The Catholic Church’s ongoing ‘Synod on Synodality’ seems destined to ratify a heretical redefinition of sin and grace.
The Catholic Church’s ongoing “Synod on Synodality” seems destined to ratify a heretical redefinition of sin and grace. The implications matter for all Christians, not only because it would mean that the papacy has defected from “Mere Christianity,” but because this heresy is peculiarly appealing in our time. It weaponizes Christian humility against Christian truth, while burning incense to the powers and principalities of our day.
This is something that has been rattling around in modernist Catholic theology under different guises for a long time. The concept was road tested in Pope Francis’s earlier document Amoris Laetitia. As I mentioned in an earlier piece, in that document:
[t]he pope, with the bishops, had recast adulterous second marriages as ‘irregular unions,’ as if the matter were something to do with paperwork rather than a sacramental reality. And instead of ‘living in sin,’ the remarried were in a state described as ‘not fully the objective ideal.’ The Vatican’s own translation is eye-opening:
Yet conscience can do more than recognize that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal.
That may sound like a lot of gobbledygook, and it is. But translated into English, it means our favorite sins are often motivated by an objectively good purpose. And pastors should ignore the sin and bless the good intention. This is almost a strict inversion of the traditional understanding of sin found in Scripture, in Saint Augustine, and in Saint Thomas Aquinas. I commented that, “The logic of transforming commandments that one must obey into ideals that one more or less, but never fully, approximates is to turn all sins into semi-virtues”:
Under Francis the Church now teaches that sometimes God’s commandments are simply impossible to follow, that it would be cruel to urge someone to obey them, and that it would be foolish to tell people that God will generously grant them help in actually obeying them. Cardinal Kasper had occasionally defended this understanding by saying that following the Church’s teaching on marriage required “heroism” in certain circumstances, but that “heroism is not for the average Christian.” Francis was widely reported to speculate privately that perhaps half of all Christian marriages are invalid because modern man is so morally deformed he cannot be expected to understand what a marriage is. This is a kind of B-school Christianity, for moral mediocrities. It is a place where God’s love stops short of transforming your life. It’s a mercy where, in the name of inclusion, the Church blesses the sins that break up families and create orphans.
The desired effect of recasting God’s moral commands as merely “ideals” that the church proposes to mankind is to make room for everybody — to have nobody condemned. But it also directly contradicts Saint Paul’s view on grace, namely, that God’s grace is sufficient to follow God’s commandments.
This week, Gavin Ashenden writes in the Catholic Herald on the deep implications of this heretical view of sin and grace:
It would be a serious mistake not to realise that the progressive liberal mindset wants to change the ethics of the faith. So it replaces the categories of “holiness and sin” with “inclusion and alienation”. The roots of this usage of the term alienation are of course found in Marx. But as our society has become more attuned to the language of existential angst, alienation has become the new terror, the new shibboleth. Sin and separation from God are not as alarming as alienation, angst and separation from society. The supernatural is replaced by the political.
The earliest chapters of Genesis unfold to show us that our deepest alienation is not from each other. It is a symptom of something more fundamental and causal: our alienation from God. In other words the supernatural and metaphysical takes priority over the political.
And further:
Jesus himself deals with division and distinction all the way through His ministry and climaxes with the separation of the sheep and the goats at the end of time when the Son of Man comes in judgement.
God is often mis-presented rather vaguely as love; but he is also justice. Evil must be held to account and good must be acknowledged. This is a matter of justice as much as of Love. Justice and reality also require it. So division and distinction are central to the project that began with free will and ended with forgiveness, the bearing of our sins, and a freedom from hell as we are welcomed into heaven.
So the practice of discrimination is essential to the exercise of moral choice and so the integrity of our humanity.
The effect of the social and cultural outlawing of discrimination and division that the progressive and political Left have launched has terrible consequences. It is not just a project to replace the spiritual with the political. It also has the effect of obscuring the critical human task of telling the difference between good and evil.
What masquerades as kindness, the unconditional invitation to everyone to the Church fatally ignores the only condition the Gospels impose – repentance.
The removal of repentance is the sign that a different religion is being implemented. It is one that is constituted by a mixture of popular therapeutic truisms and populist political tropes.
Ultimately, the pope’s understanding of sin and grace “includes” everybody within the church at the cost of alienating the church from God.