By David Warren

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Now for Mr. Warren's column: Perhaps my criticism of the Instrumentum Laboris, and the various documents that follow from it through the Synod on Synodality, is trivial. This is because I find them trivial. Doctrines are suggested without any argument besides the implication that they are modern and up-to-date.

To start narrowly and personally, I did not become a Catholic in order to be modern and up-to-date. I did have to choose. Indeed, I was fleeing the intellectual, spiritual, emotional and sometimes physical fashions of my time, by signing up to the Church. Had I been born a Catholic, I do not see how I would not have had to pass through a similar revulsion. For I cannot imagine an upbringing, anywhere in the modern world, where this could be avoided.

One is, as it were, marked for "martyrdom." As all readers will I hope already know, this word does not describe a martyr's death, necessarily, but the martyr's "witness," from the Greek word for witness and Greek suffix for "a state or condition."

Being a Catholic sets one apart, as, more extensively, it always has. The best social analogy I can imagine is being Jewish. It is, in that comparison, not an option. God comes into it. One is "chosen" and cannot be unchosen. For the Catholic (who is Christian "par excellence") one is bathed in the Grace. Even in moments of religious doubt, he cannot escape it.

I have met many Catholics who tried. I haven't met one who succeeded, although the attempts to be free of Our Lord involve him in much pain and confusion.

This is also true of those who don't quite escape, and who are marked by a confusion that is a source of pain, for them and for others. In the absence of moral clarity, intellectual clarity is unavailable to them, and vice versa.

My trivial critique of the Instrumentum Laboris, et seq., is papistical. I was informed by Pope Pius X, and most recently, by a meditation on this passage from Pascendi Dominici Gregis ("On the Doctrine of the Modernists,"1907):

It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast.

Here, I think Pius X (I'm aware that I may be criticized even for my choice of popes) was most alarmingly prescient, for his criticism would continue to be current more than a century later. His critique of the modernists of his day pertains so well to all features of the Synod on Synodality today, that I would invite all Catholics who have an interest in their religion to read the whole thing.

Even so, this tiny passage has a broader application, to the ecclesiastical fruits of the last sixty seasons. The sainted pope continues that the Modernists:

cry out that ecclesiastical government requires to be reformed in all its branches, but especia...