Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Rev. 2:11). This passage from Scripture is frequently quoted to justify a so-called “synodal Church,” a concept that at least partially, if not completely, contradicts the Catholic understanding of the Church. Factions with ulterior motives have hijacked the traditional principle of synodality, meaning the collaboration between bishops (collegiality) and between all believers and shepherds of the Church (based on the common priesthood of all those baptized into the faith), to further their progressive agenda. By executing a 180-degree turn, the doctrine, liturgy, and morality of the Catholic Church is to be made compatible with a neo-gnostic woke ideology.
Their tactics are remarkably similar to those of the ancient Gnostics, of whom Irenaeus of Lyon, who was elevated to Doctor of the Church by Pope Francis, wrote: “By means of their craftily-constructed plausibilities [they] draw away the minds of the inexperienced and take them captive. . . . These men falsify the oracles of God, and prove themselves evil interpreters of the good word of revelation. By means of specious and plausible words, they cunningly allure the simple-minded to inquire [into a more contemporary understanding]” until they are unable “to distinguish falsehood from truth” (Against Heresies, Book I, Preface). Direct divine revelation is weaponized to make the self-relativization of the Church of Christ acceptable (“all religions are paths to God”). The direct communication between the Holy Spirit and Synod participants is invoked to justify arbitrary doctrinal concessions (“marriage for all”; lay officials at the helm of ecclesiastical “power”; the ordination of female deacons as a trophy in the fight for women’s rights) as the result of a higher insight, which can overcome any objections from established Catholic doctrine.
But anyone who, by appealing to personal and collective inspiration from the Holy Spirit, seeks to reconcile the teaching of the Church with an ideology hostile to revelation and with the tyranny of relativism is guilty in various ways of a “sin against the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 12:31; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:10). This is, as will be explained below in seven different aspects, nothing other than a “resistance to the known truth” when “a man resists the truth which he has acknowledged, in order to sin more freely” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 14, a. 2).
1. Regarding the Holy Spirit as a divine person
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit if one does not confess him as the divine person who, in unity with the Father and the Son, is the one God, but confuses him with the anonymous numinous divinity of comparative religious studies, the collective folk spirit of the Romantics, the volonté générale of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Weltgeist of Georg W. F. Hegel, or the historical dialectic of Karl Marx, and finally with political utopias, from communism to atheistic transhumanism.
2. Regarding Jesus Christ as the fullness of truth and grace
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit if one reinterprets the history of Christian dogma as an evolution of revelation, reflected in advancing levels of consciousness in the collective church, instead of confessing the unsurpassable fullness of grace and truth in Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh (John 1:14–18).
Irenaeus of Lyon, the Doctor Unitatis, established once and for all, against gnostics of all times, the criteria of Catholic hermeneutics (that is, theological epistemology): 1) Holy Scripture; 2) apostolic tradition; 3) the teaching authority of the bishops by virtue of apostolic succession.
In accordance with the analogy of being and faith, the revealed truths of faith can never contradict natural reason, but can (and do) clash with its ideological misuse. There are a priori no new scientific insights (which are always fallible in principle) that could override the truths of supernatural revelation and natural moral law (which are always infallible in their inner nature). The pope can thus neither fulfill nor disappoint the hopes for change in the revealed doctrines of faith, because “this teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on” (Dei Verbum, 10).
The only and eternal paradigm of our relationship with God always remains the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth (John 1:14–18). In contrast to the intellectual superiority delusion of the old and new gnostics with their belief in the self-creation and self-redemption of man, the Church maintains that the person of Jesus Christ is the full truth of God in an insurmountable “newness” for all people (Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book IV, 34, 1). Because: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
3. Regarding the unity of the Church in Christ
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit when the unity of the Church in the teaching of the faith is handed over to the arbitrariness and ignorance of local bishops' conferences (who allegedly develop doctrinally at different paces) under the pretext of so-called decentralization. Irenaeus of Lyon states against the Gnostics: “Though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth . . . the Catholic Church possesses one and the same faith throughout the whole world” (Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book I, 10, 1–3).
The unity of the universal Church “in body and one Spirit” is christologically and sacramentally grounded. For: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:5–6). And it is contrary to the same “unity of the Spirit” (Eph. 4:3) to enmesh the bearers of the Church's overall mission (laity, religious, and clergy) in a struggle for “power” in the political sense, instead of grasping that the Holy Spirit effects their harmonious cooperation. For every one of us, “speaking the truth in love . . . must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15).
4. Regarding the episcopate as an institution of divine right
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit, who, through the sacrament of Holy Orders, has appointed bishops and priests as pastors of the Church of God (Acts 20:28), to depose them, or even secularize them, purely at personal discretion, without a canonical process. Objective criteria for disciplinary measures against bishops and priests are apostasy, schism, heresy, moral misconduct, a grossly unspiritual lifestyle, and obvious incapacity for office. This is especially true for the selection of future bishops when the candidate, appointed without careful examination, does not “have a firm grasp of the word that is trustworthy in accordance with the teaching (sana doctrina)” (Titus 1:9).
5. Regarding the natural moral law and non-negotiable values
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit when bishops and theologians only opportunistically support the pope publicly when he supports their ideological preferences. No one can remain silent when defending the right to life of every single person from conception to natural death. For the pope is the highest authentic interpreter of the natural moral law on earth, in which God's word and wisdom shine forth in the existence and being of creation (John 1:3). If the natural moral law, which is evident in the conscience of every human being (Rom. 2:14), does not form the source of and criterion against which to judge the (always fallible) laws of the state, then political power slides into totalitarianism, which tramples on those natural human rights that should form the basis of every democratic society and constitutional state. This is what Pope Pius XI declared in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (1937) against the formally legally valid Nuremberg Race Laws of the German state: “It is in the light of the commands of this natural law, that all positive law, whoever be the lawgiver, can be gauged in its moral content, and hence, in the authority it wields over conscience. Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend” (Mit Brennender Sorge, 30).
6. Regarding the Church as a sacrament of human unity
It is a sin against the Holy Spirit when the political and ideological division of society since the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution is incorporated into a restorative or revolutionary philosophy of history and when the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church is thereby paralyzed by internally pitting “progressive” against “conservative” factions.
For the Church in Christ is not only the sacrament of the most intimate communion of mankind with God, but also a sign and instrument of the unity of humanity in its natural and supernatural purpose (Lumen Gentium, 1).
The discernment of spirits is not undertaken with a view to political goals, but theologically, regarding the truth of revelation, which is presented in the Church's infallible doctrine of faith. Thus, the objective criterion of the Catholic faith is orthodoxy as opposed to heresy (and not the subjective will to preserve or change contingent cultural aspects).
With the upcoming 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (325), we might bear the following motto in mind: Better to go into exile five times with St. Athanasius than to make the slightest concession to the Arians.
7. Regarding the supernatural nature of Christianity, which opposes its instrumentalization for worldly purposes
The most current sin against the Holy Spirit is when the supernatural origin and character of Christianity is denied in order to subordinate the Church of the Triune God to the goals and purposes of a worldly salvation project, be it eco-socialist climate neutrality or Agenda 2030 of the “globalist elite.”
Anyone who really wants to hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church will not rely on spiritualistic inspirations and woke-ideological platitudes, but will place all their trust, in life and death, solely in Jesus, the Son of the Father and the Anointed One of the Holy Spirit. He alone has promised his disciples the Holy Spirit of truth and love for all eternity: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. . . . But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:23–26).
Gerhard Cardinal Müller is former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
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