In 1907, Pope Saint Pius X warned Catholics about the most pernicious enemies the Church has ever faced. He called them Modernists. He warned that they were already working within the very veins and heart of the Church, even within the clergy, to destroy the meaning of Faith itself by changing it from belief in divinely revealed truths into merely an experience of the personal religious sentiment (feelings). He said that the Modernists’ errors were the synthesis of all heresies (i.e. apostasy), and that their ideas would destroy all true faith and religion. He exposed their plan to completely change the Church under the guise of “reforming” it. This is what St. Pius said concerning the Modernist concept of what their “reformed” Church would be:

     23. ... What, then, is the Church? It is the product of the collective conscience (consciousness), that is to say of the society of individual consciences which by virtue of the principle of vital permanence, all depend on one first believer, who for Catholics is Christ. Now every society needs a directing authority to guide its members towards the common end, to conserve prudently the elements of cohesion which in a religious society are doctrine and worship.

     Hence the triple authority in the Catholic Church, disciplinary, dogmatic, liturgical. The nature of this authority is to be gathered from its origin, and its rights and duties from its nature. In past times it was a common error that authority came to the Church from without, that is to say directly from God; and it was then rightly held to be autocratic. But this conception had now grown obsolete. For in the same way as the Church is a vital emanation of the collectivity of consciences, so too authority emanates vitally from the Church itself. Authority therefore, like the Church, has its origin in the religious conscience, and, that being so, is subject to it. Should it disown this dependence it becomes a tyranny. For we are living in an age when the sense of liberty has reached its fullest development, and when the public conscience has in the civil order introduced popular government. Now there are not two consciences in man, any more than there are two lives. It is for the ecclesiastical authority, therefore, to shape itself to democratic forms, unless it wishes to provoke and foment an intestine conflict in the consciences of mankind. The penalty of refusal is disaster. For it is madness to think that the sentiment of liberty, as it is now spread abroad, can surrender. Were it forcibly confined and held in bonds, terrible would be its outburst, sweeping away at once both Church and religion. Such is the situation for the Modernists, and their one great anxiety is, in consequence, to find a way of conciliation between the authority of the Church and the liberty of believers. [Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907 — emphasis added]

     Examining St. Pius X’s words we see the following points stand out in bold relief as corresponding to the Synodal Church of Francis: (1) Instead of belief in truths of divine revelation, faith comes from the believers’ own experiences of life. (2) The bishops must listen to the believers, the “people of God,” in order to learn about their experiences and thereby “discern” from them what the faith is. (3) When the hierarchy has discerned the faith from the people’s experiences, then they relate their discernment to Francis. (4) Once the bishops have briefed Francis of what they have discerned from listening to the experiences of the people, Francis then discerns and formulates the teachings of the Spirit for the Church at that time.

     Francis himself announced the plan for his Synodal Church on October 17, 2015, in his address at the ceremony commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops by Paul VI. “From the beginning of my ministry as Bishop of Rome, I sought to enhance the Synod, which is one of the most precious legacies of the Second Vatican Council. For Blessed Paul VI, the Synod of Bishops was meant to reproduce the image of the Ecumenical Council [Vatican II] and reflect its spirit and method. Francis goes on to explain how Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI all promoted the creation of the “synodal church,” and then he states: “We must continue along this path. ... It is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the third millennium.” He states that synodality is “a constitutive element of the Church” and says that all are called to “the commitment to build a synodal Church,” and even explains that it will give a new understanding to the role of the episcopacy and the papacy itself.

     The three powers which the Church possesses actually belong to the society of believers, Those powers concern her teachings (dogmatic authority), her worship (liturgical authority), and her morals and practice (disciplinary authority). All authority of the Church arises from, corresponds to, and ultimately must answer to “the people” (the society of believers) as in a democracy. This is exactly the blueprint for the synodal Church which Francis is creating. No wonder Francis has just appointed Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez as the new Prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Fernandez, author of the book “Heal me with your mouth: The art of kissing,” will take office mid-September, just in time for the start of Francis’ Synod on Synodality in October. During a sermon in March, Fernandez remarked: “You know that, for many centuries, the Church went in another direction. It unwittingly developed a whole philosophy and morality full of classification, to classify people, to put labels on people. ... This one is like this; this one is like that. This one can receive Communion, this one cannot receive Communion. This one can be forgiven, thus one cannot. Terrible that this has happened to us in the Church. Thank God, Pope Francis is helping us to free ourselves from these patterns.”