The Amazon Synod: Two perspectives

One from a fellow named Rocco Palmo.  I'd lie if I said I know much about him.  His take is less positive than some might wish.

The other by Mark Shea.  His take, as one might expect, is extraordinarily positive.  If there are problems, they are the result of fascists right wing conservatives and racism as good as always.


My guess?  The Catholic Church continues to lumber toward the same apostasy that ruined so many mainline Protestant denominations.   The essence of liberalism, among other things, has been to destroy the past and use the sins of the past to build a new world order.

The Protestant denominations accepted that same idea.  Christians in the past did bad things.  Christians in the past were wrong.  The Civilization that Christians built did bad things.  The West was worse than anywhere else in history.  Everywhere else is fine without Jesus.  In fact, Jesus may just be our version of some abstract divine reality.  Therefore the Christian West as we know it must go and be rebuilt in our own awesome image.

There is nothing wrong with admitting the sins of the past - as long as you don't do so to declare your superiority to those in the past or to ignore the sins of the present.  But even if you do it right, you might still come up with the wrong conclusions.  One of the great lessons of history is that people might be good at eventually solving problems, but they are typically terrible at avoiding new ones.

Nevertheless, the World, secular paganism if you will, is doing a bang up job of attacking the Gospel, the civilization the Church built, and most concepts of virtue and goodness that came out of those things.  It's also doing a splendid job of converting Christians to its secular gospel.  A growing number of Christians seem bent on using the 'render to Caesar' approach to figure out just how much of the world it can align with.

When things come to pass and the plot is revealed, I have a gut feeling that the world as we know it will be gone, and a vast majority of Christians will have abandoned the faith for greener pastures.  I also feel, given where things are going and how we seem to have passed the high point of the bell curve in terms of modern innovation, there will come a time when things get really, really, and I mean really bad.  Once that happens, like the world crawling out of the rubble of the fallen Roman Empire, I think those faithful who remained in the Gospel will be there to help guide people back to the Truth.

It's a hunch I have.  Perhaps I'm reading too much history into the future.  But given how many of the evils of recent history we'd never have thought would be brought back this soon that are being brought back this soon, at least allow me to think that some of the best of history can also be raised up in times of need.

UPDATE:

Pope Francis’s English biographer, Austen Ivereigh

Yep.  Was a time when the Church, and Christians everywhere, would have condemned praying to idols, including 'Mother Earth'.  That is one of the great distinctions of the Judeo-Christian faiths - God and Mother Earth are not one and the same.  In fact, most Christians also would have condemned cultures of human sacrifice, child sacrifice, and ritual extermination of the weak.  Yet it turns out the modern Catholic Church is hip to all  of this, seeking ways to accommodate it and assimilate it because, well, that's what the cool kids at the hip parties want. 

Why am I Orthodox and not Catholic?  I give you not only the Amazon Synod, but the growing 'love Jesus, hate Jesus, piss on Jesus - just get with the secular paganism of the modern Left or else' doctrines that are emerging as the Catholic Church lumbers toward the edge of the abyss.  For all the myriad problems with Orthodoxy, jettisoning the fundamentals of the historical Faith - at least by most of the leadership - is not one of them.