Greek Bishop Exposes Neo-Modernist “Synodality”

True and False Ressourcement

In 1575 the Lutheran heretics sent a letter to the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II. In their hubris, they assumed that the Greeks would confirm their false doctrines of the “Five Solas.” They had claimed these Solas had restored the faith of the early church. They were surprised to learn that the Greeks condemned their doctrines like Trent.

But it’s more complicated than that. Rome and the west have always been in a position of resourcing the Greek and other eastern traditions. 1575 was the high water mark for one of the most significant movements of this kind, known to history as the Renaissance. The so-called “Byzantine Papacy” (537-752) is another movement like it, and so is the so-called “High Middle Ages.”

The complicated reality is that the heretics and the Catholics from the west both want to mine the treasures of Greek wisdom, but for entirely different ends. The heretics have always wanted to find justification for their heresies in the east, whereas the orthodox have striven to bring about a higher Catholic synthesis of east and west. The heretics seek to use the Greeks to destroy the Latin tradition. But the orthodox restore Greek in order to exalt the veritatis splendor of Greco-Roman Christendom.

The Trad Weakness about Vatican II

This is most acute when we evaluate one of the weakest points in our Trad movement: our critique of Vatican II. This weakness results in part from an error which Kennedy Hall calls “No Salvation Outside Thomism.” There is a certain post-Tridentine excess that overreacted to the heretical resourcing of the Greeks and became a hyper-Latinising, hyper-Thomism, especially after 1870, which helped to create hyperüberultramontanism which is the false spirit of Vatican One. If this obtains in our movement, we fail in our critique of Vatican II to distinguish between the orthodox ressourcement of the east and the neo-Modernist version. As I discuss in my book, City of God vs. City of Man, it was for this reason that the Eastern Catholic bishops sided with the European Alliance, instead of our Trad godfathers, Archbishop Lefebvre and the Coetus Internationlis Patrum. (This is why at OnePeterFive we are trying to reverse this false alliance with a more sound Trad attitude of the east, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay).

Unfortunately, I have this seen this equivocal critique from Archbishop Lefebvre in his book Letter to Confused Catholics. Obviously the main point of the archbishop is absolutely correct and prophetic: namely, the Council was an occasion for the Neo-Modernist conspiracy to impose their ugly Neo-Iconoclasm on the faithful, leading to the loss of souls from the Ark of Salvation.

However, the Archbishop fails to make the distinction necessary to gain an ally in the eastern Bishops who also oppose Neo-Iconoclasm, and have their martyrs and the Sunday of Orthodoxy to prove it.

Orthodox Collegiality vs. the Neo-Modernist #SchismaticWay

This is evident in the SSPX critique of collegiality. If we understand Collegiality in terms of the Schismatic Way, collegiality is an obvious error that Lefebvre also suffered from, as the French episcopate attempted to destroy him with calumny and a conspiracy of lies. However, in order for this critique to hold water against the faithful Catholics in the Communio crowd, we must distinguish between the truly orthodox tradition of collegiality and the obvious insanity of the Neo-Modernist schismatic way. Thankfully, the Schismatic Way is uniting Catholics from all stripes to oppose the regime of Iconoclasm which is in power at the Vatican.

A Greek Bishop Throws Down the Gauntlet

Recently, Greek Catholic bishop Manuel Nin, the apostolic exarch to Greece, has emerged to take a stand. He makes the proper distinction about collegiality and voices his concern about the Schismatic Way. The first distinction he makes is that true orthodox collegiality is episcopal:

When it is stated that: “… you in the East have always had synodality…”, is there not a danger of misunderstanding when, looking at the Eastern Churches, one confuses synodality with episcopal collegiality? The latter, in the East, is associated with the exercise of authority, the pastoral ministry, the service within the Christian Churches that takes place in the assembly of bishops belonging to a particular Church and is headed by a patriarch, an archbishop or a metropolitan.

So the first aspect of a traditional and orthodox collegiality, according to Bishop Nin, is that it concerns the bishops alone to be in power. He further adds the following:

If the West understands synodality as a place or as a moment where everyone, laity and clergy, act together in order to arrive at some ecclesiastical, doctrinal, canonical, disciplinary decision, whatever it may be, it becomes clear that such synodality does not exist in the East.

What the Schismatic Way presents is another rehash of Vatican I and Vatican II: a mob mentality which utilises the press to put pressure on the bishops to reach a certain conclusion.[1] This is not traditional lay involvement in ecumenical councils, which traditionally is for the lay nobility to 1.) protect the bishops with their armies and 2.) input their own wisdom in a limited way, but only for the sake of the depositum fidei.[2]

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