ROME — Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former head of the Vatican’s highest court, warns in a new book that a move toward “synodality” is causing “evident and grave harm” to the Church.
In his foreword for The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box by José Antonio Ureta and Julio Loredo de Izcue, Cardinal Burke notes that the synodal path already put into practice in the Church in Germany has spread “confusion and error and their fruit, division – indeed schism” and with the imminent Synod on Synodality in Rome, “it is rightly to be feared that the same confusion and error and division will be visited upon the universal Church.”
The American cardinal underscores the revolutionary nature of trying to redefine the Church by synodality, “a term which has no history in the doctrine of the Church and for which there is no reasonable definition.”
From the time of the Apostles, the Church has been characterized by four marks, namely that it is “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic,” Burke observes, and never by synodality.
Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1964, never even mentioned the word synodality.
“Synodality and its adjective, synodal, have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding, in accord with a contemporary ideology which denies much of what the Church has always taught and practiced,” Burke writes.
It is vital to uncover the ideology at work, the cardinal declares, and to correct “the deadly confusion and error and division it is propagating,” inspiring the members of the Church to undertake true reform.
In his critique, Cardinal Burke echoes similar concerns voiced by other prominent cardinals who have found the Vatican’s move toward synodality troubling.
The late Cardinal George Pell, for instance, called the upcoming synod on synodality a “toxic nightmare,” insisting that it is “hostile” to the Church’s apostolic tradition.
The Catholic Synod of Bishops has produced “one of the most incoherent documents ever sent out from Rome,” Pell wrote in reference to the synod’s working document, and what was intended to express “God’s dream” of synodality “has developed into a toxic nightmare.”
The synodal document focuses primarily on radical inclusion, listening, participation, and co-responsibility with believers and nonbelievers, while ignoring central themes of Christian teaching and practice, Pell wrote.
In the text, the Christian message of salvation has been gutted of all content and “the distinction between believers and unbelievers is rejected,” he declared.
For his part, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, called the synodal path a “hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
“If they succeed, it will be the end of the Catholic Church,” he said of those promoting the synodal process. “And we must resist it like the old heretics of the Arianism.”
South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier sharply criticized the European bishops who are pushing a “hermeneutics of synodality,” saying they focusing more on structures and the exercise of power than on Jesus Christ.
“Isn’t this the basic problem with the Church, especially in the West, its focus is on structures and the exercise of power, not on Jesus?” he proposed.
