The Amazon Synod’s Self-Subverting Vision, by Michael Pakaluk

By Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic Thing, Nov. 6, 2019

Robert Royal made the extraordinary suggestion last week that Catholics should actually read the Final Report of the Amazon Synod. So I did.

Everyone is entitled to his own impression.  And I don’t state mine as authoritative, simply as my own sense, which can be wrong.  Also, I understand that the meaning that many prelates wished to place on the text, as they voted on the paragraphs one-by-one, could be different from the sense that I believe the whole text most naturally has – when those paragraphs are placed together.

But my general impression is of a deep disaffection with Christendom as it has existed for centuries, and an attempt to replace it with a different structure, located in the Amazon, at least at first.  This structure will have its own rite, its own seminary, with its own curriculum, and its own cadre of married priests and woman deacons.

The document at times speaks as though, in a spirit of pluralism, it is proposing an additional thing, which will exist side-by-side with the old.  But the contempt it shows for the West and, indeed, for the existing Church as inserted in Christendom, compels the inference that it means ultimately to replace the one with the other.  ….

Read more at  https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2019/11/06/the-amazon-synods-self-subverting-vision/