THE
P RTAL
December 2018
Page 3
P ortal Comment
Ordinariate Blogs
Will Burton has been reading some of them
O n 11th
November 2018 at liturgicalnotes.
blogspot.com Fr John Hunwicke asks “What
are Synods for?” He seeks help in his answer from
Blessed John Henry Newman.
I trust that readers will recall the emphasis
laid by Blessed John Henry Newman on the
essentially negative function of the Papal
Ministry. “... the Church of Rome ... has
originated nothing, and has only served as a
sort of remora, or break in the development
of doctrine ... such I conceive to be the main
purpose of its extraordinary gift.”
munus of brilliantly ‘developing’ Faith or Morals
so that what this decade desires to teach will (to
the eyes of poor ordinary Christians) look like
the diametrical opposite of what was taught a
decade previously.
This, of course, was also affirmed by Vatican I
in its lapidary assertion that the Holy Spirit was
not promised to the Successors of St Peter so that
they could promote new doctrines, but to help
them to defend and teach what had been handed
down through the Apostles, the Deposit of Faith. At peregrinus-peregrinus.blogspot.com which
proclaims itself as “Canadian Catholic Perspectives and
Reflections by members of the Personal Ordinariate of
the Chair of St Peter”, on 7th November we read:
In the first millennium, a pope might associate
with himself a Synod of those bishops who
happened to be in Rome. We should expect this
to be in discharge of the Ministry of resisting
error which is the Pope’s essential function... “In Rome the distance between what was
actually discussed by the synod fathers and what
was written by the drafting committee left a lot
of space for interpretation of what ‘synodality’
means.
....The Ecclesiology of this is very plain, and
is identical with the anti-heretical teaching of
St Irenaeus in the second century: the Catholic
Faith is ‘corroborated’ by the agreement of a
significant body of bishops, acting in union with
the Successor of St Peter, and witnessing to the
faith handed down in all their own orthodox
particular Churches. Some synod observers and members were
confused by the sudden emphasis on synodality,
others had a more pointed reaction. Bishops
from different countries denounced the language,
fearing it is a step towards a parliamentary,
Protestant approach to Church governance
and teaching authority. The pope appeared
to acknowledge these concerns in his closing
remarks saying that a synod is “not a parliament.”
To quote Newman again:
“the Church of Rome possessed no great mind
in the whole period of persecution. Afterwards,
for a long while it has not a single doctor to
show; St Leo, its first, is the teacher of one point
of doctrine; St Gregory, who stands at the very
extremity of the first age of the Church, has no
place in dogma or philosophy.”
Exactly. Synods ... and popes ... do not have the
Bishops pointed out that the pope’s teaching
authority in the Church is unique, and some
raised concerns about any synod resolution that
might degrade that authority.
Traditionally the role of the synod is primarily
to discuss an issue and offer the pope the fruits of
that discussion. It is the pope, in a later apostolic
exhortation, who produces the magisterial
document.”