Queen’s Former Chaplain Gives Dire Warning To Catholics About Latest Synod LGBT Guidance

It’s one thing for an internet Anon to weigh in on questions of doctrine. But this guy was Chaplain to the Queen, fled to Catholicism, and is seeing the same ideological rot spread in his newfound home.

Often, the most ardent activists for a political cause are the people who find they’ve been crushed under the weight of a negative outcome. Gavin Ashenden, who once served as Queen Elizabeth’s chaplain, has taken to Substack to explain the dangers he sees lurking in the Catholic Synod’s latest response to the challenges of maintaining orthodoxy in the face of increasing cultural press to accept sexual mores that conflict with Scriptural authority.

He’s warning Catholic leaders that they are in danger of walking into a trap.

For those unfamiliar, the Church of England — and the Anglican Church worldwide — faced a growing crisis as very different factions were pulling the institutional church in opposing directions. In England proper, there is a commingling of political and religious influence, with 26 Bishops and Archbishops serving as the ‘Lords Spiritual’ in England’s House of Lords. It’s hardly surprising that the ‘establishment’ faction has found itself pulled along with changing social and political norms for a very long time.

Way back in 1986, an English comedy show ‘Yes, Minister’ even underscored that point by mocking the Church as skewing to apostasy:

Hacker: “Humphrey, what’s a Modernist in the Church of England?”
Sir Humphrey: “Ah, well, the word ‘Modernist’ is code for non-believer.”
Hacker: “You mean an atheist?”
Sir Humphrey: “No, Prime Minister. An atheist clergyman couldn’t continue to draw his stipend. So, when they stop believing in God, they call themselves ‘Modernists’.”

Unlike Jesus, these bishops and archbishops had temporal authority, but lacked any moral authority. Not surprisingly, they yielded ground (always after the culture around themself had already conceded it) to ascendant secular moral values. The Global Anglicans — who are still being killed for their faith in many parts of the world — held firm to scriptural authority… especially among thriving congregations in Africa and Asia. In time, there were schisms, breakaway congregations remained in communion with that Anglican Church globally, but split from the authority of churches they saw as increasingly apostate.

Last year came the final straw. The incoming Archbishop of Canterbury was already seen as having abandoned orthodoxy in multiple important senses was NOT accepted as the voice of the other Archbishops (a title equal in authority to that of Canterbury’s new Archbishop, Sara Mullally.) A letter of rebuke was written by the other Archbishops who declared her apostate and unfit for the role of leadership.

That’s the schism and context from which Gavin Ashenden observes the latest Catholic Synod.

He finds their use of ‘Paradigm Shift’ an alarming signal of surrender, and is strenuously calling for proper attention to be given to this before this wedge issue does to Catholicism what it has already done to Anglicanism.

“Paradigm shift” became the language by which every institution of Western civilisation was invited to understand its own traditional commitments not as truth, but as one historical framework among others, ripe for supersession. It was a sign that the agents of the civilisational guerrilla war undermining the ground under our feet.

The sexual revolution did not win primarily by argument. It won by ‘paradigm’. It did not prove that the Christian understanding of sexuality was wrong. It declared that the Christian understanding of sexuality belonged to an outmoded way of organising human experience — pre-scientific, pre-psychological, pre-enlightened — and that a new framework had arrived in which those old commitments were simply no longer the right questions. You do not refute a paradigm. You transcend it. Course the alert will immediately realise that behind this was a slippery assumption that both technological and ethical progress were going hand-in-hand, and we needed to get with the ethical progress in order to find our way into the future. This smuggled a wholly false teleology into the church’s conversation, but a few people called it out for what it was.

What the Church is now being invited to do, through the elegant theological dressing of Study Group 9, is to ratify this civilisational revolution as the work of the Holy Spirit. But we know that it isn’t the Holy Spirit. It runs completely counter. Also need to the holiness of the church’s experiential history, but also to the doctrinal foundations of the church’s self-understanding.

This is posing as adjustment. But it intends a coup.

He makes a strong argument for why this is a threat not in the moral or doctrinal sense, but in an epistemological sense — the meaning and understanding of truth itself.

Christian history (Catholic and otherwise) has rooted our belief in LOGOS that gives light to our life and its meaning. But the subtle pivot of the ‘Paradigm shift’ is to put SELF upstream of TRUTH. We learn about the latter through the former.

Like so many other secular attacks on Western norms, it was advanced on the pretense of inclusion and understanding. Our old ways of understanding are too rigid to interact with modern sensibilities, so here are some ‘new paradigms’ which can be so much more helpful for offering pastoral care.

And away we go down that sliding slope to the endgame the subversive had in mind from the beginning.

This is not a pastoral adjustment. It is a philosophical revolution. And it is one that the Western world has already conducted — in its universities, its legal systems, its media culture, its therapeutic professions — over the past half century. The Church is not being asked to lead. It is being asked to follow. It is being asked to arrive late to a revolution that has already happened and to bless the rubble.

He outlines the template the subversives have quietly used for half a century.

I watched it in real time. I know how it ends. And I want to say clearly: what Study Group 9 is proposing to the Catholic Church is not a new idea. It is a well-documented process with a well-documented outcome. The outcome is theological sterility, schism, and the quicksand of relativism.

After recounting the carnage this process had on his own church, explaining the steps and outcomes he referenced in the previous quote, he prefaced his advice to catholics with this caution:

I am not describing a slippery slope as a theoretical possibility. I am describing what I have watched happen, in a Church I belonged to, collapse over forty years.

He hits back at the Synod’s claims that this is merely a continuation of Vatican II.

How are the authors of the report trying to trick the Catholic reader? The report’s most audacious move is its claim to be completing the work of the Second Vatican Council. It anchors the paradigm-shift agenda in Veritatis Gaudium and frames it as “a process initiated by Vatican II that challenges the models that have been prevalent in ecclesial life over the past centuries.”

This is the beginning of a series of posts in which he is taking on the ‘paradigm shift’ and the corrosive and corrupting seeds that are carried within it.

You don’t have to be a part of the Roman Catholic Church to hope and pray that they stand strong against attempts to corrupt it and bend it to the will of secularism.

The Substack piece is entitled “The Quicksand Beneath the Cathedral: Paradigm Shift, Civilisational Surrender, and the Catholic Church’s Moment of Decision“, and others, building the case for the danger they are facing, are due to follow.