Yes, you read that correctly. Since Protestants have been doing “synodality” far longer than we Catholics have, we need to study them to see how it’s done.

Or something like that.

Here’s what the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference put out this week:

To help better understand the place of synodality in the Catholic Church, ecumenical leaders will attend national Uniting and Anglican gatherings this month to see how synodality works in those communities.

The global Synod on Synodality has encouraged engagement with ecumenical and interfaith groups as part of the process leading towards the gathering in Rome in October 2023.

Cardinals Mario Grech, general secretary of the Synod of Bishops, and Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, recently said: “Conscious of our need for the accompaniment and the many gifts of our brothers and sisters in Christ, we call on them to journey with us during these two years and we sincerely pray that Christ will lead us closer to him and so to one another.”

ACBC Media blog May 4th.

So let me get this right: to learn how to be better Catholics, we need to learn from Protestants. Right.

Maybe we should send our teenagers to carjacking school to make them better drivers? Or send our daughters to Marie Stopes to make them better mothers? (Oh, I forgot – Archbishop Comensoli has already tried something like that.)

The article goes onto say that the Australian Synod of Bishops committee is sending “key ecumenical leaders” (Catholics) to the Uniting Church’s Assembly and to the Anglican Synod, which are both being held this month. This is where some of your hard-earned church-offerings are ending up, friends: sending Catholics to take notes from the Protestants.

One of the participants is a Fr Trainor, a priest from Adelaide. He said that “One of the key lessons I’ve learned is that open and friendly dialogue is at the heart of communion in faith …. The core of our communion is Baptism, which leads us to see each other as sisters and brothers in faith.”

So which is it, Father? Is it Baptism or is it “dialogue” that is the basis of our alleged communion with heretical churches? It matters not – neither would pass the Syllabus test, would they?

One good thing could come of this kind of meeting, though. If Catholics hear from their Protestant peers about the numerous difficulties involved in being a married priest, or the practical challenges of being a female priestess, or the lack of acceptance for (God forbid) an openly sodomite bishop, they just might have second thoughts about their own radical plans for the Church.

But until then, be prepared for more of this nonsense as the increasingly irrelevant Plenary movement morphs into the far more fashionable Synodality movement.

At least that’s what the Bishops are trying to convince us of, anyway.