By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine - Yet, what would the recent Synod have been without these issues? An afternoon’s chat about the economy, with a little seasoning of environmentalism; but all the force lay finally in what that troubled young man in my high school wanted back in 1977. The faith is under assault on all fronts, and in the West it is fading fast; culture is withering under the heat of mass phenomena; the machines of antihumanism roll on; and all that some of our leaders attend to is scrawled on a bathroom wall.