Cardinal McElroy’s Grand Deception – Catholic World Report

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of San Diego, in his recent manifesto on synodality (“Cardinal McElroy on ‘radical inclusion’ for L.G.B.T. people, women and others in the Catholic Church”) in America magazine, has done us a tremendous service.

Why? Because he has given us the clearest articulation to date, from a high ranking prelate who enjoys the favor of Pope Francis, of what this whole synodal thing really is all about. He finally puts the guessing game to an end and tells us that the processes of synodality are leading the Church into a realm of deep “conversion”—to a radically “inclusive” Church that ordains women, has no eucharistic barriers or discipline beyond valid baptism (in a nod, I guess, to some exclusionary limits to the distribution of the liturgical hors d’oeuvres), eliminates for all intents and purposes all non-criminal sexual sins from the books, and which openly embraces and celebrates those who have previously run afoul of Church teaching on these matters.

And the latter would most especially include welcoming the divorced and civilly remarried to receive communion, as well as the entire spectrum (apparently) of our ever-expanding alphabet acronym sexual identity movement.

Cardinal McElroy is also quite clear that what the synodal process seeks is a big tent Church committed to the systematic deconstruction of all of the “structures of exclusion” in the Church. He does not explicitly define what he means by structures of exclusion, but it is clear (from what he goes on to describe) that he means all of the Church’s traditional teachings on the topics mentioned above. By direct implication, therefore, and in thinly veiled ways, what he means when he says that the synodal way is committing us to a path of deep conversion to the movement of the Holy Spirit is that we must overcome the current intolerable state of “polarization” by overcoming those who stand on the wrong side of that binary – i.e. those who still accept the Church’s traditional teachings on these matters.

Thus, the good Cardinal’s lament over the sad polarization in the Church today is a faux concern. It is a mere rhetorical device designed to mask over the latently non-dialogical, non-inclusive nature of his message, which is a not-so-veiled attack on those Catholics of a more traditional bent who are the sources of the very exclusionary practices McElroy loathes. He directly links the polarization in the Church with the marginalization of his favored groups within the Leftist acronym sandbox, clearly saying that the “conversion” he thinks we are being called to is the path of a radical “re-education camp” mentality wherein such retrograde folks are themselves drop-kicked to the margins.

This is not hyperbole or some kind of conservative fever-swamp, overreactive tantrum. I am quite sober in my analysis since there is precedent in the Church’s recent history amply illustrating what I am saying. I was born in 1958 and grew up therefore in the lunacy of the immediate post-conciliar era. I was in the seminary from 1978-1986, both minor and major. And so I can testify to the fact that McElroy’s language about inclusion, dialogue, welcoming, diversity, and radical openness are now, as they were then, a grand deception.

What liberals want is dialogue and inclusion until their views prevail—whereupon all dialogue and inclusion end. Just ask any conservative, orthodox seminarian from that era what words such as “dialogue” meant to them back in the day. They will respond with one word: totalitarian. A seminarian in that era fear nothing more than to be labelled as “rigid,” which really meant they disliked that you opposed their preferred forms of rigidity.

There is nothing different or new in McElroy’s language. What it all amounts to is code for the ascendancy in the Church of the moral ethic of secular modernity and its imposition on everyone in the Church via the pathway of deceptively pre-engineered, faux democratic processes designed to produce predetermined results. And since the conclusions reached are putatively democratic, in our modern ethos, that means the Holy Spirit is speaking here in the “voice of the people.” Which means if you object to it all, you are against God himself. And those who are anti-God cannot be in the Church.

This is precisely the move that is now being made by McElroy, Austen Ivereigh, and others, with regard to the synodal “listening sessions” which they characterize as expressions of the movement of the Holy Spirit. Why is this? Because the opinions trickling up from the listening groups are coming from “the people of God”. Never mind that only 1% of Catholics worldwide participated in the synodal sessions. Never mind that the vast, vast majority of Catholics worldwide probably do not even know there is a synodal process. Nor would they care if they did know. Never mind that the questions asked in the sessions were not developed according to the now well-established scientific protocols for developing polling questions. Never mind that the 1% who did participate were also not selected according to any scientific metric for gathering a truly representative sampling of opinions. Never mind that the collating and curating of the various results is being done by a small group of ecclesial elites who are well-versed in the language of Cardinal McElroy ecclesial double-speak. And never mind that there appears to be no forthcoming promise of total transparency in publishing in-full all of the various responses.

Never mind all of that, because Cardinal McElroy and his allies have pre-checked the proper boxes for our convenience. So we can dispense with those pesky holdouts as we move into our bold new future as a “Church on the move” (a phrase coined by Cardinal Hollerich, another papal favorite). But moving toward what exactly? McElroy, without ambiguity, states this movement is away from the Catholicism of exclusion and toward one of inclusion, which the synodal process will show us is a movement of the Holy Spirit as such. Which means that those who think like McElroy will now be portrayed as the champions of the Holy Spirit and those who do not as enemies of the same. And exhibit “A” in that game of ecclesial shame-blame is Traditionis Custodes. Exhibits “B” and “C”, and on through the alphabet, are soon to follow.

But none of this corresponds to what the Church has always taught about the Sensus Fidei as an expression of the Holy Spirit. And since Cardinal McElroy and other promoters of the current synodal path love to position themselves as those who are seeking to implement Vatican II, allow me to quote Lumen Gentium on the Sensus Fidei:

The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole people’s supernatural discernment in matters of faith when “from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful” they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God. (LG 12)

This is hardly a description of a process of revolutionary synodal change wherein a few random voices of average lay people will be raised to the level of the very voice of the Holy Spirit. Yet, even if the voices so expressed do not represent or even evince the “universal agreement” Lumen Gentium says must be present for it to count as a movement of the Holy Spirit, they will stipulate to it all the same since it is the results that matter and not really the process, a process which is at the end of the day a mere ruse and a stalking horse for a much broader agenda. It is all very cynical, mendacious, and deeply manipulative.

In reality, what McElroy is advocating for is a synodality that is a kind of crypto Vatican III where the progressive wing of the Church will finally have their day absent the peskiness of a universal meeting of bishops in Council, and where the Holy Spirit will be, apparently, quite busy “doing a new thing”.

This raises the thorny question of where Pope Francis stands in all of this. He has said in the past that he opposes any approach to synodality that will treat it as a super parliament for debating opinions on various doctrines. He has said that he will uphold the orthodox teachings of the Church on all of the issues that Cardinal McElroy says must be changed. And just this past week, in an interview with AP news, he was very critical of the German synodal way, which he said is a process being carried forward improperly and in not helpful or serious ways because it is being orchestrated by elitist ideologues. In those comments, he is most certainly correct and they therefore should also stand as a rebuke to the elitist ideologues in the American Church as well, who are advocating that the upcoming Synod on synodality take on the tonality and content of the German synodal path.

But it is Pope Francis who has elevated McElroy to the rank of Cardinal. In so doing, he deliberately eschewed giving a red hat to more conservative prelates from large Sees normally associated with its bishop being a Cardinal. And it is Pope Francis who has made Cardinal Hollerich the relator general of the Synod, even though he too, based on his public comments, seems cut out of the same cloth as the Germans and Americans like McElroy.

Perhaps, as the synodal process moves forward, Pope Francis can clarify this apparent incongruity, using his papal authority, for the sake of ecclesial unity and peace, to rein in the kinds of excesses championed by Hollerich, McElroy, and Co.

In the meantime, again, I want to thank publicly Cardinal McElroy for his blunt honesty for articulating clearly what it is he and others like him want to see from the synodal processes. Nevertheless, despite his clarity, certain theological and pastoral ambiguities remain, which the good Cardinal can hopefully address soon in future clarifications.

For example, what does it mean for the Church to be radically converted to welcoming LGBTQ people in the full range of that spectrum? What does it mean for the Church to be “open and welcoming” to the “B” in that equation (bisexuals)? That we allow to the communion line a married man, his wife, and his side-bar, male lover? (Assuming they are all baptized, of course. They must at least be baptized apparently.)

What does it mean to be welcoming to transgenders? In my own Ordinariate parish a few years back, we had a man who was a lector who suddenly began dressing as a woman and caught everyone by surprise when he began this practice, unannounced, one Sunday at the lectern. Our pastor, a very compassionate man, told him after Mass that he was most welcome in the parish and that we all would treat him with love and respect, but that he could not lector dressed as a woman. The man promptly left the parish and never returned.

But what would have been McElroy’s pastoral solution? To allow the Mass to be turned into drag queen holy hour? And, if so, does this not create “structures of exclusion” of its own for every parent of a child in that congregation who may not want their children exposed to such toxic and risible nonsense? Or does Cardinal McElroy even care about such Catholics since they are the very unconverted conservative obstacles to the Church of trendy inclusion he favors?

The game’s afoot. The stakes are high. Let us wait and see what the Pope’s end game in all of this really is.