Synod Showdown Report—October 23, 2015

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Friday's press conference, the second to last, just ended a little bit ago. Two pieces of news coming out: One is that they are just going over the initial draft of the Final Relatio and the bishops are going over it. There were 1335 submissions by the bishops — they're called modi — saying they'd like to change this, strike this, add this, reword this, that sort of thing. So that's what they are doing. They're going to have the Final Relatio, and they say they're going to take all of those things, and the drafting committee, which is made up of seven very liberal cardinals and archbishops and priests (the Superior General of the Jesuits) — they are going to take all of those suggestions (they tell us at the press office) and put it all together and produce the Final Relatio. And then tomorrow this whole three-week extravaganza, which many are saying is just kind of a dog-and-pony show, is going to come to an end. They're going to vote up and down on the document, and then they're going to vote individually on each of the paragraphs.

Whether any of that will be released to the public is still a question. The very fact that that's still a question right now raises a question: Why can't you just make the call now? What's the big deal? Some people are saying, well, the bad guys are waiting to see how the vote goes. If it's overwhelmingly in support of their position, they'll release it and say, "Hey look, all the bishops agree." If it doesn't get the great number of votes that they want or calls into question some of the liberal, progressive stuff, they just won't release it. So the final thing is going to go to the Pope, and what the Pope is going to do to it is still a question also. Tomorrow's the last day, so as we wrap up the Synod, it's pretty safe to say the Synod isn't actually over. The official Synod is over, but all the fallout, all the ramifications of it now are what we're still waiting to find out about. When that comes is anybody's guess.

The second thing that was extraordinarily revealing here about the mind of some of the bishops, Cdl. Peter Turkson, who is on the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, made a comment. I'll say it again, every day this week, it's been the very last thing said at the very end of the hour-long press conference. He let drop a bombshell when he said, "I studied in America in the early 1970s, 1971 and 1972, and at that time, homosexuality was viewed as a psychological disorder. Then in 1973, the U.S. Psychological Association got together and struck that understanding from their official guide, saying it's not a psychological problem and accepted it as just a normal expression of sexuality."

Now we could go into all the reasons why that happened. In short, a bunch of political gay radicals — this was slightly after the Stonewall Riots in 1968. That group had mobilized. They actually invaded the hall where that happened and forced them to change it over the course of three different days. You can look at all of that on our FBI on homosexuality that we produced about a year and a half ago.

But more to the point, this is extremely revealing because Cardinal Turkson has bought into that! And he made the outlandish comment that now that we understand it's not a psychological issue, we just have to give some time to other countries (and he named Russia) to catch up to this and become more enlightened that homosexuality is not really a psychological disorder.

That is scary talk. That is scary talk that a prince of the Church would have bought into that. And why? Because he was in America in the early 1970s when all the wheels were coming off the wagon. He was just probably some young little priest or seminarian sitting there hearing all the madness and just drank it in, drank the Kool-Aid. And now, 40 years later, here it is being regurgitated here at the Vatican.

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