Never a dull moment

Packed 15 boxes last night. Got all the paperbacks and most of the hardcovers, all the art supplies, nearly all the linen closet, all the CDs and DVDs. Ran out of juice around 11:30. I don't know why putting things in boxes is so exhausting.

Anyway, was tuckered out, so slept in and have spent the morning perusing the daily disasters, and it seems like the Synod has had quite a... well... an invigorating effect on many.

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Here is Alessandro Gnocchi (in translation from Rorate Caeli), under the headline "Over half of the bishops (in the Synod) have already switched religion..."

We find ourselves confronting a Synod in which the majority of Cardinals and Bishops threw at least three Sacraments overboard: Matrimony, Confession, and the Eucharist. Church history teaches us that schisms have been consumed by much less. The dramatic point is in the fact that there are Bishops and Cardinals who are in substance schismatics in playing out their roles, with no sense of contradiction, in response to the pressure exerted by Bergoglio towards “the new”.

Lots of thoughts on this, of course, but something to keep in mind is that we knew what was going to happen at the Synod. I don't know if we anticipated that it would be quite so ... up front, let's say, but we certainly knew the general parameters. We had known, for instance, that for the most part only those bishops who were known to be in general agreement or who were likely to remain timid, were going to be invited. We also knew well ahead of time that the Synod's organisers were going to be getting up to some shenanigans, because, well, they basically told us. So while we know that the Synod itself was very illustrative of the problems we are facing in the post-Asteroid Church, we must remember that it is representative of a certain trend in the Church and is not the whole story. It is of course a very large trend, one might say the dominant trend, but it must be remembered that there are bishops out there, who were decidedly not invited, who feel quite differently about it.

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As to that, we have something today which might be even more shocking than the goings-on in the Synod. Is my journalistic spidey sense failing me, or does this look to you like Notpope Benedict (who totally isn't still also the pope no more, not no-how, not no-way becausetherecanbeonlyoneandhetotallyresignedlegitimatelytotallyandcompletelyfreelybecausehesaidso...sothere)

publicly correcting Pope Francis...

"The risen Lord instructed his apostles, and through them his disciples in all ages, to take his word to the ends of the earth and to make disciples of all people," retired Pope Benedict wrote. "'But does that still apply?' many inside and outside the church ask themselves today. 'Is mission still something for today? Would it not be more appropriate to meet in dialogue among religions and serve together the cause of world peace?' The counter-question is: 'Can dialogue substitute for mission?'

"In fact, many today think religions should respect each other and, in their dialogue, become a common force for peace. According to this way of thinking, it is usually taken for granted that different religions are variants of one and the same reality," the retired pope wrote. "The question of truth, that which originally motivated Christians more than any other, is here put inside parentheses. It is assumed that the authentic truth about God is in the last analysis unreachable and that at best one can represent the ineffable with a variety of symbols. This renunciation of truth seems realistic and useful for peace among religions in the world.

"It is nevertheless lethal to faith. In fact, faith loses its binding character and its seriousness, everything is reduced to interchangeable symbols, capable of referring only distantly to the inaccessible mystery of the divine," he wrote.

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Just some stuff to think about when deciding whether it is still worth observing the Church's old fashioned, rigid, unforgiving and judgmental rules about the Friday abstinence...

Anyway, I'm going to go out into the wonderful breezy sunshiny day, and walk on the beach-o before collecting today's batch of 20-odd boxes from the supermarket, and continuing to dismantle my life.

Here's hoping I make it out in time. I can feel the clarion call of the mountains, like the faint ring of hunting horns at the start of boar season. Enough of this warm, festering, louche and languid coastal existence...I'm ready to fight the elements for my dinner. Chop some wood. Maybe shovel the walk, like a real Canadian.



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