Stumbling on the Synodal Path

[00:00:16] So the Senate on Senadality part one just ended, but it didn't go as it was pre planned. Outside events over shadowed what happened at the Synod, and not everyone was on board. The path to a Sonato church. That's what we're going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I'm Eric Simmons, your host, editor in chief of Crisis magazine. Before we get started, encourage people to smash that like button, subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. We really appreciate when you do that. Also, if you want to write us a review on like Apple podcasts, I think people still listen to that. Go ahead and do so. We appreciate that as well. Also, you can follow us on social media at crisis, mag all the various social media channels and go to Crisismagazine.com if you wish to subscribe to our email newsletter. And then also one last thing is new feature which is going to be starting up pretty soon, is if you have any questions you want me to address on the podcast, just email it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. I've already gotten several. In fact, I think I've gotten more than several at this point. And I haven't decided if I'm just going to do at the end of a show or have shows that are just basically question answer format, but I'm going to do one of those two things. But if you have any questions that you want me to answer on the podcast, just sent it [email protected]. Okay, so let's go ahead and get started. [00:01:41] So the Synod on Synodality part one just ended. I say part one because to make people clear, the schedule of the Synod was back in 2021, the whole process started. So over two years ago the whole process started where they sent out these questionnaires to diocese and did all this different stuff. And then what happened was that they gathered all together and then they pre picked who they wanted to come to the actual Synod. Bishops, priest, gay priest, laypeople people heretics, whoever they wanted to come, they had come. [00:02:19] And then they had the first session of the actual Synod this month in October. And then what they're going to do is next year in October 2024, they're going to have the second session of the Synod on Synodality. And from now until then, I think we're supposed to be talking about what they talked about so they can talk about some more. And then afterwards we'll talk about some more and then maybe the Pope will write about what we talked about them talking about, that they're talking about. So that's essentially in a nutshell, what the sin on Sin Ality is. [00:02:53] Now we have to recognize that this Synod, it's a big deal in the minds of progressive Catholics, it's a big deal in the mind of Pope Francis himself. [00:03:03] It's been going on officially since 2001, but really it's been planned even much longer than that this is kind of the whole purpose in one sense of the Francis papacy is this synod, this synodality of changing how the Church operates. There has been an immense amount of time and your money, if you donate to the Church, spent on making this happen. I mean, just think about everything they had to do to make the synod this past month come together just as a meeting. But then you have all the meetings that happened in the various parishes and diocese. There's a lot of energy. In fact, I would argue, and I don't think this probably wouldn't be controversial, I would say this is by far the most time and resources that the Church has spent on anything over the past, I don't know, maybe past decade since Francis has been Pope, probably since Vatican II. Probably because if you look at the previous synods that have happened, they were not like this. They weren't like two years they had two years of preparation and two years of actually the synod with multiple different people coming in all this. [00:04:20] So this was a huge deal and it is an effort to basically remake how the Church is run. This is not something that is a conspiracy theory. This is exactly what they're saying about it, that now the Church will run in the mode of synodality. There's a new mode of doing things and in a sense they consider it the progressives, those who are promoting it as a completion of Vatican II, that this is the completion. Now vatican II has never really fully been implemented. Now we're going to implement now kind of like how communism hasn't fully been implemented. So now we're going to so this is all to say that this is a big deal, like they want it to be a big deal. However, it's been a big flop. I mean, I don't think there's any other way to say it. It's been a flop. It's like those blockbuster movies where you spend billions of dollars and then all of a sudden it just flops. Like the latest Disney and Marvel movies. This happens to you spend all this money, all this marketing and all the time spent developing this movie and it's usually to push the message and then it flops. Well, that's basically what's happened here at the Senate. Now they'll try to pretend that it wasn't, but it was ultimately it was a flop. And for a number of reasons. First of all, it demonstrated very clearly. I talked about this a lot last week on my podcast. I recommend you check that out. [00:05:48] Rome is fiddling while the world burns And I talked about how basically it's dominated by insular progressive Catholics, people who live in their own world and they don't really see the world outside of them. They're not people who are interacting with real people who are leaving the Church, real Catholics who are having struggles in their lives, with their marriages, with their children, leaving the Church, with their finances, with the culture that hates them, all these things they don't. And this is the whole Western world. And I'm not claiming that Africa, for example, catholics don't have the exact same issues we have. But at the same time, most of these people represent the Western world, and they don't actually understand the issues going on among Catholics at all, because they're just obsessed with the same things they've been obsessed with since the 1970s women's ordination, acceptance of homosexuality, acceptance of contraception, all these things. These are their issues that they've been hammering on since the 1970s. And they won't give them up. They keep talking about discerning. They want to discern. But what they're really saying is that, okay, the Church has decided against what we want definitively, so we need to discern so we can keep talking about it. So eventually the Church will change its mind. But of course that won't happen because this isn't something that these aren't debatable points. Women's ordination is not a debatable point. The acceptance of homosexuality is not a debatable point, acceptance of contraception, things like that. So the fact is that they're obsessed with this small handful of progressive issues, and they're not going to give them up, no matter what, until they die. Now, unfortunately for them, and fortunately, I guess, for the Church, in some ways, they will eventually die. And I don't think the younger generation people, I mean, okay, let me take a step back. Since the 1990s, since I first became Catholic, conservative Catholics have been saying, oh, we just the demographic solution is going to take care of it. Eventually all the progressives will die off, and then we won't have to worry about them anymore. And it's been 30 years that we've been saying that, and it hasn't happened. But I still think it's true. [00:08:11] And it's true for a very sad and tragic reason. [00:08:14] The sad, tragic reason is progressive Catholics don't reproduce both physically or spiritually. They don't have many kids. Many of them are gay. Of course they can't have kids in, and they don't reproduce spiritually. Their kids don't end up remaining Catholic. Now, I know it's true, tragically for some orthodox Catholics as well. But I mean, just in general, on a whole, the vast majority of progressive Catholics do not reproduce spiritually or physically. [00:08:44] And conservative Catholics on a whole do, at least better than the progressives. Unfortunately, with a culture as bad as we are and things so messed up in the Church, we fail at that many times, too. So I'm not trying to get on my high horse and say that conservative Catholics are way holy or anything like that, just but in general, on a whole, that's true. And so does it happen overnight? No. But the fact is, if you look at the main people who are promoting progressive Catholicism, they're older, and so they will die off. And so it was also comical just to see the things the progressive Catholics were fixated on at the Synod. Like, for example, at the closing Mass, the lay participants, they processed in first in front of the clergy and this was somehow some big deal showing how the Church isn't hierarchical or something like that. I mean, it's just a joke. They also made a big deal about how women were sitting at the same table as the Pope, and they made a big deal about the tables. The roundtables actually made it into the final report praising how this is a new way of doing Church is to sit around roundtables. I'm not kidding. Look it up, look up roundtable. I think that's how you'll find it in the Senate report and you'll see they're praising that. It's like just so silly. It's just so just ridiculous. And outside of the reality of what Catholics have to worry about today, we're not like obsessing over women priests, lay people processing before the clergy and roundtables. We're not obsessing about how the Church does, about radically trying to change how the Church does things in this Synodality method. [00:10:31] And so, like I said in my last podcast, it wasn't attached in any way to the real world. And so that's one way in which the Synod was a flop was it clearly did not address the concerns of actual Catholics. [00:10:46] Another way is also even making pre picked participants, making it pre planned. They still didn't get the results they really wanted. [00:11:00] Now, part of that is because the Pope himself like the women's ordination thing. I think the Pope likes this being discussed because it's that whole idea of his of making a mess and wanting controversy, constant turmoil in the Church. I think he thinks that's a good thing for some. Like, he's been pretty clear that women's ordination isn't happening yet. He allows women's ordination to be talked about these events and he picks people for the Synod that he knows are very pro women's ordination. [00:11:31] Now, people might just not understand that. I'm not claiming I understand Pope Francis, I don't think anybody does except for Pope Francis, and maybe even he doesn't. [00:11:40] But I think that it is this idea of he wants these issues to be constantly talked about. So there's always talk of change and change and turmoil so certain things can get accepted that he wants and maybe even thinks one day women will be ordained priests after he's gone. [00:12:01] But the fact is that the paragraph on the study of the female diaconate received the largest amount of unfavorable votes. It went down 279 to 67. [00:12:15] So there wasn't a strong support for women's ordination in the end. Another thing is, and I'll talk about this in a minute, when I talk about the report, the final report, lgbtqabcdefg concerns weren't even mentioned. It wasn't even mentioned the LGBTQ. And that got a lot of progressives very upset that it wasn't even mentioned in the final report. [00:12:37] And so what we see is that's another reason why this Senate was a flop. But I think probably the biggest reason that the Synod was a flop is that real world events overtook it. Now, I would argue it was the Holy Spirit actually speaking. I mean, for all the sin had talked about the Holy Spirit, we're listening to Holy Spirit. We're listening to Holy Spirit. I think the fact was they were deaf to the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit decided to speak elsewhere. You can't stop the Holy Spirit. You can stop him in your own heart. Like, if he wants to come to you and speak to you and you refuse to listen, you do have the power to stop the Holy Spirit in that sense. But you can't stop him working the world when so many people are praying for his intercession. And so the Holy Spirit, I do believe, did speak this past month, but not in the way that they expected to. Some of it was tragic things happening. [00:13:32] So, for example, the Rupnik scandal being revealed. I mean, that happening right in the middle of the Synod. I think that's something where God is allowing these things to happen. Of course, God does not will evil like, for example, somebody like Rupnik being incarnated. For those who don't know, Father Rupnik is the priest, I think what's his first name? Ivan or something like that. He's the priest who has been accused of some very terrible sexual abuse and awful, blasphemous things. And he was kicked out of the Jesuits, but then he was just reincarnated not reincarnated, incarnated in a diocese, I think, from his home country. [00:14:15] And basically this was announced during the Synod. [00:14:19] And the same day that this was announced, the Pope gave a I think it was a spontaneous speech to the Synod. And one of the things he mentioned was the great scandal he mentioned. And so it's like, okay, the day a known abuser is incarnating, new diocese. What's the great scandal, Holy Father, that we should be concerned about? [00:14:41] And it was young priests who are shopping at ecclesiastical stores for cassocks and lace robes and things like that, that's the great scandal, because that's clericalism, don't you know? [00:14:52] And so the combination of these two things right in the middle of the Synod, I think perfectly encapsulates how out of touch and how, let's be honest, corrupt today's Vatican is. [00:15:10] And I think it really did kind of let that be known. And that news dominated over anything the Senate was doing. In fact, it overshadowed so much, nobody cared what they were saying at their roundtables, because they're like, while you're speaking at tables about your own pet issues and congratulating yourselves on how great you are, we'll get to that in a second. [00:15:28] You have a priest has been accused of some terrible stuff, being allowed to practice his, and who's a friend of the pope being allowed to practice his ministry now freely in this diocese. And if he's in good standing in his diocese, that means technically he's in good standing in the entire world because he's a priest in good standing, as they say, just like Father James Martin. [00:15:51] And so I just think it's one of these things where it was a very clear indication that the Synod was irrelevant and it was overshadowed and it made it a flop. Another thing that made the sin a flop I talked about last week was just simply the outbreak of the war in Israel. [00:16:11] Because what the outbreak in the war in Israel did was it reminded us that the world is in a crisis, in a real crisis, where we have so many souls who are without God, so many souls who reject God, they reject his son, Jesus Christ. They do not know the love of God. [00:16:33] And yet we have our leaders sitting around tables talking about women becoming priests and other nonsense. [00:16:43] I think that was a real wake up call, because the news was dominated and is still is dominated, should be dominated by what's going on over in the Holy Land, which is a great example of the crisis our world is in. And yet they're completely oblivious to it. At the Senate, yes, in the report they had a little mention about there's war going on other places. That's too bad. But look at what we're doing. Look at how great we are. [00:17:09] And so I think that's another reason why the Senate was a flop, because the reality of the world we live in was brought into sharp focus by the News of the Month, and that allowed us to see how ridiculous this Synod was. [00:17:25] A third thing, I think, that really overshadowed the Synod, and this is the most embarrassing thing in my mind for the Vatican, was the launch of Bishop Athanasius Schneider's catechism, Credo. The Rome launch was last week, and during it, Bishop Schneider and Cardinal Sarah and a few other eminent people in the church, commentators and whatnot they did, a launch of Credo, which I've talked about before. I have it up here on my bookshelf right there. Credo. I've talked about it for this is a monumental publication, first in 60, 70 years of its type, where a bishop has written a catechism that used to happen all the time. Not all the time, but not infrequently that's been given an imprimatur by another bishop and basically lays out the Catholic faith in a way that is faithful to Catholic tradition. And yes, that means at times it challenges some of the ambiguities that have come out of the Church since Vatican II. [00:18:30] And so this was embarrassing because the thing is taken off was one time when I checked the highest I saw when I checked one time last week on Amazon. It was the 106 ranked book in sales rank at Amazon. Not 106 in the Catholicism category or the Christianity commentary category, but in the whole store. Millions of books at Amazon. If you crack the top 100 at Amazon, that's a huge deal. And I saw it at 106. It might have cracked it at some other point, but I know it was at 106. It's still, I think, in the triple digits, like under 1000, you crack a top thousand at Amazon, that's a huge deal. And that's not something that you can rig to make that happen. I mean, especially not a small publisher like Sophia Institute Press, which publishes it. They can't do that. It's sold out now at Amazon. Sold out. Sophia. My understanding is if you buy it, though now, you will get it before Advent. [00:19:30] But that's the thing, is there was a mad rush to buy this catechism. And remember, they're not giving this away for free. It's not like all over the place because it's being given away for free. This is something people are buying. They're rushing to buy it. I tell you what, the thing sells itself. I've brought it up a few times at a conference on my podcast, and people immediately, I got to go buy that. I'm not a good salesman. I've never been a good salesman. But the book sells itself because people are hungry for the unadulterated fullness of Catholicism, not the pseudo Catholicism that the Synod is pushing, the watered down version of Catholicism the Synod is pushing. Instead, this is the fullness of Catholicism unadulterated in this book, Krato, in this catechism credo. And so what we see is we saw what really interests Catholics. [00:20:21] One is they're hungry for the truth, the full truth, not this joke version of it that the Synod is pushing. Two, they are serious about the corruption in the Church and wanting somebody to take care of it and to overcome it. So in the Ruptnik scandal, people were furious. I mean, even people who normally are pretty reticent about what they say about the Pope, even cheerleaders of the Pope, were saying, this is ridiculous. [00:20:51] So we want corruption out of the Church, out of the highest ranks of the Church. And then the third thing is we want the Church to address real issues of concern, not these ridiculous progressive 1970s concerns. That's what we saw, and that's what really the Holy Spirit, I think, in many ways revealed to us this month while the Synod was going on, and that which overshadowed the Senate. You know how in the Scriptures it talks about the Spirit overshadowing the waters at Creation, the Spirit overshadows Mary at the Incarnation? In a certain sense, the Spirit overshadowed, but in a different way, the Synod in that it said, okay, you can ignore what's going on there because they're not listening to me. Instead, here's where I'm going to be speaking. I'm going to be speaking here. I'm going to be revealing the corruption of the Church. I'm going to also be speaking through this catechism of credo. [00:21:47] So I think we should be happy about that. I think the fact that the Synod was a flop, at least this version, I'm not saying it's over, got a Synod next year. They're going to continue to keep on pushing and pushing, pushing. As long as they're in power, they're going to keep on pushing. But it does kind of remind us of how ridiculous their project is. When you fight against God and what he wants, you're always going to lose. You might win little battles because he allows it, but you're going to lose. It really is like a five year old going up to, let's say, a bodybuilder and know, don't buy them, say, hey, I'm going to beat you up, I'm going to knock you down. And he starts hitting on his knee or something like that, and the guy can barely even feel it. That's what I feel like. That's the image I see when I see the Father James Martins of the world and the other progressive Catholics, the Synodalatists, when I see them, that's what they're like. They're raging against God, they're raging against what the Holy Spirit wants. But they're insignificant in the long term. They're insignificant in the grand scheme of things. They will do damage, don't get me wrong, they will do damage. Souls are lost. That's why we have to fight against them. But ultimately they will lose. Hopefully it'll happen in our time completely, but they will lose. Now, one thing I kind of want to talk about a little bit is this Synod report. So I think it was just this morning the Senate report was released in English. It was released first in Italian. [00:23:16] And I don't recommend you read it because it's difficult to read and hold down your lunch. At least read it after you've been fasting or something because otherwise you might have an accident waiting to happen because it's so difficult to read. Especially if you've been reading if you've, for example, been reading Credo, or if you've been reading St. Thomas Aquinas, or you've been reading the Church Fathers, or if you've been reading anything from the tradition of the Church before 1960 and then you read this, it is a hard slog. I won't even say before 1960. If you read, for example, Pope Benedict Ratzinger's writings and then you read this, it's so clearly different. It's like this is not even Catholic in the deepest part of its meaning. It has Catholic words it uses at times, although it avoids a lot of them. It has a Catholic veneer, but really it's just a bureaucrack, self congratulatory report. [00:24:18] It's basically saying, look how great we mean. Just the language it uses is just so ridiculous. I mean, it's like our meeting took place in Rome, gathered around the successor, Peter, who confirmed us in our faith, encouraged us to be audacious in our mission. I mean, look how great they are they're being audacious in their mission? It was a grace to begin these days with an ecumenical vigil which saw the leaders and representatives of other churches and Christian communities praying together with the pope at the tomb of Peter. Remember, this is all happening while people are being killed in the Middle East, people being killed in Ukraine. Abortion is rampant around the world. We have complete destruction. But, hey, they're getting together, and they're having a good know. They're full of mean. It just goes on and on, like, just so it really is. It's laughable in one sense. I mean, you read it and you kind of laugh, like how silly these people are. But it is tragic at the same time. When we know souls, I mean, all of us, I think, know individuals, loved ones who have left the Church. [00:25:20] And when we see this, that these guys sit around and gals sit around the round tables congratulating themselves on how great they are, how they're all listening to Holy Spirit and doing whatever the spirit wants as long as it's what they want. [00:25:31] And we know that souls are being lost. It really is. It is enough. I've said it before. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be angry. We have to be righteous. Anger, it can't control us. It can't make us sin. But it's okay to be angry at these buffoons over in Rome. [00:25:49] One of the biggest things you notice when you read the report and you read any of the synod speak, any of the stuff they put out anymore is there is almost never a discussion of being a sinful. People in need of repentance. [00:26:03] That's never brought up. It's never a matter of, okay, we are sinful. Like you, me, the Church leaders, everybody, we're sinful. And the reason we have this crisis is because we're sinful, and we need to beg God's mercy. We need to repent and beg for God's mercy. [00:26:27] That's what is always absent in these reports and in these documents. There's no talk about it. And I contrast I've brought this comparison before, but I've read a lot about St. Gregory the Great. [00:26:39] He became pope because a plague was going on in Rome that killed the pope. He was elected pope. People were dying. [00:26:47] Rome was a mess. The city politically, the city of Rome was just a mess when he became pope. I mean, there was so much I mean, they had the barbarians were at the gates. I mean, it was just a disaster. The Roman Empire no longer cared. The Byzantine Empire no longer really cared. [00:27:04] What did he mean? In a lot of ways, it's similar to our age today. He led a procession begging God's mercy and repenting of other sins. He was saying it's our fault because we have sinned. You don't see this at all in the senator report, this idea that we're the people who are responsible, the tragedy of our sins has led to the problems we have today. And so we need to repent. It's our fault. You don't see that at all. It's all self congratulatory and one thing. There's also a complete divorce from reality. Let me bring up one of the quotes. This one struck me. This is one of the paragraphs in this Senate report. [00:27:43] The entire journey talking about the Synodal journey, the entire journey, rooted in the tradition of the Church, is taking place in the light of conciliar teaching. By the way, whenever a church argument talks about concilia or teaching, they mean Vatican to that council. The Second Vatican Council was in fact like a seed. Sown in the field of the world, in the Church, the soil in which it germinated and grew was the daily lives of believers, the experience of the churches of every people and culture, the many testimonies of holiness, and the reflections of theologians. The Synod 2021 through 2024 continues to draw on the energy of that seed and develop its potential. The Synodal path is in fact implementing what the council taught about the Church as mystery and people of God called the holiness. It values the contribution all the baptized make according to the respective vocations in helping us to understand better and practice the Gospel. In this sense, it constitutes a true act of further reception of the council, prolonging its inspiration and reinvigorating its prophetic force for today's world. [00:28:43] Now, this is just, it's so divorced from reality. You do not have to be a skeptic of Vatican II to know this is divorced from reality. In fact, I would argue probably anybody who is a Hermeneutic continuity guy, anybody who is checked into reality, knows this is a bunch of hogwash. Whether you blame the council for it, or you blame something, the spirit of the council or something else for it, the fact remains that following the council was one of the worst times of disaster in the history of the Church. Maybe you could say it was because of the culture, maybe you could say it's because of the council. Maybe you could say it's something completely different. World War II? I don't know. Whatever. It doesn't matter. We don't need to get in that argument right now. [00:29:31] The reality is that we all know is that hundreds of thousands of priests and religious left the religious life. Millions of people left the Church. [00:29:42] The catechesis just became abysmal in the church. So many bad things happen. Again. You don't have to blame the council for that. We just know that's what happened. That is a historical fact that cannot be denied. Yet. If you read this paragraph and you didn't know that, you would think the council led to a new springtime in which seeds of faith were growing all around us. And this was one of the greatest times in church history for converting souls and bringing people to Christ. And the sin is just continuing. That grand tradition. [00:30:16] I mean, if nothing else demonstrates how divorced from reality the synod participants are, it should be that. [00:30:26] I mean, the fact that they think the life of the church after Vatican Council Two was somehow a great thing that we need to continue, just demonstrates that they're not trying to bring about a true reform or true revival in the church. They're just not trying because if they were, they'd realize, okay, whatever we've been doing, it's not working. Let's try to figure out, is it the council's fault? Is it the implementation's fault, is it outside forces fault afterwards, whatever the case may be, let's figure out and fix it instead. They're just like, no, we're just going to keep doing it harder what we've been doing, even though it's completely and 100% a failure. [00:31:12] Now, what was interesting about the report though, it didn't quite have everything they wanted. Like I mentioned, it didn't have the LGBTQ in there. [00:31:19] And one of the things it removed from the original document from before the Senate was this idea of perpetual synod. Because that's what they want. They want perpetual synod where literally every year we have a new Senate. Like I said, I mentioned the last podcast, we've had 30 out of the last 60 years. We've had 30 senates of some nature. So I mean, they're having it almost they're having it every other year on average. But they want a perpetual synod. And because that's perpetual turmoil, that's always a chance, a new chance to make changes. And I already talked about this in last podcast, that's antithetical to a Catholic sensibility. A Catholic sensibility is you just don't change unless it's absolutely necessary. You conserve what you've been given. I mean, that's what Rome was known for in the first century, the first millennium of Christian history. [00:32:08] Was it conserved? It was very conserved. It did not try to innovate or bring new things. [00:32:14] So really, like I said, the whole thing was a flop. And I think the synod participants know it was a flop because what they're saying now is the new spin as you see this. I think it was Michael Sean Winner said this at America magazine. Some others is what really matters is that we now see synodality has been accepted as the path forward. Why do we know that? Because everybody who was pre selected to attend the synod and who already endorsed synodality says it is. [00:32:42] It's like they were acting like it's a big deal that people at the synod thought the synod was a good idea. Well, of course they did. They were invited. And they were invited because they thought the synod was a good idea. So of course they agreed the sin is a good idea. [00:32:57] But the reality is that's what they really want. They want a perpetual state of synodality, of synods in the church. Because as I wrote at Crisis magazine about a month ago, synodality is the new religion within the Church that they're trying to make it the new religion in the Church, the religion of synodality, which is not the same thing as Catholicism. And so what they want is this permanent revolution. We didn't get what we want out. We didn't get an agreement on women's ordination, we didn't get an agreement on let's go ahead and accept homosexuality or wherever the case may be. So we just have to continue agitating for it. Continue agitating for it. Even though these things are settled issues in the Church, but thanks be to God, the Church in the people. [00:33:46] A lot of the priests and many of the bishops well, reject this idea. They simply do not have an interest. We see that with the fact that the credo catechism has sold so well. We see this in the fact that so many people were just tuned out to what they wanted. They didn't even get what they wanted, but they were tuned out. They were completely irrelevant to the world, to the Church. And so I think that although it will do much damage, I don't want this to be like I'm being an everything is awesome kind of guy. Pollyanna saying, oh yeah, it's no big deal, it's a big deal. [00:34:19] But I would say it's more like a wound rather than a fatal blow. I mean, obviously we know as Catholics, the Church can't really have a fatal blow. But the Synod itself is not the fatal blow that many were fearing it was going to be. [00:34:36] What Catholics want is they want authentic Catholicism, both in doctrine and in practice, orthodoxy and orthopraxis they want to see holiness. They're attracted to holiness. People like Cardinal Sarah, people like Bishop Schneider, people like the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Pizza Bola. I think his last name is Bishop Strickland. People like that. They're attracted to those things. They're attracted to eucharistic processions, they're attracted to the traditional Latin Mass. They're attracted to these things that help them grow in holiness. And that is what will prevail eventually. Yes, it might mean a much smaller church at first, but it will be one that is more authentic, as Joseph Ratzinger predicted many, many years ago. [00:35:20] But it's one that will then become attractive. I think Catholics need to just be honest that the Catholic Church is not attractive to most people today. And by that I don't mean attractive in the way that the Synod people want to make it attractive. They want to dress us up like a harlot. What I mean is beauty, internal beauty that can be seen by people of goodwill. [00:35:43] They want to dress up the Synodalatists, want to dress up the Church as a harlot, put on some fancy makeup and spread themselves out for the world. But what is true beauty is inside and that is holiness. And that's what attracts people of goodwill. And that's what we have. And that's eventually what will be attractive. That's what will be left in the church, and that's what will attract people to her. So I'll leave it with that. But I just say, continue to pray and fast for your local bishop. Pray and fast for the church and work in your own own parish and your own family to preach and live in authentic Catholicism, not the synodality we saw in the past month. Okay, everybody, until next time. God love.