The Synodal Church of Magnificent Humanity
By Chris Ferrara
Another Mixed Bag Arrives
In my last article I concluded that perhaps the title “Vicar of the Zeitgeist” was a bit timid. Then came the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas—if a 188-page book can even be called a “circular” (from the Greek enkyklios). Issued on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Magnifica Humanitas (MH) has promptly elicited numerous critical appraisals, for after all we live in an epoch in which every papal document is anticipated with dread by anyone who still retains a memory of the unreconstructed Catholic religion and the teaching of the great pre-Vatican II Popes and their collective defiant nay to the spirit of the age which, so they warned us again and again, threatened the destruction of whatever was left of Christian civilization. In what has become the customary mode of postconciliar Vatican documents—that is, the Modernist mode—Magnifica Humanitas (MH) manages to further the de facto abandonment of the divine commission in the midst of pious references to grace, the Eucharist, and the Incarnation, none of which are shown to be essential to the eternal destiny of anyone, much less non-Catholics. Let Bishop Strickland—removed from office by Francis on suspicion of orthodoxy—sum up the document’s overall tenor:
Yet despite these positive elements, many faithful Catholics will experience a profound uneasiness while reading it. That uneasiness does not arise merely from isolated passages, but from the overall orientation, emphasis, and theological center of gravity of the document itself.
The deepest concern is not that the document says false things about humanity, but that it reorders the hierarchy of truths by placing humanity, human flourishing, human dignity, and human relationships at the center in a way that risks overshadowing the primacy of God, sin, redemption, worship, and salvation….
The Church has repeatedly warned against forms of religious humanism that preserve Christian language while gradually relocating the center of Christianity from God to man. When human dignity becomes detached from the sovereignty of God, when social transformation overshadows salvation, and when the language of communion replaces the language of repentance and sanctification, Christianity risks becoming reduced to an ethical or humanitarian vision.
The Pope as Life Coach
It is precisely the reduction of Christianity to “an ethical or humanitarian vision” that characterizes the approach of the postconciliar Church to our fallen world. If someone with no knowledge of the Catholic Church read MH, he would have no idea of what exactly the papacy was established to do beyond providing absurdly lengthy documents, which almost no one will read entirely, endlessly exhorting humanity to do better at being human without actually becoming members of the Church of which the Pope appears to be the earthly head. In MH the Pope assumes the role of life coach to the unconverted new world order. The role of divine grace in perfecting human nature is certainly mentioned, but only in a context which suggests that grace is available to anyone without baptism or membership in the Church. The discussion of the Sacraments is limited to Christians in terms of the promotion of their communion and unity, not their salvation, and there is no suggestion that sacramental grace is actually necessary for the eternal salvation of anyone as opposed to mere human flourishing in this world.
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Today’s Pope Leo attempts to justify the worldly orientation of MH as compared with Rerum Novarum by arguing that “[w]hen some objected that the Church should not waste energy on worldly matters, but instead focus on communicating the message of eternal life, Leo XIII responded with realism and wisdom, saying that the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.” Conspicuously omitted from this mischaracterization of Leo XIII’s approach—nowhere in Rerum Novarum is the phrase “concrete lives of people” to be found—is the following admonition:
It is clear that they must pay special and chief attention to the duties of religion and morality, and that social betterment should have this chiefly in view; otherwise they would lose wholly their special character, and end by becoming little better than those societies which take no account whatever of religion. What advantage can it be to a working man to obtain by means of a society material well-being, if he endangers his soul for lack of spiritual food? “What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?” This, as our Lord teaches, is the mark or character that distinguishes the Christian from the heathen. “After all these things do the heathen seek . . . Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His justice: and all these things shall be added unto you.”
Moreover, in keeping with Leo XIII’s traditional orientation to eternal life he, unlike today’s Pope Leo, wrote of “eternal happiness,” “eternal reward,” the “eternal weight of glory,” “the eternal life of heaven” and “the eternal law of God.” He also denounced socialism, of which today’s Pope Leo is quite fond, for “working on the poor man’s envy of the rich,” “striving to do away with private property,” and “robb[ing] the lawful possessor, distort[ing] the functions of the State, and creat[ing] utter confusion in the community.” The socialists, he warned “strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.”
Novelties Replace Teaching, Governing and Sanctifying
In Rerum Novarum we see a pontifical magisterium whose every pronouncement was ultimately focused on man’s eternal destiny, even as temporal injustices are decried and remedies proposed within the Church’s competence—for example, Leo XIII’s enumeration of the rights of the working man in natural justice. But what we have today is a Church whose divinely appointed mission has been lost in a miasma of conceptual novelties, devoid of doctrinal content, which have no mooring whatsoever in the perennial Magisterium. “Dialogue,” “ecumenism,” and now “synodality” have replaced teaching, governing and sanctifying. Consider, for example this pair of pronouncements from the early paragraphs of MH:
Within this shared task, Christians discover their unique role of guiding actions toward God so that, in his light, pluralism does not dissipate into disorder, but instead, through the practice of synodality, it becomes the space in which humanity rediscovers its solid foundations and its final end. In the Book of Revelation, John sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2) as a gift for all humanity. And this vision of grace is an invitation for us Christians to work together in order to foster a peaceful, just and dignified life in community within today’s “cities.”
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Francis’ insistence on a synodal Church, a Church that “walks together,” that seeks to read the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel and allows herself to be evangelized by the poor with whom she shares history, also fits into this perspective.
Query: What in heaven’s name is a “synodal Church” as opposed to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church? For nearly 2,000 years the faithful heard nothing, absolutely nothing, about this “synodal Church” until Pope Bergoglio invented it. And what in heaven’s name does “the practice of synodality” have to do with Christ’s commission to “teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”?
Query: Since when is it the mission of the Church merely to take care that “pluralism not dissipate into disorder”—which, of course, pluralism has long since done. What happened to the divine imperative to “bring back all civil society to the pattern and form of Christianity which We have described,” as Leo XIV’s namesake declared in line with every one of his predecessors, and indeed every one of his successors until John XXIII committed the Church to a council whose optimism about the “modern world” was self-evidently a catastrophic misperception of reality.
Query: How can Leo defend stealthy alteration of the New Jerusalem, the eternal dwelling place of the elect with God, into a “gift for all humanity,” believers and unbelievers alike? At the consummation of the world the only dwelling place besides the New Jerusalem will be hell. But in MH there is no mention of hell nor the root cause of the very evils MH deplores, identified resoundingly by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “With God and Jesus Christ excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated. The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.”
Query: What sort of nonsense has it that the poor should evangelize the Church? That pronouncement alone implies before the whole world that the Church is a repentant supplicant in need of correction by the victims of her supposed indifference.
Yet Another Unwarranted Papal Apology
Speaking of this notion of ecclesial repentance before the world, one can only protest as an outrage Leo’s virtue-signaling on the issue of slavery, in which he implicates the Church while implicitly absolving himself:
