I could’ve sworn I saw this here, but I can’t find it while wrestling the baby– h/t to Suburban Banshee for sharing this news story, though:
From CNA:
“The art portrayed in the picture of the synod does not correctly represent us as practicing Catholics. The artist depicted four out of five of us with false identities seemingly to fit a more inclusive and skewed agenda,” he told CNA.
Furthermore, the woman next to Smith was drawn with her real-life features, except she was drawn as a person of color and labeled as a graduate student, when she is a white undergraduate student.
“The woman next to her was labeled as queer, but she is a heterosexual woman in agreement with Church teaching on sexuality,” Smith told CNA. “This image warps the truth.”
Read the rest here.
For those interested in the artist who took photographs and manipulated them into altered “art,” apparently without permission of the subjects, Banshee found her here.
Sheer goofiness. I imagine the artist was bummed he couldn’t work in the comics industry so he or she race-swapped a real live white woman. The synod is a complete disaster.
Artistic license taken to a whole other level. Everyone these days thinks they’re an artist. Insane.
This was either a massive failure of vetting the artist or a complete success of vetting the artist. A cursory examination of her portfolio leans one heavily towards the latter.
The DIE (diversity, equity, inclusion) inspired trans-racing of the subject matter is not surprising in the slightest. Prior to my conversion I was working at a United Methodist megachurch which was overwhelmingly white, and in almost every video we made that involved footage of people or interviews, we had to aim for diversity, even if drawn from the very white population of the church. A pastor at one of the satellite campuses somewhat objected since it wasn’t representative of the actual congregation, and the rejoinder was that we weren’t representing the congregation/community/whatever as it was, but as we wanted it to be in the future.
That is, of course, exactly what is happening here, and it’s likely no accident that they hired the artist they did. If the leadership in charge of this had any compunctions about the message that was communicated by means of these “art” pieces, they could have asked the artist to modify them or simply not posted them and just eaten the expense. Instead, they went forward with them, almost certainly because the vision expressed in these pieces is exactly the vision of the church that they have.
That, after all, is what “listening” means.
I think this incident with the artwork, while not at all representative of the kids photographed, perfectly captures the nature of this Potemkin Synod.
The people running this farce didn’t get the racial/LGBT diversity they wanted to see, so they manufactured it. The results of the synod’s ‘listening’ will also be massaged to look like what the organizers want.
We’ve seen this pontificate manipulate synods before— the participating bishops ended up being used as a rubber stamp, assembled to give legitimacy to ‘results’ likely decided upon before the first speech was even made. I believe the results of this kabuki synod were also decided upon before the first attendees were ever ‘listened to’. This is pure theater, designed to give a veneer of legitimacy to an agenda.
The only question is: what is there for a sensible Catholic do about it?
Jason-
calling it DIE is now wrong-think bad-stuff, it’s supposed to be DEI, and anyone who points out they called themselves DIE is horribad.
:tongue in cheek: