The Conciliar/Synodal Church is not the Catholic Church – it lacks the necessary marks
Despite apparent legitimacy, the Conciliar or Conciliar/Synodal Church lacks the four notes essential to identify the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of Christ. But then where is the Church?
Many traditional Catholics assert that the “Conciliar Church” is not identical to the Roman Catholic Church.
The term “Conciliar Church” was actually invented by Cardinal Benelli of the Vatican, as Archbishop Lefebvre wrote in 1976:
“It thus appears impossible to approach the basic problem, which the agreement of the Conciliar Church, as H. E. Mgr. Benelli himself calls it in his last letter, and the Catholic Church. Let there be no mistake. It is not a question of a difference between Mgr. Lefebvre and Pope Paul VI. It is a question of the radical incompatibility between the Catholic Church and the Conciliar Church, the Mass of Paul VI being the symbol and the program of the Conciliar Church.”1
We started using the term “Conciliar-Synodal Church” in December 2023, to refer to the latest incarnation of the conciliar church of Vatican II. In the 2024 document The Bishop of Rome, published by the Dicastery of Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Koch used this term, raising the question: Have he and others in the Vatican been reading The WM Review?
In any case, we are happy to adopt their chosen designation of Conciliar/Synodal in place of Conciliar-Synodal.
In any case, the claim that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is distinct from the Catholic Church seems incomprehensible to many well-intentioned persons who simply want to be Catholic. After all, we all know that the Conciliar/Synodal Church has a more or less plausible prima facie claim to be the Roman Catholic Church:
It is headed by a man claiming to be the Roman Pontiff, based in Rome
Its representatives occupy various formerly Catholic buildings
Even its most outrageously non-Catholic officers appear to have some sort of material succession to the Apostles
It has retained some aspects of the Catholic faith and religion.
All these points could be summed up by saying that the Conciliar/Synodal Church has retained a sense of visibility, and it is to this visibility that its defenders most frequently appeal.
But those who appeal to this supposed visibility to insist that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is the Roman Catholic Church are motivated by natural considerations and are missing what is most important.
This consideration is naturalistic because it treats the Church of Christ as a society like any other (for example, a football club, a political party or even a religious order), albeit one whose continued nominal or legal existence is divinely guaranteed.
The visibility of the Church cannot be crassly reduced to the level of something like a football club, or any other merely human grouping: just so, her indefectibility cannot be crassly reduced to mere continuing existence.
The true doctrine holds that the Church is also distinctly visible as the true Church of Christ, with the same constitution and properties with which she was endowed by her Founder. It means that she will indefectibly and perpetually remain so.[1]
But the Conciliar/Synodal Church is not distinctly visible as the Roman Catholic Church, because it lacks such properties.
Let’s see why this is so.
The discontinuity of the Conciliar/Synodal Church
The lack of such properties, which are necessary to the Catholic Church, is a key reason as to why we say that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is not the Catholic Church.
If a shape lacks four sides, then it lacks a property necessary to a square; and by the fact of that lack, we know the shape is not a square.
Applied to the Conciliar/Synodal Church:
It manifestly lacks the necessary property of unity, particularly in faith.
There are multiple different faiths and religions exercised under the umbrella of the Conciliar/Synodal Church
Large percentages of its adherents openly reject what they know to be Church teaching.
It has thrown off the principal means by which the note of holiness is manifested to the world, and thus cannot be seen to possess the necessary property of holiness.
The relaxation of the notoriously stringent processes of canonisation and beatification, recognised as such by even the secular world
The relaxation of the previously high standards held in “institutes of perfection” (viz. the state of the secular clergy and of religious life) and the accompanying moral degradation
It has disclaimed the necessary property of catholicity,
By rejecting evangelisation under the name of “proselytism”
By declaring that not all men are obliged to enter the Church, i.e., in the Balamand Declaration regarding Eastern Schismatics, and various documents pertaining to the Jews and the Old Covenant.
It lacks a key aspect of the necessary property of apostolicity, as a result of its “apostolic hierarchy” having largely departed from the integrity of the apostolic faith.
Thus, taken “simpliciter”, the Conciliar/Synodal Church cannot be said to be identical with the living Roman Catholic Church.
The continuity of the Roman Catholic Church
However, this living Church remains precisely where she always was, albeit obscured by those who have left her.
She remains, as Pius XII taught, the body of men “who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed.”[2]
At least in the Western world, this body of men is the body of traditionalists, along with some of the conservatives here and there who remain materially entangled with the Novus Ordo structure.
This body of men exhibits the property of unity: even if they are materially divided in ways similar to the Great Western Schism, they remain visibly united in their profession of the Catholic faith, notwithstanding differences over confusing matters, or doctrinal matters which are not “of faith”.
This body of men exhibits the property of holiness, in the “causative sanctity” of the sacraments, doctrine and discipline, which are vigorously used. It also typically exhibits at least the ordinary personal sanctity through these means, and through the continuation and serious use of the institutes of perfection.[3]
This body of men exhibits the property of catholicity, in that they are diffused throughout the entire world (as any directory of Traditional Masses may indicate) and are typically very clear that the Church is for all men.
This body of men exhibits the property of apostolicity, in that history and the other marks show that it is apostolic in origin and doctrine.[4] While apostolicity in succession is harder to demonstrate, this body of men contains absolutely no intruders into the apostolic succession, as traditional bishops agree that they are “merely sacramental bishops”, or bishops in an auxiliary sense.
Similarly, by virtue of being Catholics, they remain united and in communion to whatever true successors of the apostles remain in the world, as well as with any and all other Catholics elsewhere. It is indeed difficult to see what, if anything, is left of the Latin-rite successors of the apostles after so many have disappeared into heresy and a false religion, as have several Eastern-rite claimants. But this is quite distinct from positing a universal negative, and saying that the entirety of the Church’s hierarchy has utterly disappeared.
In short, the location of the Roman Catholic Church is somewhat harder to verify than it was a century ago; but this is the very nature of an obscuration or eclipse.
As such, the Roman Catholic Church continues to exist, visibly, with these necessary properties intact. In spite of any problems and obscurity, there is no need or reason to conclude that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is the Roman Catholic Church.
We are often told that those who reject this Conciliar/Synodal Church are like those who could not recognise Our Lord in the humiliations of his Passion, and so either rejected him with the Jews or fled with the Apostles.
This could not be further from the truth.
As we shall see here in due course, those who insist that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is the Church of Christ are like the disciples who could not comprehend that Our Lord was somewhere other than where their natural expectations would have him – and so did not recognise him in his resurrection.
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[1] Salaverri n. 1123
[2] Mystici Corporis n. 22
[3] E.G. Berry 86.
[4] Berry 77
Note of July 12, 1976, to the Agence France-Presse. https://web.archive.org/web/20211213201555/http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/Archbishop-Lefebvre/Apologia/Vol_one/Chapter_12.htm
"We are often told that those who reject this Conciliar-Synodal Church are like those who could not recognise Our Lord in the humiliations of his Passion, and so either rejected him with the Jews or fled with the Apostles."
When I converted to the Catholic Church from the New Order sect, my kids (and kids are often more astute than adults) pointed out that it was ALMOST like the New Order secret had an aversion to the Passion, and so minimized trials and sufferings, and went out of it's way to make people feel good.
When they pointed that out, I was drawn to the situation in Esdras, Nehemias is asked, after the returning Jews have sold their children to slavery and mortgages their corn, they are in so much suffering. He responded that it was because they, in their desire to minimize suffering in a worldly sense, abandoned God. The trials of the New Order are self-inflicted, because they abandoned the True Faith...not some mystical passion.
“The true doctrine holds that the Church is also distinctly visible as the true Church of Christ, with the same constitution and properties with which she was endowed by her Founder. It means that she will indefectibly and perpetually remain so.”
So what does this hold for “traditional” groups, especially those that have their own constitution?