Pius VI and the Synod of Pistoia

]Apr. 15, 2023] One of the most brazen attempts to undermine the traditions of the Church prior to the post-Conciliar age occurred at the Synod of Pistoia in 1786, held in the region of Florence under the presidency of Bishop Scipio de Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia and Prato.

The Synod of Pistoia was the last gasp of the Gallican movement, which attempted to detract from the authority of the Holy See by transferring much of the governance of national churches over to their respective governments and synods of local bishops. It asserted radical innovations in Church governance and proposed sweeping reforms that touched on everything from monastic discipline to the sacramental theology to the order of the liturgy. In many places, the acts of Pistoia anticipate the thinking of the theologians of the Nouvelle théologie responsible for the calamities that followed the Second Vatican Council.

USC Videos: Inculturation and the Missions

It's been awhile since I made a video for the Youtube channel, but the controversy surrounding the Synod on the Amazon and the now infamous Pachamama idol provided excellent occasion for me to make this video exploring the idea of "inculturation"--how is it different from Christianization, how is it being interpreted by contemporary Church leadership, and what it means for the Catholic missions. It's about fourteen and a half minutes long. Enjoy!

This Female Image is Not the Blessed Virgin Mary

The image above has been showing up all over the Amazon Synod. It has been featured prominently in ceremonies presided over by Pope Francis himself and has been the object of religious veneration in the Vatican Gardens in what looks suspiciously like a pagan ritual.

Defenders of the Amazon Synod and the current pontificate's vision for "Amazonia" are bending over backwards to make this blatant paganism palatable by claiming the image is the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Without getting into the muddy waters of the content of the Synod—which others are already doing with much greater skill—I wanted to simply collect some statements that should be sufficient to disprove this falsehood.

The first statement is from a missionary bishop in the Amazon region, one who, perhaps more than any other cleric, would be in a position to understand what this image is. The latter two statements come from members of the Vatican communications office; Fr. Costa is the Secretary of the Information Commission. Dr Paolo Ruffini is Prefect of the Dicastery for Communications—in other words, both men tasked with delivering official Vatican communications.

Bishop David Martínez de Aguirre Guinea of Peru: "I’d seen this image on various occasions and I did not identify and not even and no one either at the vicarate...it was an image that was shown also on other occasions, and I wouldn’t know how to interpret it. Well, we all have our own interpretations … the Virgin Mary, the Mother Earth, probably those who used this symbol demonstrated, wishes to reflect fertility, to women, to life, the life presence among these Amazonian people … and Amazonia is meant to be full of life. I don’t think we need to create any connections with the Virgin Mary or with a pagan element" (source).

Fr. Giacoma Costa, SJ: "It is an indigenous woman who brings life...nobody said it was the Virgin Mary. I don’t know who might have said so" (source).

Paulo Ruffini: "It is a statue that represents life. That's it" (source).

It's some Amazonian personification of life or the earth or fertility. My own gut is that this is Pachamama, but of course no one at the Vatican would admit that.

At any rate, OnePeterFive has done an excellent job cataloguing the silliness surrounding this image and the contortions of certain persons trying to explain it away as an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary; I highly recommend their article for a much more thorough investigation of this image. However, even if we grant the dubious claim that this image is the Virgin Mary, it would horrifically improper to depict her nude.

No official channel has claimed this image is the Virgin Mary.

If anyone is still saying this image is "just the Blessed Virgin Mary", please share this information with them. Catholics are so dumb right now they will believe any nonsense if it will save them the intellectual effort of recognizing that the Church has sunk into a nadir from which it will take generations to recover, if it ever does before the Second Coming.

UPDATE: On October 25th, Pope Francis issued a statement on the theft of the images in which he referred to them a Pachamamas, thus admitting what many had suspected all along. His words:

"Good afternoon. I want to say a word about the statues of the pachamama that were taken from the church of the Transpontina – which were there without idolatrous intentions – and were thrown into the Tiber."

Source: Vatican News, October 25th, 2019, "Pope Francis announces retrieval of indigenous statues"

"But the Eastern Churches have married priests..."

"I don't see what is the big deal about married priests. There's a tradition of married priests in the eastern Churches."

Granted. And such is not the tradition in the Latin Church. Do you care at all about the Latin tradition? Or is it only eastern churches that get a pass? No doubt these same people who say "Eh...it's cool, there's married priests in the East" would throw a fit if celibacy were somehow foisted on the East. They would raise the hue and cry and say how it was not part of the eastern tradition and how unjust it was. By the same token, can't you see how unjust it is to shove a married priesthood on the Latin rite churches of the West? Apparently it's always acceptable to dismantle the Latin Church if we can find some obscure justification for it in the annals of the East, but meanwhile the Eastern Churches are sacrosanct.

Also, a few points about this topic, because people are seriously uneducated about it:

It is not true that priests in the Latin rite used to be sexually active until celibacy was mandated in the Middle Ages. Latin rite priests were never sexually active; priestly celibacy is an apostolic tradition.

Yes the patristic Church had married priests, but these married priests were sexually continent. These priests remained married but were expected to live celibate. This is well established in the canons and writings of the fathers. 

In the eastern churches, married priests were expected to live in continence as well.

The tradition of allowing priests in the eastern Churches to be sexually active is not a patristic custom but something that began to encroach upon the east in the era of Justinian II (around 691) due to civil legislation relating to the bishoprics, inheritance, and other secular matters and is based on a misrepresentation of apostolic teaching. It takes its origin from the legislation of the Quinisext Council in Trullo.

Even if there were married priests, there was never an ancient tradition approving of a sexually active priesthood. Never.

Do the research. If you need a place to start, see our essays:

Book Review: The Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy by Christian Cochini
The Truth About Priestly Continence and Celibacy in the Early Church
The Council of Ancyra and Clerical Celibacy
The Quinisext Council in Trullo and Priestly Celibacy

The Church Doesn't Need More Women's Involvement

One of the sacred cows of liberal Catholicism is the unwavering belief that the Church is dominated by men and that women are voiceless and passive in an institution run by the patriarchy. To that end, there are endless proposals being tossed about to get women "more involved" in some sort of "official" capacity. There is always talk about utilizing the particular "gifts" women have to offer the Church and how much we will all benefit by hearing the woman's "voice", et al.

There's always this recurring idea about a female diaconate (by the way, for an excellent theological explanation of why this cannot be, please see Fr. Ripperger's article On the Unity of Holy Orders). We're going to see a lot of this nonsense being bandied about at the upcoming Amazon Synod; the Pre-Amazon Synod meeting in Rome spoke of the "the indispensable mission that women have", and the document "urges the Church to identify the type of official ministry that can be conferred on women." Now these comments were made solely with reference to the Amazon, but that doesn't really matter; we all know the end game is to shoe-horn women into an official ministerial role as a means of eventually force-feeding women's ordination to the entire Church.

A while ago I was traveling and compelled to attend a random Novus Ordo parish to fulfill my Sunday obligation. As I sat there during the Mass, I watched the procession of young, female altar servers preceding the elderly priest into the sanctuary. I listened to the readings done by female lectors. The organ was played by a female organist, the hymns and psalms sung by a female cantor. Two young girls brought up the gifts at the offertory. During the announcements he mentioned the religious education program, whose director was a woman. He thanked a female parishioner for organizing the floral arrangements around the altar. At communion time, two female EMHCs distributed the sacrament along with the priest. After Mass, I looked at the congregation and wondered how many men I saw would be attending Mass of their own volition if their wives were not dragging them there—in how many homes was the woman the functional spiritual leader of the family?

I later visited the parish website and saw that the organizers or contact persons for 10 of the 19 ministries listed on the website were women—even for the Knights of Columbus, which  found bizarre. Only two ministries had male contacts; the rest just said "Call the office", where no doubt the inquirer would be put in contact with a female secretary. And children attending CCD classes would most likely be taught by female catechists.

And in all my years as a Catholic I can say with confidence that this situation is normative in most parishes. When I was a Youth Director and DRE, I remember going to a meeting of all the DREs in the diocese and I was one of only three men. The rest were all middle aged (or elderly) women. I have noticed a similar trend among parish Youth Directors. The same is true for the moribund National Catholic Youth Ministry organization: according to their site, 57% of the national leadership of the National Catholic Youth Ministry organization is female, including their executive director. Women are broadly represented in the regional chairs of the NCYM (43%) and hold 75% of the at-large chairs. You may like Catholic youth ministry, you may hate it, but either way the fact is it is dominated by women.

This experience really made me stop and ponder, in what sense can anybody claim that women are underrepresented in the Catholic Church? Anyone who walked into an average Catholic parish and got involved to any degree would get the impression of a Church completely run by women. Women already dominate the Church at almost every level. If you add to this the prevalence of women in Catholic education, the ratio of women to men becomes staggering. 

And it's not just at the parochial and academic level. At our dioceses as well women are broadly represented, usually at or far above their societal demographic. According to the staff director of my diocese, 50% of the diocesan staff are women. A very fair representation of the general demographic! However, if you remove the ordained from the equation and look only at laypeople, the percentage of women working in the diocese rises to 60%. In other words, 6 out of every 10 lay people involved in administering the diocese are women. They represent a majority of the lay folks currently managing the diocese. Women are running the place.

Please tell me how women are underrepresented? How their voices are suppressed? The average Catholic is going to hear the Word of God read by a woman, worship to music played and sang by women, have their kids catechized by women, probably receive communion from a woman, deal with women in parish and diocesan administration, and interact primarily with women volunteers and employees at all levels of Church.  In many places, deacon's wives are also elevated to an unofficial, semi-ministerial role in "couples ministry" with their husbands, so Catholics often receive baptismal or marriage prep from women. But I guess because there is one, statistically tiny office women are excluded from—the ordained—then they are completely oppressed. 

Even among the ordained, however, women are not without their influence. I don't want to be too particular so I will stay to vague generalizations here—but even in the priesthood I have noticed that parish priests who are surrounded by women staff are often completely cucked by them.

Several years ago, I was traveling up the coast of California visiting the old mission parishes ahead of the canonization of St. Junipero Serra. I visited the lovely mission of San Antonio de Padua, the only one of the missions where I felt a spirit of genuine Catholic piety was still alive. Within the old church there was a mural painted in the early 19th century. It depicted a priest (perhaps Fr. Serra) posing at the altar with several of his servers and other eminent men of the mission. In the late Rococo style, the figures are all looking out of the painting at the viewer. The priest has rugged, hard features and a dark beard. The servers are all robust young men with dark eyes and evidently Spanish or Mexican, some of them sporting beards or pointed mustaches. They are all kneeling in white surplices with ornate lace trimming, hands folded. There are also a few men in secular dress, apparently landowners or local magistrates, wearing sashes and holding swords. All of them are standing or kneeling before the altar, looking out, a half dozen or so. It really struck me what a manly enterprise Catholicism was at that time and place—looking at this old portrait, I could clearly grasp its appeal and why men of that time would have wanted to be part of this.

This is nothing against women by any means. I'm not one of those "back to the kitchen" Catholic men. But my friends, the crusade to "finally" get women "involved" is a farce. Women are pretty much already running the show at every level; at least they are heavily represented to such a degree that nobody can sincerely argue that the Church is excluding women from involvement. The Church is already inundated with women. We don't need more women involvement. If anything, we need more male involvement. It is men who vanished from Catholic administration, schools, parish life, and liturgical service as servers, cantors, etc. And many of our priests, if they are not part of the homosexual clique, are far too effeminate. A entire gender has been silently atrophied away while progressives lament that the atrophy has not been extreme enough.

A Church without the active engagement of an entire gender is a Church on life support. Our Lord requested that we pray for vocations by asking God to send workers into His harvest; these days we need to pray also for the much more basic petition that one of the two human sexes merely shows up. What times indeed.

There's Always a Priest Shortage in Missionary Areas

The ostensible reason the ordination of married "elders" is being discussed for the Amazon is because of a critical priest shortage in the region.

Let us set aside for a moment the fact that the ideologue of the Amazon Synod, Bishop Fritz Lobinger, has stated that the priest shortage is not the real reason for the proposal to ordain married men; let us look at the historical background of "priest shortages" in general.

The Amazon is more or less a missionary region. I do not deny there is a priest shortage there. But there have always been priest shortages in mission areas. How is this a new problem? Mission territories generally don't have the population density or Catholic base to produce a sufficient level of indigenous priests. This is why evangelical efforts in mission countries have typically been spearheaded by foreign priests supported by subscriptions or donations from the faithful in more thoroughly Christianized areas. This is just common sense.

Let's review some history:

• There was a shortage of clergy in Samaria during the Book of Acts; the Bible says even after they had converted there was nobody in the territory to administer Confirmation so the Apostles had to make a trip up to them (Acts 8:14-17).
• There was a shortage of missionary priests willing to go to Ireland prior to it's conversion, even though there were already small bands of Christian Irish living there before St. Patrick.
• There was a shortage of priests in Anglo-Saxon England during the time of its conversion; priests sent from Gaul often times refused to cross the Channel and go over to Britain. Some of St. Augustine of Canterbury's own companions refused to leave Gaul.
• There was a shortage of priests in Germany during the Carolingian era. Missionaries like St. Boniface were constantly sending back to France, Italy, and Britain for more helpers.
• There was a shortage of priests to Asia during the 13th century Mongol period. It was not uncommon for friars sent east to abandon the journey before reaching Mongol territory.
• There was a shortage of priests in Japan during the period of the Christian persecutions. Japanese Catholics went generations without seeing a Catholic priest. 
• There were priest shortages in New Spain (Mexico) for many years until the Spaniards really started coming over en masse. Catholic converts sometimes went a year or more without access to the sacraments. 
• There was a shortage of priests among the Jesuits who evangelized New France. A single priest such as St. Isaac Jogues or Fr. Marquette might be in charge of thousands and thousands of miles of territory.
• There was a shortage of priests on the American frontier for most of the history of the United States. Priests traveled along exceptionally broad circuits, sometimes covering thousands of miles, in order to minister to their flock. Their letters to Europe are full of pleas for more priests to aid them in their work.  

I'm sure we could come up with many more examples. But the point is there have always been priest shortages in mission areas. The situation in the Amazon is absolutely not unique. In none of the situations listed above did anyone in the Church ever seem to think the solution was ordaining married men. Even in the case of New France, where Jesuits were being killed by Iroquois while simultaneously being expected to administer an ecclesial territory the size of Texas, there was no suggestion or ordaining married men, Jesuit novices were still required to put in years and years of training before ordination, and the speedy ordination of indigenous peoples was rejected—even though any one of those could have "solved" the problem by providing more priests to minister to the faithful.

But historically the Church has not viewed this as a problem that you solve by throwing more warm bodies into the grinder. Christendom was not built on the mentality of, "we need someone to do this job...meh, you'll do."

Of course, this is not really about a shortage of priests in the Amazon anyway. But...whatever.