When I was a child, I was a huge fan of the Beatles. I listened to their songs over and over again and bought several cassette tapes (Google it, young people!) of their music. I worshiped their genius like an idolater. One of my favorites was the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which was supposed to be on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album but was released as a single instead.
In the song, John Lennon sings about a field near his childhood home and how he got caught in a tree: “nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.” I used to think Lennon was on LSD when they recorded the song because his voice sounded abnormally low-pitched and groggy on the recording. It turns out this was not the case. The Beatles actually recorded two different versions of the song, one faster and one slower in tempo. But they couldn’t figure out what to do with them. Producer George Martin came to their rescue and combined the two by slowing down the faster version so that the whole song played at the same speed. Hence, Lennon sounds like he just woke up from a coma in the later parts of the song.
You are wondering what any of this has to do with the Synod on Synodality, the Vatican’s planned two-year “listening session,” whose American instantiation just wrapped up recently, issuing in a “synthesis” of its proceedings. The answer is: absolutely nothing. Except that, after reading this synthesis, you might sound like you had been through a coma too. And that, just as the reminiscence of my juvenile musical tastes has nothing whatever to do with the topic of this essay, the synthesis document bears no relation to reality whatsoever.
This is only slight hyperbole on my part. There are, perhaps, a dozen or so words in the entire document that fail to airbrush out the unpleasant realities of life on Earth in the Holy, Apostolic, and Catholic Church and replace it with the soothing bath of therapeutic HR-speak. To be sure, no one is perfect, as others have pointed out, and they did occasionally let slip in a few archaisms like “the Holy Spirit” and “Jesus Christ,” but this does not dampen the overall effect. Let me give you a few examples.
In the Introduction, the report notes that there are 66.8 million Catholics in America and that some 700,000 participated in the Synod. That amounts to around .01 percent of the Catholics in the United States. This is not a representative sample of Catholics in the United States, numerically speaking. One might think this would be a cause for reflection on the value of this whole process.
But no, in the next breath the report optimistically states that despite “some apprehension and even opposition as they began their synodal listening…they were surprised by a level of engagement and richness that surpassed their expectations. It was frequently noted how much agreement participants found when they listened to each other.” I’m quite sure a tiny, self-selected group of people found they agreed on many things and enjoyed “sharing their stories” with each other. But why these represent “the honest and authentic contributions of the People of God” I cannot fathom. And the document makes no attempt to justify such a claim.
From there, it gets worse. The document brings up the subject of the sexual abuse scandals in the Church and how they have caused “a lack of trust and credibility on the part of the faithful” toward the hierarchy, which is undeniably true. Perhaps the actual discussions did attempt to deal with this difficult subject, but the authors of the synthesis never move beyond vague platitudes about how sexual abuse and its cover-up prevent “people from entering into relationship with one another.”
How detached from reality one has to be to believe these Potemkin town hall meetings will do anything to curb abuse or heal its victims is an astonishing thing to contemplate. It is almost as unbelievable as the idea that Pope Francis, whose record on dealing with sexual abuse is a disgrace, will actually do anything about it.
The document goes on to enumerate a laundry list of groups who “experience marginalization in the Church, and thus a lack of representation.” Never mind the fact that the Church doesn’t exist to “represent” anyone but the Holy Trinity and Christ, the Son of God. Among these “marginalized groups” are the usual suspects—immigrants, racial minorities, and others, lumped in with the unborn—as well as the “LGBTQ+ community.”
Yes, that famously marginalized community, among whose members are the CEOs of multibillion dollar, multinational corporations; whose cause is championed by one of the major political parties in the United States; who are celebrated 24/7 in the film industry, news media, and academia; whose incomes dwarf those of other “marginalized” peoples; and who are protected by the power of the Federal government and the Supreme Court－that marginalized community.
Perhaps I missed it, but I have never in all my life as a Catholic listened to a homily that attacked gays and lesbians, or even mentioned that homosexual behavior is wrong according to the Christian understanding of sexuality. Nor am I aware that Catholic bishops in America do anything but bend over backwards to “welcome” them or outright tolerate if not encourage them.
