Synodality, ‘Instrumentum Laboris’ and the culture wars
by Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald:
It was forty years ago that I walked into an Anglican Communion service in Canada and encountered my first Anglican woman priest in the liturgy. I was rather excited. I was not long out of Anglican theological college and no one had quite understood what the fuss was all about. The issue about priesthood had been presented very simply and simplistically: “If men can, why can’t women?”.
My experience that day was both powerful and strange. I found myself experiencing a severe and incomprehensible clash between rationality and intuition, head against heart, that was going to act as a commentary on the future of both Church and society.
In fact it has taken me forty years to understand the implications of that moment and to “join the dots”.
Even now, very few find themselves able to join up the dots between the desire of the Church to reach out to placate a secular progressive culture, and what appears to be the paradoxical sexual depravity combined with a degree of social control and exclusion exercised against Christians and traditionalists in general.
Depravity may seem a harsh word to use. But Pride processions in particular seem to celebrate pushing the boundaries of sexual deviancy to new limits. This June, “Pride Month”, the latest Pride celebration in New York saw a crowd of “Alphabet people”, comprising of bare-breasted topless drag queens, shouting with jubilation: “we’re here, we’re queer and we are coming for your children”. Meanwhile, on the other side of America in Seattle, the Pride procession comprised of hordes of naked cyclists exhibiting their genitalia joyfully in front captive children.
We are entitled to ask if there is a connection between this aggressive sexualised culture and our embarking on an act of cultural synthesis with a sub or anti-Christian culture by means of the process of Synodality. The question we should ask is whether Synodality appears to have the energy to convert secular culture to the faith, or whether the priorities of secular culture subvert the faith and change it.
Given what has been happening in the UK in the arena of sex education as we discover primary school children being taught about masturbation in sex education classes, we will never be able to say that “they” made any secret that the progressive project was ultimately about the sexualisation of our children. The New York gay sloganeers were telling the truth.
But what does that have to do with the Anglican Canadian priestess?
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