Vatican News portal reports on May 20, 2026, that the General Secretariat of the Synod has released a document titled *Towards the 2027–2028 Assemblies: stages, criteria, and tools in preparation for the 2027–2028 Assemblies*, outlining a four-stage process—Remembering, Interpreting, Orienting, Celebrating—designed to guide local “Churches,” Bishops’ Conferences, and continental groupings toward an “Ecclesial Assembly” in October 2028. Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod, describes this as “a time of shared discernment and thanksgiving,” insisting the assemblies are “not sociological consultations” but “a profound ecclesial and spiritual experience.” The document emphasizes an “exchange of gifts among the Churches” and calls for the inclusion of “people living in situations of fragility or marginalization,” alongside consecrated persons, members of movements, and the laity. This entire apparatus constitutes nothing less than the institutionalization of permanent revolution within the occupied Vatican structures—a ritualized process of collective apostasy masquerading as spiritual renewal, designed to consummate the final demolition of the Catholic Church’s hierarchical constitution and replace the immutable deposit of faith with an endless, self-referential dialogue rooted in humanism and religious indifferentism.
The Heresy of “Synodal Conversion”: A Perpetual Revolution Against the Divine Constitution of the Church
The very concept of “synodal conversion”—repeated like a mantra throughout the document and Cardinal Grech’s accompanying statement—is a theological absurdity that inverts the true nature of conversion. In Catholic doctrine, conversion means the turning of the soul *toward* God, toward the unchanging truths revealed by Christ and entrusted to the Church’s Magisterium. Pius XI, in *Quas Primas*, taught with luminous clarity that “the hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior.” The Church does not need “conversion”—she needs fidelity. The very notion that the Church herself must undergo perpetual “synodal conversion” implies that the Church founded by Christ was defective, that the Holy Ghost abandoned her governance, and that the faithful must now collectively reinvent her mission through endless consultation. This is the heresy of *ecclesia semper reformanda* carried to its logical and blasphemous extreme—the doctrine condemned in the strongest terms by every Pope who defended the divine constitution of the Church against the innovators.
The document speaks of “recognizing the steps we are called to take” as if the Church’s path were not already marked out with absolute precision by divine revelation, the councils, and the perennial Magisterium. St. Pius X, in *Lamentabili sane exitu*, condemned the proposition that “the organic structure of the Church is subject to change, and the Christian community, like the human community, is subject to continuous evolution” (proposition 53). Yet this is precisely the operating assumption of the entire synodal process: that the Church is a mutable human organization whose structures and even whose self-understanding must evolve through collective deliberation. The document’s four-stage process—Remembering, Interpreting, Orienting, Celebrating—is not a spiritual exercise but a bureaucratic methodology borrowed from corporate management theory and secular organizational development, applied with grotesque incongruity to the Mystical Body of Christ.
The “Exchange of Gifts”: Ecumenical indifferentism Elevated to Structural Principle
The document’s central mechanism—the “exchange of gifts among the Churches”—reveals the deeply ecumenical and ultimately indifferentist character of the entire enterprise. The language of “exchange of gifts” is not Catholic theological language; it is the language of the World Council of Churches, of interreligious dialogue, of the very religious relativism that Pius IX condemned in the *Syllabus of Errors*. Proposition 17 of the *Syllabus* condemned the idea that “good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.” Proposition 18 condemned the claim that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church.” The synodal process, by treating all “local Churches” as equal partners in an exchange of gifts, implicitly denies the unique and exclusive salvific mission of the Catholic Church—the only true Church of Christ.
When the document speaks of communities offering “what it has matured” and “becoming ready to receive what is offered by other Churches,” it is describing not the Catholic Church’s missionary mandate to teach, govern, and sanctify all nations, but a horizontal dialogue between entities presumed to possess equal spiritual authority. This is the ecumenism condemned by Pius XI in *Mortalium Animos* and by every Pope who upheld the dogma *Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*. The “gifts” being exchanged are not the sacraments, not grace, not the deposit of faith—they are “experiences,” “narrative reports,” and “theological-pastoral reports,” the currency of a bureaucratic process that has nothing to do with the supernatural life of the Church.
The Composition of the Assemblies: Democratization as Demolition of Hierarchy
The document’s specifications for the composition of the synodal assemblies reveal the democratizing impulse that has animated the conciliar sect since its inception. It calls for “appropriate attention to the relationship between men and women and between different generations, to cultural and ecclesial diversity,” and includes “priests, deacons, consecrated men and women, members of associations, movements, and new communities, and faithful not belonging to organised structures, as well as the presence of people living in situations of fragility or marginalization.” This is not the Catholic Church—it is a parliament, a congress, a secular assembly dressed in ecclesiastical vestments.
The Catholic Church is a hierarchical society, not a democracy. Christ did not establish a parliament; He established a kingdom. Pius XI, in *Quas Primas*, taught that “Christ possesses, in a word, dominion over all creatures, not by force but by essence and nature,” and that “from this it follows that Christ not only is to be adored as God by angels and men, but that angels and men are to be obedient and subject to His dominion as Man.” The authority to teach, govern, and sanctify was given by Christ to the Apostles and their successors—the bishops—not to assemblies of the laity, not to “synodal teams,” not to “people living in situations of fragility or marginalization.” The inclusion of such persons as participants in ecclesial discernment is not charity; it is the abdication of the hierarchical authority that Christ Himself established.
St. Pius X, in *Pascendi Dominici Gregis*, identified the democratization of the Church as one of the essential characteristics of Modernism: “The rule of the democratic spirit is to be recognized in the Church.” The synodal process is the fullest realization of this modernist program—the transformation of the Church from a divine monarchy into a human assembly where all voices carry equal weight and where the “Spirit” is discerned not through the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium but through the collective deliberation of the faithful.
Cardinal Grech’s “Shared Discernment”: The Theology of the Abyss
Cardinal Mario Grech’s statement that “we are proposing to local Churches not an additional task, but rather a time of shared discernment and thanksgiving, in which to reread together what the Spirit is causing to grow in the Church” deserves particular scrutiny. The phrase “what the Spirit is causing to grow in the Church” is deeply revealing. It implies that the Holy Ghost is actively producing new things in the Church—new structures, new understandings, new paths—that were not present in the Church’s previous teaching. This is the heresy of the evolution of dogmas, condemned by the First Vatican Council and by St. Pius X in *Lamentabili* (proposition 58: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him”).
The notion of “shared discernment” as a collective ecclesial practice is foreign to Catholic tradition. Discernment of spirits, in Catholic theology, is the work of individual souls under the guidance of a spiritual director, operating within the framework of established doctrine and the sacramental life. It is not a corporate exercise conducted by assemblies producing “narrative reports” and “theological-pastoral reports.” The very idea that the “fruits” of the synodal journey must be “recognized” through collective deliberation implies that the Church’s previous understanding was insufficient—that the Holy Ghost had more to reveal through the synodal process than through twenty centuries of Magisterial teaching.
Grech’s insistence that the assemblies are “not sociological consultations, deliberative processes, or technical evaluations” is a transparent attempt to obscure their true nature. If they are not consultations, not deliberations, not evaluations, then what are they? They are rituals—rituals of a new religion, the religion of synodality, which has its own liturgy (the four stages), its own priesthood (the synodal teams), its own creed (the “exchange of gifts”), and its own eschatology (the “Ecclesial Assembly” of 2028 as the culmination of the process). This is not Catholicism; it is the emergent liturgy of the Church of the New Advent, the paramasonic structure that has occupied the Vatican since the death of Pius XII.
The Calendar of Apostasy: 2027–2028 as the Consummation of the Conciliar Revolution
The document’s timetable—diocesan assemblies by June 2027, episcopal conference assemblies by December 2027, continental assemblies by April 2028, and the Ecclesial Assembly in October 2028—reveals the methodical, stage-by-stage character of the process. This is not spontaneous spiritual renewal; it is a carefully orchestrated campaign to consolidate the gains of the conciliar revolution and to institutionalize synodality as the permanent “style” of ecclesial life. The four-year cycle (2024–2028) mirrors the four-year cycle of the initial synod (2021–2024), suggesting that this is not a one-time event but a permanent structure—a perpetual synodal process that will never reach a definitive conclusion because its purpose is not to arrive at truth but to maintain the process itself.
The document’s guiding question—”what concrete face of a missionary synodal Church and what new paths of synodality are emerging in your community?”—is not a question seeking a definitive answer; it is a question designed to generate perpetual discussion, perpetual consultation, perpetual “discernment.” It is the question of a Church that has abandoned the certainties of faith and replaced them with the endless dialogue of human opinion. Pius IX, in the *Syllabus of Errors*, condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (proposition 80). The synodal process is precisely this reconciliation—the final capitulation of the occupied Vatican structures to the spirit of the age, dressed in the language of the Holy Ghost.
The Silence About What Matters: The Supernatural Vacuum at the Heart of Synodality
Perhaps the most damning feature of the entire document is what it does not say. There is no mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass—the true Mass, the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary, not the Protestantized “assembly” that has replaced it in the conciliar sect. There is no mention of the sacraments as the ordinary means of grace. There is no mention of the state of grace, of mortal sin, of the necessity of confession, of the reality of hell, of the obligation to convert non-Catholics, of the social reign of Christ the King over nations and peoples. There is no mention of the crisis of faith, of the apostasy that has consumed the Church’s hierarchy, of the duty of Catholics to resist the innovators and cling to immutable Tradition.
The document’s vocabulary is entirely naturalistic: “stages,” “criteria,” “tools,” “narrative reports,” “theological-pastoral reports,” “forward-looking reports,” “Instrumentum laboris,” “synodal teams,” “coordination.” This is the language of corporate management, of organizational development, of secular bureaucracy. It is the language of a Church that has lost all sense of the supernatural and reduced itself to a human institution concerned with “process” and “style” rather than with the salvation of souls. Pius XI, in *Quas Primas*, warned that “when God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The synodal process is the culmination of this removal—a Church that derives its authority not from Christ but from the collective deliberation of its members, a Church that has replaced the governance of the Holy Ghost with the governance of “synodal teams.”
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation, Institutionalized
The synodal process outlined in this document is not a reform of the Church; it is the final consummation of the destruction wrought by the conciliar revolution. It takes the errors of Vatican II—ecumenism, religious freedom, the democratization of the Church, the evolution of doctrine—and institutionalizes them as the permanent “style” of ecclesial life. It replaces the hierarchical constitution established by Christ with a horizontal network of “assemblies” and “synodal teams.” It replaces the deposit of faith with an endless process of “discernment” and “exchange of gifts.” It replaces the supernatural mission of the Church—the salvation of souls through the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments—with a naturalistic program of collective self-reflection and organizational development.
The faithful who still profess the integral Catholic faith must recognize this process for what it is: not a spiritual renewal but a spiritual catastrophe, not a work of the Holy Ghost but a work of the enemy, not the Church of Christ but the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. The response to synodality is not participation but resistance—resistance rooted in fidelity to the unchanging faith of the Church, to the true Mass, to the sacraments, to the social reign of Christ the King, and to the immutable teaching of the Magisterium. As Pius IX declared in the *Syllabus of Errors*, the Church has never disobeyed the divine command to render to God what is God’s. The synodal process is the ultimate act of rendering to Caesar what belongs to God—the governance of His Church—and it must be rejected with the same firmness with which the Church has always rejected error.
Source:
Synod releases document on path toward 2028 Ecclesial Assembly (vaticannews.va)
Date: 20.05.2026