Do Not Worry About The Synod

The Northern Cross has refused to publish even part of this safeguarding risk, as I discovered on a day when we were subjected to a variation on the atrocity that is Happytudes, having just heard a Church of England service on the radio during which the same passage was read in English instead:

Do not worry about the Synod. 24 years ago, and smugly assuming that their views were the consensus, members of the WASP elite on at least three continents invoked their nth generation club rights to demand that their church change to suit their specifications.

They are still screeching abuse at the insolent colonial darkies who were having none of it. Such Baby Boomers were then in their pomp rather than in their early dotage, and Western Europe, North America and the Antipodes had yet to feel the full effects of mass immigration from outside each other.

When their sociologically indistinguishable Catholic contemporaries from the same regions and from the whitest parts of Latin America, including Argentina, have the same experience, then they will have it from a far weaker position at home no less than abroad.

They are already reduced to a sort of self-parody, substituting the Christologically less comprehensive Apostles’ Creed for the Nicene Creed at Mass, making 1970s-style alterations to the lyrics even of Christmas carols that remained part of mainstream popular culture, clinging to the Jerusalem Bible even after having been forced to accept an accurate translation of the Liturgy, and so on.

Meanwhile, the Western world is crying out for fidelity to the Magisterium, and is increasingly discovering it, only to be confronted instead with a “cultural Catholicism” that has little culture and no Catholicism. But should the Synod ever meet, and the Pope is already 85, then it would roar that fidelity from most of the world, as if the very questions from the old, rich, white people were silly and bewildering. 

On that basis, it would then get on with discussing the things that really mattered, whether the living links to the last days of Empire and of Jim Crow liked it or not.