not sin but the sense of sin which modern man has lost.”
How does this tie into the new Synodal movement? Because the very laity that our ‘listening’ Church now wants to place on synodal commissions, etc. are the very same persons who already suffer from a lack of strong Catholic formation. It’s similar to sidelining the doctors while placing the patients in charge of a sick ward. Unfortunately this method of ecclesial government has already been tried by the Protestants. It’s called Congregationalism, where the people in the pews get to decide questions of truth and morality by a show of hands. In practice, as in most ‘democracies,’ this means that the louder and more aggressive elements in any church body basically bully the rest into submission. Those who are being bullied then tend to vote with their feet and the sanctuaries gradually empty out. When apostolic authority is replaced by congregational consensus the end result is an interminable wave of defections. Consequently, today there are over 40,000 different competing Protestant denominations. Is this the model that the Catholic Church needs to emulate?
Synodality is merely the Catholic version of congregational governance, via the abdication of their rightful authority by weak-kneed prelates to the demands of revolutionary activists. Bishop Mutsaerts is one of those few courageous prelates willing to challenge directly the current synodal narrative. He asks: “Has synodality strengthened the Faith, led people to Christ, filled the churches, and produced new vocations? The fact that these questions come directly from a Dutch bishop is particularly significant: scarcely any local Church has paid a higher price for a radically interpreted aggiornamento.” (i.e., openness to the world.)
The good bishop adds, “For years, the Catholic Church has been talking about synodality. Questionnaires have been distributed, discussion groups established, working groups formed, reports written, continental assemblies held, and finally deliberations conducted in Rome. There is talk of listening, participation and involvement, of new forms of ecclesial decision-making, and of becoming a synodal Church. What is all this for?
“Have the churches become fuller? Are there more young people who want to become priests? Do Catholic children and young people know their faith better? Do Catholics once again understand what takes place upon the altar during Holy Mass? Has reverence for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist increased? Has the Church regained the courage to tell people that Jesus Christ is not simply one religious possibility among many, but ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ (Jn. 14:6)? If you ask questions like these, it is impossible to describe the Synod as a success.”
Bishop Mutsaerts then exposes the entire charade. “The revolution in the Church is peculiar because it is usually carried out by people who insist that no revolution is taking place at all. The old revolutionary at least climbed onto a barricade. The modern revolutionary joins a committee. He does not say, ‘We shall change the doctrine.’ He says, ‘Of course the doctrine does not change, we shall merely apply it in an entirely different way.’ It is a particularly sophisticated form of logic. One does not change what one believes; one merely changes everything one does because of what one believes.
“The problem is not that Catholic teaching is too strict. The problem is that modern Catholics have sometimes become so polite that they are embarrassed whenever Catholicism turns out to be Catholic… So let us not spend so much time worrying about whether we shall save the Church that we forget the rather more Catholic truth: Christ is saving us through the Church. And if we remain faithful to Him, then however turbulent the present moment may be, we already know how the story ends. Not with a synodal report. Not with a press conference. But with the words: “Behold, I make all things new.” (from his address to the Catholic Identity Conference, 2026)
Christ did not establish a synodal Church but an Apostolic Church under the oversight of Peter. The ‘sin’ in synodality is the attempt to water down that divinely mandated structure to be more like modern ‘democratic’ states. The Church is not a democracy but the sovereign Kingdom established by Christ on earth for the salvation of souls. Any attempt to change that identity, even from within, is a direct challenge to Christ himself, the Church’s one and only true head. Christ is King. Viva Cristo Rey!
Francis J. Pierson a.m.d.g.
