“Archbishop Aquila reminds us of the words of Pope Francis, ‘The Successor of Peter, yesterday, today and tomorrow, is always called to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the priceless treasure of that faith which God has given as a light for humanity’s path’,” Archbishop Cordileone said.
“Yes. Let us remember above all our first love, Christ crucified,” he added.
Archbishop Aquila also offered criticisms of other parts of the German text.
“Even in the Church, legitimate views and ways of life can compete with each other even in core convictions,” the text stated. “Yes, they can even at the same time make the theologically justified claim to truth, correctness, comprehensibility, and honesty, and nevertheless be contradictory to each other in their statements or their language.”
Archbishop Aquila responded that such a claim is “remarkable...if only for its incomprehensibility.”
“It is difficult to know how to comment on it, for such a candid rejection of the law of non-contradiction is already its own reductio ad absurdum,” he added. “Despite lip service to the authority of Scripture and tradition, it is evident that the Synodal Assembly’s interpretive approach is sufficiently malleable to strip them of any truly decisive content.”
He warned that the text revealed “deeper maladies” in its view of Church authority.
The text has “an astonishing paucity of references to the Gospels,” he said. The Church’s hierarchical nature was the “manifest intention of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit themselves,” he said, and is “outside the competence of the Church, in Germany or elsewhere, fundamentally to alter it.”
The Church’s hierarchy is not purified through a worldly system of checks-and-balances, but through “penance and the sincere pursuit of holiness,” he continued.
The text wrongly demands that the Church be “easy to grasp and efficient, designed for its effectiveness and able to be used without causing harm,” he wrote.
“The Sacraments—and much less the Church!—are not our ‘instruments’. They are God’s instruments, for he alone is the principal efficient cause of all the graces mediated through the Church and the Sacraments,” Aquila wrote.
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