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.

Mothers, be at home!

Couples basing their marriages on two incomes may not realize the underlying assumption they make, that everything will go well for them at all times, is not realistic.

During this past year, many discovered that this gamble threatened everything, including their sanity and the well being of their children.

Excellent article by Suzan Sammons: Locked-Down Women Discover True Freedom. I do think that many locked-down women suffered and are suffering a lot, because they are locked in by their choices. But I hope that they can find a way to freedom!

Are we humans?

The tendency to use the word "humans" to refer to mankind damages our self-understanding, and it's used, thoughtlessly I believe, by even the most refined thinkers in these ideological days of ours. This usage has a curious evolution. 

Feminists understood that they could change how people thought about fundamental realities of life -- being a man or a woman, in this case -- without opposition, simply by making certain strategic demands. They weren't above couching these demands in terms that begged for a chivalrous response, ironically enough.

The general public dropped "man" and "mankind" and began to say "people" universally when "inclusive language" -- a political tool designed by feminists to control speech for their own ends, ends inimical to natural law -- became the norm. In academe especially, they succeeded in replacing ordinary speech with "inclusive language" (and this was their triumph of using an appeal to chivalry for egalitarian ends) and thereby achieved results without a struggle.

Feminists knew they had to control the social media of the time in order to change the minds of the great mass of people. Magazines and TV were the media through which opinions could be changed without the need for argumentation. They grasped the Marxist idea that communication itself is a means. And they succeeded in controlling the language to the extent that many children seem not to recognize older texts using the word "man" to mean "men and women," even when they continue to use "man" in its linguistically productive sense (as Fr. Paul Mankowski explains), in forming or recognizing new words.

English "man" remains a preeminently productive morpheme. This is obvious from the fact that speakers are continually using it spontaneously and unreflectively in the creation of new compounds, not only in such terms as "hit-man," "bag-man," "airman" and "manned flight," but even in words we have seen emerge in our own adult lifetime, such as "point man" or "pacman." A few moments' consideration will show that "humanity," "people," or "person" are not productive in this way.

(Read the whole essay, which focuses on inclusive-language translations in Scripture and the Liturgy, but can illuminate the general question.)

In our more managerial and utilitarian time, yet another ideological usage has taken hold: The deliberately imposed replacement "people" has been itself been replaced by "humans." I don't as yet know how this came about; it seems not to have been a conscious effort on the part of any group of agitators. Humans brings a particular context, albeit subliminally; namely, the biological categorization of animals. In biology, humans are studied next to other species; we would speak of humans as a kind of mammal, or in contradistinction to birds. It's not a word that was used to mean man in the old sense, for as a scientific term, it takes no notice of the immaterial aspect of the human being.

Using "humans" in a sentence like "Humans have been making mistakes in governance since ancient times" makes a category mistake, because man is rational, unlike the animals -- monkeys don't govern and clams don't make mistakes.

To use the word "humans" instead of "people" or "man" in non-biology discussions tends, I'd argue, to imply that man is not a rational creature -- that he has not been endowed by God with the capacity to reason and thus to share in the immaterial world of the angels and of divine life itself.

When I posted these thoughts on Facebook, Tony Esolen said, "I always mark 'humans,' in my students' papers, with the comment, 'sci-fi lingo'." He tends to confirm my intuition that it is a scientific term -- and not a complimentary one -- that fails to acknowledge man's soul. And that implication becomes a feature of the user's world view, just as "inclusive" language formed ideological egalitarianism between the sexes in those who adopted it.

A note about the term "human person," which may seem to overcome the difficulty of the over-technical term human, in that the added word "person" connotes the rational side: First, "person" is not productive in the linguistic sense. It's awkward to form new words or replace old ones with it -- we are self-conscious when we say "garbage person" and if military, we would not bother to refer to a "pointperson" -- even if in so doing we would increase our virtue signal. Second, "person" is also a technical term, this time in theology, not biology. It lacks "homeyness" or common use. The man on the street cannot be counted on to recognize it as anything other than a redundancy, and an effete one at that. It can be argued that it will gain that comfortable connotation as it is used, but these things can't be forced. Honesty requires us to ask whether we would have used the term "man" or "mankind" in the context that we use "human person"* but are too ashamed to do so, simply because we sense it would not be politically correct.

*edited to include "human being" in this lexicon of substitutes for the straightforward yet more meaningful "man."