Mark Lambert

The wifi password where I am saying is avemaria 🙏😄😁🙏👏

Should Pope Leo XIV remove Cardinal Fernández as head of the Doctrine of the Faith and reverse two of the most controversial documents of the Francis pontificate?

Canon lawyer Fr Gerald Murray certainly thinks so.

In this striking exchange, he argues that Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Supplicans represent serious departures from Catholic teaching, and suggests that Pope Francis's famous exhortation to young people to “make a mess” became something of a governing philosophy.

Fr Murray believes Leo now has an opportunity to restore doctrinal clarity. But will he be prepared to confront the legacy of his predecessor?

Full interview on REGINA coming soon!

Pope Leo XIV has just spoken about synodality in Peru, almost simultaneously with Larry Chapp publishing one of the most searching critiques of the whole synodal project that I have read and I think the contrast between the two raises some very important questions about where the Church is actually going.

I remain profoundly unconvinced by synodality both as an idea and most certainly from the way it has been presented and implemented so far. We have devoted an ridiculous amount of time, energy and presumably money to an elaborate programme of meetings, consultations, documents and committees, and I struggle to see any positive fruits which have emerged from it. I can see plenty of confusion, ambiguity, institutional manoeuvring and increasingly contentious questions about ecclesiastical authority. What I cannot readily see is how any of this has made the Church more effective at proclaiming the Gospel, calling people to conversion or handing on the Catholic faith.

Larry identifies something that I think is absolutely fundamental, we're constantly being told that the Church must become a more 'listening Church', but what exactly does that mean? Who wasn't being listened to before? What are we listening for? Who decides whose experiences are considered representative and how do we distinguish the genuine voice of the faithful from the preferences of those organising the consultation?

These are hardly unreasonable questions, particularly when the answers seem so elusive. I certainly don't discern a more listening Church after all these years of synodality.

Larry also raises a much deeper theological concern which needs to be taken seriously, the constant emphasis on 'lived experience' has to be understood against the background of decades of argument about Catholic moral theology, particularly the attempts to make circumstances and subjective experience decisive in judging the morality of an act. The Church has always understood that individual circumstances matter when considering personal responsibility and culpability, but as St John Paul II made clear in Veritatis Splendor, circumstances cannot transform an intrinsically evil act into a morally good one. Listening compassionately to someone's experience cannot mean treating that experience as a source of authority capable of overturning what the Church has received and faithfully taught.

If listening means understanding people more fully so that we can accompany them towards Christ, we should welcome it. If it becomes a method of treating settled doctrine as an obstacle to be negotiated away through carefully selected testimonies, we have a very different proposition on our hands.

Now consider what Pope Leo said yesterday in Chiclayo.

He insisted that the participation of the laity is an expression of their baptismal dignity, rather than something generously conceded by the hierarchy. I think that is absolutely right and it is firmly grounded in the Second Vatican Council. Lumen gentium 12 teaches that the whole People of God participates in the sensus fidei. Paragraph 37 explicitly recognises the right, and sometimes the duty, of lay Catholics to make their views known concerning the good of the Church, while urging pastors to seek their advice and take their concerns seriously. There is nothing revolutionary about any of this, and I would suggest that it is precisely the sort of genuinely Catholic participation we ought to be encouraging. But Lumen gentium also makes some distinctions which are absolutely essential. Paragraph 10 teaches that the common priesthood of the baptised and the ministerial priesthood differ in essence and not simply in degree, although both participate in the one priesthood of Christ. Paragraph 27 explains that bishops exercise an authority proper to their apostolic office, an authority received through the Church's sacramental constitution rather than delegated by an assembly of the faithful.

These are complementary truths. The laity are not second-class Catholics waiting for permission to participate in the Church's mission, and bishops are not simply elected representatives answerable to a national committee. Their responsibilities are distinct, but ordered towards the same purpose: the sanctification of God's people and the salvation of souls. Pope Leo appeared to recognise this distinction when he encouraged the revitalisation of pastoral councils, explicitly acknowledging that their role is consultative while insisting that their ecclesial importance is considerable. I see that as a useful clarification, particularly in light of what we have been discussing about the proposed German Synodal Conference, whose statutes are still awaiting Rome's approval.

The German proposal is not simply about bishops listening more attentively to lay Catholics, it envisages a permanent national structure participating in consequential decisions about the Church's life, raising questions about where consultation ends and ecclesiastical government begins. Pope Leo's remarks do not constitute a judgement on the German proposal, and I wouldn't pretend otherwise. But they provide a theological framework within which its claims ought to be examined.

There is, however, something rather important that Leo did not address. His speech tells us what a properly ordered synodal Church should look like. It says very little about how the actual synodal process has operated, how participants are selected, how competing testimonies are evaluated, or how we prevent appeals to the Holy Spirit from becoming a convenient means of privileging whichever opinions those organising the process happen to favour.

Another uncomfortable observation made by Larry is, why do some experiences of alienation and exclusion receive such prominence in synodal discussions while the experiences of Catholics wounded by restrictions on traditional liturgical life seem so much less welcome? If listening is genuinely a theological principle, surely it cannot be selectively applied according to the conclusions we would prefer to reach. It's also worth remembering that the sensus fidei is not a theological name for public opinion. The International Theological Commission made this explicit in 2014, the faithful discern and receive the truth of the Gospel within the communion of the Church, they don't manufacture new truths by expressing sufficiently strong preferences.

I welcome Leo's insistence that genuine participation must be rooted in baptism, nourished by prayer, the Mass and Eucharistic adoration, and directed towards the Church's missionary purpose. Those are encouraging emphases, and they are entirely consistent with Lumen gentium, but I remain to be persuaded that the elaborate machinery of synodality we have witnessed actually serves that vision. In fact I don't actually see that it adds anything beyond a layer of needless and problematic waffle.

We already possess a rich Catholic understanding of consultation, lay apostolate, episcopal responsibility, the sensus fidei and the Church's missionary nature. Much of what is now being promoted under the banner of synodality was already articulated with considerably better theological clarity by the Second Vatican Council. So I think we are entitled to ask what this enormous institutional exercise is supposed to accomplish that could not be achieved by taking the Council's actual teaching seriously. If synodality means bishops listening attentively, lay Catholics exercising their baptismal responsibilities, the Church discerning faithfully in the light of Scripture and Tradition, and everyone working together for the conversion of souls, then I have no objection to any of those things. But if it means creating ever more committees, prolonging arguments about doctrines the Church has already settled and constructing new structures whose authority remains theologically uncertain, I struggle to see how that represents genuine renewal.

Pope Leo has given us a clearer account of what synodality ought to mean. I hope he will now address some of the points @LarryChappGS22 has so effectively exposed: the serious problems with what it has actually come to mean in practice.

Above all, I hope we might finally begin judging this project by its fruits. Is it producing more conversions, stronger Catholic families, better catechesis, holier priests, more effective evangelisation and a deeper fidelity to Christ? Because after all the listening, meetings and documents, those are the things that really matter.

People Who Grew Up In Emotionally Healthy Families Are Sharing The "Normal" Things From Their Childhoods That They Now Realize Were Pretty Special apple.news/AhWyfAGo6Rz69n…

Here @LarryChappGS22 has written what I think is one of the most intellectually devastating & necessary critiques of the modern synodal project I have read.

Larry asks a deceptively simple question: what exactly is a “listening Church”, and what was the Church doing for the previous two thousand years if she wasn't listening? But the really serious point comes when he examines what is being smuggled into the conversation under the reassuring language of accompaniment, discernment and lived experience.

There is a long and rather uncomfortable history here, particularly the attempts to rehabilitate forms of moral proportionalism which St John Paul II confronted in Veritatis Splendor. Larry traces those theological currents into contemporary synodal thinking and asks whether the language of listening is being used to reopen questions the Church has already answered.

And then there is the extraordinary question of who actually gets listened to. When a tiny, self-selecting proportion of Catholics participates in a process whose findings are subsequently presented as the discernment of the People of God, we are entitled to ask some searching questions about representation, transparency and theological authority.

I am entirely in favour of bishops listening to the faithful. Indeed, I think far too many bishops have been remarkably poor at doing so. But listening is supposed to serve the truth, not become a means of negotiating it.

Larry's article deserves to be read carefully, particularly by those who have become accustomed to treating criticism of synodality as evidence of opposition to the Holy Spirit.

One final thought: I wonder whether Pope Leo's own insistence upon doctrinal fidelity might eventually require a rather more fundamental reassessment of this entire project than its architects anticipated.
catholicworldreport.com/2026/11/13/507…