The Synod Perfectly Encapsulates The Left

In our parish, we are participating in the second round of the synodal process which is being hyped by Catholic leadership. It's like dying, only without the good parts.

The synodal process is just that - a process. We have been told not to set goals or look for outcomes, but participate in the process of listening and understanding. To illustrate this, we've been given a 20-page booklet with helpful guidance and real-world examples. Ohioan will recognize this immediately as symptomatic of the very worst of the strategic planning teams we ever had the misfortune to join at work.

In one of these examples, a priest in our diocese wrote about a decision he and some leading members of the parish made to use parish buildings to house "migrants," i.e. illegals. He then talked about the synodal process where some members of his parish objected.

Our parish, xxx, initiated a migrant shelter in October of 2023. The question that was quickly coming to us as we are using a much-needed community space, is "how long are we going to do this?" My fellow priests and I felt, after a few months and some good advice, that we needed to give this shelter a full year to see the ups and downs of migrant cycles in order to make a good discernment. We are hoping that this year of discernment includes a variety of voices. While I will probably give more credibility to the voices of those who are more involved in the shelter, one of my brothers points out that we also need to listen to the voices of those who are not so crazy about the idea, or those who feel like we are putting too much of our attention in the shelter to the neglect of some other programs.

Emphasis mine. You see, he is going to listen, undoubtedly with a condescending and smarmy smile on his face, to those "who are not so crazy about the idea" and then he's going to do exactly what he wants because he's already gamed the system by giving greater weight to the pro-migrant crowd.

Welcome to the synodal process! God is love!

We had a planning meeting to discuss how we will do our own synodality synoding and got an earful of just this kind of thing. An AWFL brought up the migrants in our session, insisting that we make them a big part of our topics for synodishness. Trying to be helpful, she had been taking notes on just who in the parish had shown bigotry recently and just how they had been doing it. It was lovely and full of love and lovingly served the God of love.

At that point, I and the others who didn't want to see the synodification devolve into house-to-house fighting in the parish had a choice to make. We could either push back or we could remain quiet and see if it would blow over. One woman asked if she could hear the names and the crimes. The AWFL refused to do so in a most synodalicious way. Personally, I couldn't think of a way to push back that didn't end in shouting, so I kept quiet.

In retrospect, this perfectly encapsulates almost all interactions with progressives. They are full of love and you are a bigot. From that starting point, you are supposed to engage in dialog.

On the plus side, the rest of the country isn't as stupid as San Diego. We are the only diocese dumb enough to engage in Round 2 of Synodalizing. In fact, here in the diocese of San Diego, as I understand it, more than half the parishes have simply refused to participate. It's no wonder. The thing is doomed to end in shouting and tears. After all, there are just so many bigots out there and they are all so full of hate.

Synodality in action.

God Speaks To Me In Prayer

 ... for real, I am sure of it. But those conversations, I believe, are limited to those things about which I have direct, personal knowledge.

A good friend of mine, we'll call him Andy, recently fell while hiking a local, canyon trail. The trails can be uneven and steep. My friend is in his mid-60s. He braced himself with his hands and when he fell, he badly injured both shoulders, possibly damaging his rotator cuffs. He's been in pain since then.

Andy's life is defined by active service for others. He is the ultimate handyman having worked as a mechanic for decades and, through enforced frugality, having repaired, rebuilt or constructed everything in his house and his children's houses. He, with family help, recently did a moderately-sized remodel of his own house, doing almost all of the work himself.

Andy cannot watch a movie all the way through because he wants to be working on something instead. He would never watch a sporting event all the way through if not doing so at one of our dinners or parties where the game is the excuse for the get together. His entire being is defined by his productive, physical activity.

The fall and injury took that away from him, at least temporarily. Andy and I don't have a whole lot in common - we can't discuss sports, theology or most of the things on this blog. Still, I see him and his wife a couple of times a week, so we socialize quite a bit. I like Andy and enjoy his company.

During my morning prayer recently, I thought about him as I spoke my thoughts out loud to God*. I believe that God or the Holy Spirit or Jesus or whatever pointed out to me that Andy is going through excruciating, psychological pain right now. Andy, being Andy, doesn't show it, perhaps not even to himself. What I needed to do was use my gifts as an ENFJ and draw out his feelings and thoughts about his injury, his recovery and his inability to do the things he normally does. I needed to give him a place to talk about it.

I needed to love Andy in the way he needed to be loved.

I believe this was divine because, at the time, my thoughts were consumed with my ongoing war with the bottle, the presence of the pit bull puppy and the way it was wrecking my life, the lack of the Alabama river house and any number of other self-pitying introspections. There is nothing more important than me, you understand. What I heard was gentle, loving, compassionate, true and perfectly suited to my nature and gifts. It was oriented towards someone other than me.

The next time I saw him, the interaction was only brief, I asked him about how he was doing and he brightened visibly as he told me how he was feeling. He was still in a good deal of pain and it prevented him from doing things. He liked having someone who understood and listened.

Bingo.

Going back to the recent theme on this blog where I rage against the Eccliastical machine, I don't believe the Holy Spirit would tell me to vote for JD Vance when he responded to me in prayer. I don't know JD personally and while I may think he'd make an excellent president, he very well may be a self-serving crook in ways I can't see. It would be a form of insider trading for the Holy Spirit to give me divine guidance to direct my voting.

Similarly, the Holy Spirit isn't guiding the Catholic bishops or the Pope, for that matter, to support open borders and the "migrants." Those issues are hopelessly complicated with winners and losers no human can hope to estimate. For the Holy Spirit to give such guidance would be to imply that Heaven has run the numbers and they come out squarely on the side of mass migration. The bishops, being fallible humans of no particular skill in macroeconomics, cultural assimilation, political science, environmental studies, etc, certainly couldn't run those numbers themselves.

To believe that the Holy Spirit is guiding our prelates to support mass migration is to believe that the Holy Spirit is engaging in insider trading at the highest levels.

As Aquinas said, to love is to will the good of the other. In the case of mass migration, the "other" is absolutely everyone. Even AI run on supercomputers would have no hope of working out those equations reliably. The question of what is "the good of the other" in this case is hopelessly complicated.

While I have direct, first-hand experience of divine guidance and intervention in my life, I simply cannot believe that Heaven is handing us the answers to questions as cosmically difficult as that.

Yeah, I don't think it works this way.

* - I've learned to follow Andrew Klavan's dictum - when you pray, speak out loud because it forces you to speak in complete sentences and think clearly about what you're saying. I also follow the teaching of many, many Catholic teachers who say that prayer is conversation with God.

Jesus Is A Muslim

One more in my series on this kind of thing and then I promise I'll stop.

That graphic is from an article in America magazine, or something similarly airheaded, where the US Catholic bishops make the case for supporting mass migration.

The primary outcome after 15 years of mass migration has been a dramatic increase in the populations and power of Muslims across Europe and North America. As a predictable result, girls are being raped, Jews are being persecuted and churches are being desecrated or burned. The locals are getting a bit restive as well.

Volley of bottles against Gardai at CityWest earlier pic.twitter.com/IZrfqFIMYp

— Aris Roussinos (@arisroussinos) October 21, 2025

From the article at that link:

Fearing a riot, the Irish authorities yesterday evening shut down the Luas tram line from central Dublin to the suburban village of Saggart, southwest of the city centre. It didn’t work. Many hundreds — perhaps a thousand — angry protestors had gathered outside the gates of the Citywest IPAS (asylum) centre, hurling missiles and abuse at the Gardai public order unit blocking them from forcing their way up the long and wooded drive to the hotel.

The day before, an African asylum seeker had been charged with the sexual assault of a 10-year old Irish girl on the grounds of the Citywest centre, a 2,500-bed hotel recently acquired at vast expense by the Irish government, against fierce local opposition in the 4,500-strong community. The suspect, who needed an Arabic translator, was issued with a deportation order this spring and hadn’t yet been removed; the victim, in the care of Ireland’s scandal-hit Tusla child protection agency, found her chaotic personal circumstances publicised by the state in a manner many on social media saw as tantamount to victim-blaming. Outside the IPAS centre, the toxic combination had fired up both locals and protestors from across the country, who now had very little time for Ireland’s main political parties, or the police forces standing between them and the hotel they wished to storm.

An African Muslim "migrant" raped a 10-year-old Irish girl and those crazy, unpredictable Irish got their Irish up.

Jesus, being omniscient, must have predicted this on the way to the sports betting site where he was picking up his winnings from betting heavily on Georgia this weekend. Since the Catholic Church has played a significant role in the mass migration crisis by loudly supporting the migrants and since the bishops claim to be informed by the Holy Spirit through prayer and since they also claim that Jesus is present in the whole thing, we can safely assume that all is going according to God's plan.

Personally, the only conclusion I can reach as I look at demographic predictions that show many European countries becoming majority Muslim in a few decades and political polls showing that NYC will soon have a Muslim communist mayor, is that Jesus has switched sides and now plays for Team Islam.

Prove me wrong, bishops.

Jesus Does Not Like The Jews

We know this from modern Catholic teaching, summarized here.

1. Our prelates are convinced they are being guided by the Holy Spirit.
2. The Holy Spirit has told them to support open borders and welcome all migrants.
3. Muslims are a good chunk of those migrants.
4. Those Muslim migrants have now become a majority in several locations. Birmingham, England, for example, where Jews were recently forbidden from attending a soccer match.
5. In many Muslim-heavy locations, Jews are persecuted and sometimes killed.
6. The Holy Spirit, being omniscient, knew this would happen, as did anyone with even the faintest familiarity with Islam.
7. Ergo, the Holy Spirit does not like Jews.
8. As we say in the Nicene Creed every week, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial.
9. Ergo, Jesus does not like the Jews, either.

Man, Jesus' home life with his Jewish Mother Mary must have been wild.

In The UK, No Jews Is Good Jews

This is unreal.

I welcome the news that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans will not be permitted to watch the match at Aston Villa! Well done to all those that signed our petition! pic.twitter.com/cRDtdDc7ad

— Ayoub Khan MP (@AyoubKhanMP) October 16, 2025

Birmingham Islamic preacher, Astar Rashid, told his followers that the Muslims of Birmingham “should show no mercy” to the football fans from Tel Aviv.

And the British police just announced that it is not capable of protecting the Jewish fans.

The UK has a big problem pic.twitter.com/dFVoC0eD1F

— The Uri (@uricohenisrael) October 16, 2025

It's For Their Own Good

 ... that we should repeal the 19th Amendment.

Here's something I hadn't considered: women are much more liberal than men. Liberal governments are the ones who have opened their countries' borders to the "migrants." Now the migrants are raping women like mad. Women continue to vote for those same liberals.

Women are voting to be raped.

Women's risk of being gang-raped in Europe would be reduced to just ~25% of the current level if there had been no Muslim / African mass immigration.

The Muslim / African mass immigration has made Europe less safe for women to an extreme degree. pic.twitter.com/y8kJKEUVaV

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) October 13, 2025

Here's a reasonable explanation, one that jives with my own experiences and the deep-dive I did into writing romantic fiction with AI. I don't agree with the over-broad generalization, but the sense of the thing seems true.

For women, it's better to risk getting raped than to be seen as lacking empathy.

That sounds insane, but it fits the facts.

They Aren't Smart Enough To Want Anarchy

Continuing with my model of primitives instead of progressives, let's look at this excellent blog post about the decay in Chicago.

A driving reason for me to start (my business elsewhere) was because I saw that Chicago was on the brink of a financial precipice. I knew the politicians were full of themselves when they touted the “diversity of the economy”. Chicago was and is driven by financial services. Chicago has lost insurance, banking, investment banking, and other major verticals in finance. It has accounting, and it has trading...

I was early in this realization. An old friend who has passed away, Dan Rahill, and I went to lunch. Two CEOs laid out the math on city/county/state budgets, pensions, and everything else. A career bureaucrat stood up at that lunch and said any reform was against the Constitution.

Dan and I quickly realized that either we grow the economic opportunity, or we move.

He goes on to discuss how he left and doesn't miss Chicago because those remaining are angry with Trump's efforts at deporting illegals and the ICE raids. After a few anecdotes, he summarizes the situation as follows.

There are some truths about immigration and illegal aliens.

1. You cannot have open borders with a welfare state. It’s impossible.
2. It is lawful to deport illegal aliens. They aren’t here legally, and it is the federal government’s role to do it. There is no such thing as a sanctuary state or city. Asserting such is not any different than assertions by the old Confederacy that they were above federal law.
3. When there is no law, and there is no will to enforce the law, or there is only a selective will to enforce some laws, anarchy will reign. Totalitarians love anarchy. It’s what Lenin brought to Russia to take control. It is the playbook of Saul Alinsky. Anarchy begets totalitarianism.

1 is spot on. 2 is a poor reading of the legality of secession in 1861, but it's close enough for our purposes. 3 may be correct, but it's irrelevant. Anarchy might lead to totalitarianism but in a place where the residents can choose to flee, it will be warring tribes living in mud huts and squalor, not a modern city. Who cares who rules the place at that point?

Dig this from South Africa.

As the primitives gain more and more power, money and skilled people flee both Chicago and South Africa. The ones who are leaving, just like my friends who have left California, are the builders and producers. The ones staying behind are the primitives. Thus, the spiral downward continues.

Lots of people on the right keep going on about totalitarianism, anarcho-socialism and the plots of the Globalists. It hardly matters whether or not the primitives wrecking the place have some grand plan or not. They're tearing those places to bits.

It's not really a blog post without a dig at the primitives who run our Church, is it?

The bit about open borders and a welfare state being incompatible touched a nerve. We receive regular earfuls about Catholic social teaching (read: lots of welfare) and support of the "migrants" from our leaders in the Church. Sigh.