Details via Crux:
In the foreword to a new booklet by a conservative group criticizing Pope Francis’s looming Synod of Bishops on Synodality, American Cardinal Raymond Burke has slammed the process surrounding the synod, calling it deeply harmful and potentially schismatic.
Burke, a hero to the traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church, has been a frequent Francis critic.
In his foreword, Burke said the booklet touches on “a most serious situation in the Church today” which he said “rightly concerns every thoughtful Catholic and persons of good will who observe the evident and grave harm which it is inflicting” on the church’s members.
“We are told that the Church which we profess, in communion with our ancestors in the faith from the time of the Apostles, to be One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic is now to be defined by synodality, a term which has no history in the doctrine of the Church and for which there is no reasonable definition,” he said.
Both the term synodality and its adjective, synodal, he said, “have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding, in accord with a contemporary ideology which denies much of what the Church has always taught and practiced.”
Titled “The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box: 100 Questions & Answers,” by José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue, the booklet is an initiative of the conservative American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), which also has repeatedly criticized Pope Francis.
The 100-page booklet was published in various languages, including English, Spanish, and Italian, on Tuesday, Aug. 22, less than two months before the synod is set to begin, and includes answers to questions insisting that Catholic doctrine cannot be changed and suggesting that the current Synod on Synodality is implementing at a universal level the same ideas as the recently-concluded national German synodal process, called the “Synodal Path.”
