The Liberal and Flawed Roots of Tiresome Synodal Grievances, by Larry Chapp

One of the things I have learned in my 65 years of being a Catholic is that the meaning of the term “Church reform” in the post-Vatican II era is almost always a cognate for “liberalization”. Why this is so and how it came to be this way is a story too complex to rehearse here. But it is sufficient to simply note this fact with an eye toward its ongoing significance for our “new way of being Church” in our brave new era of “synodal listening”.

Nor do we need to spend time here analyzing the typical laundry list of issues that the so-called reformers wish to address. From women’s ordination to contraception to LGBTQ everything, the central intellectual impulses are all the same: what the Church has taught for centuries has been wrong, or at least wrong now for our “times”, and needs to be changed in deeply constitutive ways to fit into our “new cultural paradigm”. …

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