Changing the Church one bureaucracy at a time

While you were thinking about how to defend motherhood, and babies, and marriage, and other nice things that are almost extinguished, this was happening in the Vatican's Synodal Synod of Synodness Process:

In historic first, Pope Francis approves an ‘ecclesial conference’ with lay people instead of a bishops-only leadership body

“We are living a ‘kairos,’ a propitious time of God in the history of the church,” Cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno, S.J., told America in an exclusive interview in Rome on Sept. 6 in which he revealed for the first time that Pope Francis has approved the statute of the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon (CEAMA), giving it formal recognition in the church... 

CEAMA, he said, can be compared “to the small mustard seed that grows little by little and spreads its branches to welcome the entire universal church.” He expects similar ecclesial conferences to emerge on other continents in the coming years, including Africa and Asia, as bishops from those continents have already shown great interest in the structural developments in the Amazon region...

Cardinal Barreto said that final document emphasized the need for a new ecclesial body to promote synodality and shape a church with “an Amazonian face,” while seeking new paths for evangelization and for an integral ecology. The new Amazon ecclesial conference is that body.

And here is the crux: 

He revealed that the members of the Amazon conference are “also discussing the question of ministries…their service in the church and, more specifically, the ministry of women and the service women are already giving in Amazonia.” He reported “that inside Amazonia, but also outside the region, women religious celebrate baptisms, weddings, liturgies and some even hear confessions for people who confide personal problems to them although they cannot give [sacramental] absolution.”

Lest you think that redefining jobs in a remote part of the world has no universal significance, the article closes with this quote:

He concluded the interview with these words, “We are living in a very special moment of the grace of God. It is a time of hope in the midst of a desperate, aimless humanity.”

I tried to warn you, though, here: Querida Amazonia: Enabling Ecclesial Change. Among other matters, I pointed out that the Pope's synodal process letter is notable for what it does not say:

Not one theologian or academic I'm aware of (please prove me wrong) read Querida Amazonia and reported on what it does not say:

It does not mention the family and the woman's irreplaceable role in it, as every previous reflection on the Church in the world has done. 

It does not mention mothers and their role in forming children. It does not mention fathers as providers and protectors.

But it does speak of women as sort of parallel apostolic agents who ought to be recognized as such. 

In other words, it speaks -- very clearly for those who have ears -- of a new ecclesiology in which traditional apostles -- men who are priests -- must give way to and work with and often under -- women in apostolic roles.

This ecclesiological vision is what is behind Cardinal Ouellet's letter on women [more on this below] being given equal roles in seminaries.

And it is behind this move reported here -- note that Querida Amazonia is referenced by Pope Francis in his letter to the CDF) to codify in Canon Law the long-established role of women as lectors and women and girls as acolytes. (As always with progressives, questionable praxis knowingly precedes formal legislation.)

So no, Querida Amazonia was not the anodyne letter proving that the orthodox needed to apologize for worrying about Pope Francis's destructive tendencies. In fact, it was one more wedge in the modern fissure threatening the bulwark, the Church. 

When women start to think of their "baptismal dignity" as being proven and perfected in the sanctuary, the work of these corrupt shepherds will have been accomplished.

Outright revolution has gone out of style, I suppose, but seekers of power have learned another way. While it's romantic, and gets your profile on a t-shirt, to brandish a rifle and overthrow the institutions, the more effective albeit less glamorous method is to work through the channels of administration.

And women are very good at administration, it turns out. For the great majority seeking a place in the world, glass ceilings are not a real problem; women are content to take their place in the cogs of the machinery. The "feminine genius" has been reinterpreted quite apart from motherhood and has settled for a dreary imitation of male function at its most mediocre level.

Harvey Mansfield has written that feminists "show themselves to be very unerotic" -- "women are induced to put their trust in impersonal bureaucracy rather than in a man who loves them." While radical feminists, he points out, never speak of careers, their more moderate counterparts do and have spent the past handful of decades earning the sisters a place in management.

The Vatican, too, aspires to make of the woman a bureaucratic sharer of power. And that's what this new model is all about. Not content with the stultifying -- yet subversive -- role of bishops' conferences (surely bastions of male power in name only; the USCCB is staffed by over 200 people, and I'd be willing to bet that the majority are women), the feminist prelates in charge of the synodal process want more. They want bigger desks and more paperwork. They want the whole world to be one giant departmental affair.

And that's what the ecclesial conference will be -- not a mustard seed, for how can any conference be conceived by a Christian as something that "spreads its branches to welcome the entire universal church" in Cardinal Baretto's overwrought image not sourced in any Gospel I have read, nor in Acts either -- but a sort of kudzu imported to strangle normal, flourishing family life and complementarity of the sexes, within which Christian witness finds its origin and development.