Answer to Mike about "Wacky goings-on within the Church"

Hi Mike,

You write:

As I read about all this wacky goings-on within the Church, I cannot help but recall the words from Matthew 16 where Jesus says to Peter, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."  Seems to be quite a promise.  Gotta believe that Jesus knew what he was talking about. 

MIKE

I've been thinking how to answer this one, Michael. Three options come to mind.

I suppose Option 1 is to get on the Vat2 Church Bandwagon, i.e., become a Progressive Modernist oneself. They're in power now, and so many in the hierarchy, whatever their personals beliefs, are now "out and proud" pro-Gay Progressives. They're weather vanes, they blow which way the wind blows.

Option 1 stinks, of course. Anyone who really believes the religion, accepts it as Divine Revelation, can't join The Church of What's Happening Now. That's an act of non-belief in itself.

Option 2 is to cry up, "To your tents, O Israel!" as Jeroboam did in King Rehoboam's day. It has lots of drama, but it didn't work out so well for the Northern Kingdom, soon conquered by sin, unbelief, and scattered to the four winds by the Assyrians. That's the Protestant option -- and there are now 20,000 Protestant denominations. They scattered. A cacophony. There's also cacophony on the Orthodox side of things (big "O" crowd, not those in Communion with Rome); they are hopelessly divided along linguistic and national lines, and that's the looming fate of the mainstream Western Church that doesn't return to the Latin Mass. (This "nationalization" is something that can't be reversed, really, except by a "conversion" to the TLM!)

So, what's behind Door Number 3?

Recently, to the extent I pay attention to religious sites, I look a good bit at OnePeterFive and a handful of others. Not much chance recently to blog anything. But it is clear from what I read that "Conservative" Catholics, those Middle-of-the-Roaders (aka Magisterium Catholics) who tend toward orthodoxy -- probably the actual majority of Catholics in the world -- are pretty much at the end of their rope. Hence my comments about Robert Royal and Fr. Murray. Another season or two of The Bergoglio Show and they'll become Hindu Kanwariyas, making their pilgrimage to the Ganges, singing to Shiva.

As a "Trad" Catholic, I don't really care too much about the Progressive (Left-Wing) Catholics; they're not Catholic any more, except in their own minds, sort of like Mormons consider themselves "Christian". One can, after all, only walk so far out on the plank before one falls into the sea. Deny you've fallen into water, deny you're drowning: fine; but one's denials don't change reality.

Of course I feel very sorry for the Magisteriums. Their bishops are either aiders and abetters in the Gay / Modernist / Secularist takeover of the Church, or they are somnolent zombies. (The left-tending Magisteriums are very similar to the Progressives, and seem unable to "read the signs of the times." Or perhaps they've given up reading; theirs is a "feel good" faith!)

Zombie bishops: take the U.S. bishop's recent vote on June 12th to (what, exactly? Endorse? Accept? Ratify? -- classic Vat2 "creative ambiguity!) Bergoglio's condemnation of the Death Penalty, for example: they voted 194 to 8 to favor Bergi's heresy, with three abstaining. The Catechism will be "reformulated".

Now, take note that the bishops use a secret ballot, so we cannot know their names! We don't know who the eight orthodox ones are, though perhaps we can guess. But aside the heresy the 194 are embracing, consider that we have, in effect, a "faceless bureaucracy" voting to do X, Y, and Z, and no actual individual is responsible. A bishop is God-on-earth to his diocese, God's vicar, His stand-in, God's direct representative, accountable on Earth (as it is currently sent up) only to the pope, who as top bishop (he's not consecrated pope, but elected; it is a juridical-executive position as God's vicar general on Earth, as it were) and court of final appeal. In that capacity, a pope can remove or discipline a bishop. Over the past century or so, the Vatican has come to be the sole appointer of bishops, too. The episcopal bench used to be locally elected (by Cathedral chapters) and only affirmed by Rome when the news eventually got to Rome. Occasionally a pope would appoint a bishop directly, but that was usually an archbishop. By the time the first trans-Atlantic cables were laid (mid-19th century), the pope at that time began to assume "up close and personal" control of bishops (he of Vatican I fame, Pio Nono).

Speaking of archbishops, the archbishops currently have some small role to play today in lower bishops' Church discipline, too, but the archbishops should be the ones directly answerable to the pope, and responsible for managing their suffragan bishops -- there are over 5000 bishops in the world, and that's far too many for the Vatican to directly manage. It used to be that the pope of the time would send a pallium to a local bishop (or include the man with the pallium!) to manage a nation's bishops, to be the pope's man-on-the-scene, the archbishop. The buck always stopped at the archbishop -- though on very rare occasions it might be passed to Rome. But as it is now, there's just no actual responsibility for overseeing the overseers (the definition of episkopoi) except these faceless national bishop conferences and ultimately the faceless Vatican bureau responsible for bishops. All these insulate the pope from direct responsibility.

So, while these national bishops' conferences are not the actual Church rulers in each country in terms of God-ordained responsibility, yet, for all intents and purposes, they actually govern the national Churches of each nation! AND they're essentially anonymous! Say you are one of the eight against the 194 (sort of like the Seven Against Thebes) -- you oppose the heretical pope (for heretic Bergoglio is, as he himself evinces about every time he opens his mouth, as with this Amazon synod ) -- but now you're stuck with going against your conscience because of some anonymous vote!

Needless to say, were I a bishop, I would resign from the bishop conference and explain why, and in effect dare the bureaucrats (in the national bishop conference or Rome) to remove me! All that garbage is yet another rotten fruit of the Animus of Vatican II. But it is running the Church -- into the grave.

Of course, none of them have that kind of chutzpah, if I may use that word.

So were does that leave us? What's behind Door Number Three. The Gates of Hell will not prevail, as Matthew says, but then Scripture is written on many levels, like a Shakespeare play. And it raises the question: What is the Church? The old answer is the faithful laity of the bishops who are in Communion with the pope in Rome. But what happens when the pope is a heretic? It is a Scylla and Charybdis situation: you can't be Catholic and not be in Communion with the pope and yet you can't be in Communion with a heretic.

What to do with a heretic pope? Can anything be done? The question has been asked in the past and various saints and theologians have put forward various answers, but the bottom-line is we have to wait it out, to let God Himself take care of it. We just need to be prayerful and suffering. Suffering is at the core of the Faith, so suffer, offer it up. No actual mechanism exists to judge a sitting pope, after all. Some writers I like say Bergoglio is a "severe mercy" God has afflicted us with, in order to trash out and drive a stake through the unquiet corpse that is the Vatican II Church. That's probably true. Even Satan himself, the top (lowest?) guy, does God's will, much against Satan's will and much to his eternal chagrin. And it is a trope of Greek tragedy that the king who acts to prevent a prophecy from coming true, well, in that very act he brings about the circumstances that eventuate the prophecy!

The Door Three option isn't purely passive, either. We can certainly stop funding the dying Vatican II Church, taking care only of our local orthodox priests and monastic communities. (This is what mostly happens today -- the mainstream Church lives off of U.S. government money given out for "refugees".) That's hard to do in any event because Pope Plutarco Elías Calles will unleash his gay Federalis against them at any time. True, we've yet to rise up in a La Cristiada revolución against Pope Callous Calles Bergoglio, but it's coming, in God's good time. (What we really need is a General Enrique Gorostieta, of course.) "Viva Christo Rey!" we should all be saying, as the Cristeros shouted when they shot up the Federalis down in Old Mexico. Of course, the mainstream Church betrayed them, then. But now it has betrayed itself. 

The Bottom Line

All we can do is try to live like Catholics ought to live -- as any good Christian ought to live, whatever their perception of what "Church" is: i.e., if you live by the Gospels, you should know that The Figure therein -- Yehoshu'a, Joshua of Nazareth, is interested in primarily two things: how we treat one another, A, and B, whether we recognize Him. "Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect", said Joshua of Nazareth (Matthew 5:18). In the Historical Church (Catholicism and the Orthodoxies) that means baptism and then Holy Communion, by which we "take on Christ", "put on Christ" become "new creations in Christ" (St. Paul used various ways to say this). Protestantism rejects the Holy Eucharist being God Himself and thus deletes the possibility of this Transformation/Divinization in Christ, what the Greeks call Theosis. For Protestants, as Luther taught, we can't be perfect and are manure piles covered with God's grace, entering Heaven shining outside but reeking of filth within. But that is clearly NOT what the New Testament teaches, and the New Testament is not the 27 books of the Bible Christians use, but the Holy Eucharist itself, the Seventh Covenant, the one God made with Himself, Father and Son, through Himself, the Holy Spirit.

The Most Holy Lord God of Hosts would not pour Himself into walking manure piles.

This "be perfect as your Heavenly Father is" is also NOT what Jorge Bergoglio teaches -- to the extent he's revealed his mind on this, it is Lutheran, and how can that be surprising since Modernism developed in Lutheran 19th century Germany? Modernism is essentially Lutheran: we're incapable of fulfilling Matthew 5:18, so "sin boldly, Philip," as Luther wrote Melanchthon. Isn't that exactly what Pope Francis teachers? Anyone who teaches otherwise, he says, is a Pharisee.

Whatever. It's a crazy world. Always was. Hold on, Mike. The krill of the Modernists have been swallowed by the humpbacked whale and we orthodox minority are like Marlin and Dori, the fish in Finding Nemo, about to be blown out through the whale's blow spout as the krill remain behind to be digested.

Well, something intestinal like that! :D

An Préachán