By Michael Hanby, First Things - Facts and great personages in world history occur, as it were, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The Synod on Synodality seems destined to confirm Marx’s words (themselves a revision of Hegel). The tragedy arises from the deep theological and philosophical division that has plagued Catholic Christianity throughout the modern era, ever since God disappeared from the horizon and the Church became split between recalcitrant traditionalism and modernist historicism.