Questions Taylor Marshall & Calvin Robinson's interview raise, also, Gavin Ashenden's response

Amici,

I have an initial question to start the ball rolling:

Desacralization. Can someone – some Vatican IIer, some Bergoglio acolyte, or some Protestant maven – please explain to me why it is SO important to desacralize Catholicism? The Orthodox East have always been horrified at the West's orgy of desacralization. But it is not just the West. Islam itself is another form of Christian desacralization, a Christian heresy "boiling it down" to basics. Islam and Judaism are more a mundane, law-based "ethnicization" of a faith than religions, per se. Islam has the Sufi mystics sect, of course, often shunned by regular Muslims, and Judaism has the Haredim, but they have 613 laws you must obey, for Heaven's sake; (Judaism obviously never recovered from the loss of the monastic Essenes, its most spiritual faction.) Protestantism serves as an expurgation of Catholicism, an abridgement of it. Vatican II Catholicism meanwhile is the bowdlerization of itself.

But we're talking about – please remember – a religion. A RELIGION. Don't you WANT a religion to be sacred? Holy? Set apart? Non-mundane, non-profane? Uplifting, soul-heightening? I mean, isn't that the whole point?

• Religion needs to be vertical, not horizontal. 
• God-centered or the Divine Above-centered it ought to be, rather than human-focused and earthbound.
• That's what the Reformation was, a massive desacralization. The Iconoclasm of it was precisely that, the casting down of both art and theology from the themes of heavenly sacrifice and spiritual ascendancy, the verticality of it all, knocked down to a paltry banality of prosaic credence. A whittling down to the lowest common denominator short of atheism. (But of course it would inexorably lead to atheism.)
  
• And Vatican II was a "mini-me" replication of the Reformation that left the Catholic Church completely wrecked, with now twelve types of Catholics in existence, as per this interesting video. All thanks to the Vatican II Church's idiot cognoscenti.
  

Marshall and Robinson

A fascinating interview occurred between Taylor Marshall and Calvin Robinson, an Englishman who has gained an internet following as a Christian apologist. He is not a Roman Catholic priest or a priest in one of the Eastern Rite Churches in Communion with Rome, nor yet an "Orthodox" priest. Robinson was on Marshall's podcast to explain what he is: he's been an Anglican then an English Free Church deacon and now is some form of "Old Catholic". Mr Marshall seems to agree that Robinson obtained valid if illicit orders and could easily become formally a Catholic priest in communion with Rome, and spends a lot of time trying to pin Robinson down on why he won't go ahead and become a full Catholic. Robinson dodges and weaves. "Is Catholicism Always ROMAN?" 

Then Gavin Ashenden, who knows Robinson, weighs in with a long but engrossing podcast explaining the English Reformation in great detail and utterly destroys the Anglican/Episcopal conceit that they have "Catholic Roots". Brilliantly done, Mr. Ashenden (who was himself once an Anglican bishop).

I highly recommend both the friendly, civilized Marshal-Robinson discussion, and Ashenden's friendly, civilized rebuttal of Robinson's arguments. Robinson himself is the unknown quantity, and we want to know about him. He's obviously quite orthodox in his Catholic beliefs and made the argument that historically, to be Catholic, one had to hold and teach the doctrines of the Universal (i.e. "Catholic") Church, and Marshall was making the point one also has to be in Communion with the pope to be Catholic. As an interested third party, I would say that in theory the two notions ought to go together; in practice, as we see every day, they don't. And at the core of why that is so stands this question of desacralization of the Faith.

What's Catholic?

First and foremost, heretics don't get to define what's "Catholic", and Protestants of any stripe are some sort of heretic, by definition. But now we have a crisis within the Church (as Ashenden reminds us) and things ecclesiastical are deeply awry. We have the Church desperately trying to desacralize itself. Just now Anthony Stine has a video up on homosexual priests about to "come out" and demand being fully accepted by Rome. "James Martin's Favorite Kind Of Priests Are About To Go Public In A Big Way".

As Stine points out, this is all part of the secularization of the Church that has been going on since Vatican II and is now gathering steam under "Francis". Clearly, Queer Advocate Martin and these homosexual priests seek to make "push come to shove" and force the Church to accept them, which it cannot do without dumping St. Paul, let alone Our Lord Christ. Stine says Martin has openly rejected St. Paul's teaching on deviants, and now "Pope Francis" has written a foreword to James Martin's new book.

• In a mess like this, why would a good man like Calvin Robinson want to become Roman Catholic?

Church of the Troll Bergoglio

Although Vatican II sourced the confusion, one of Bergoglio's most infamous hallmarks is his spread of utter confusion. This is the Twilight Zone papacy. We all know Bergoglio is an absolute formal heretic (or whatever term one desires to use), and certainly a professional Destructor (you know, like Gozer in Ghost Busters). Bergoglio is "cancelling" orthodox Catholic bishops and crushing the orthodox Traditional Latin Rite Mass while allowing the Sin of Sodom to disembowel the Holy Church. Did you see the Vatican sponsored a drag queen? For their World's Children Day no less? This is a "No, just stop" moment. It ought to be an officially "Damn Bergoglio and the horse he rode in on" moment. Bergoglio and his peeps have not denounced this, so far as I know, and the deposed Bishop Strickland calls for something to be done about it. Well, my dear Bishop, you shouldn't have let that Troll depose you.

Bergoglio allows all this and lets the insane German Church run wild while he sacks bishops like Joseph Strickland for the crime of being a believing Catholic. As with Joe Biden being America's worst president, so "Pope Francis" is Holy Church's worst pope – were he an actual pope, which many of us know he cannot be. So, one can reason:

• As Bergoglio's minions in the hierarchy are cancelling orthodox Catholic priests in every direction, therefore – 
  
• Why would Calvin Robinson want to become a full Roman Catholic priest when the bishop who received him would immediately "cancel" him, too? (Yes, they probably wouldn't receive him in the first place.) 
• Calvin Robinson was too polite to say this, of course.

The question is crucial. Is one not a Catholic if one is not "in Communion" with the pope, even though one is baptized and holds all the Catholic dogmas and essential doctrines? And even more basically, can one be "in Communion" with a heretic pope who is destroying the Church? In this crazy reality, Robinson can quite possibly possess valid holy orders because a "Nordic Catholic Church" bishop ordained him, a bishop who had himself received a valid although illicit consecration. Is Bergoglio himself an actual bishop because of his valid consecration when he himself doesn't believe a word of it all? Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

The Papacy

Every organization needs a top guy with whom final authority rests. A ship needs a captain, an army needs a general, a platoon needs a sergeant, a company needs a CEO and a country needs a monarch or president  The papacy serves that role for the Universal (Catholic) Church. For almost two thousand years, each bishop of a diocese was "pope" of that Church. Once elected by the clergy and people, or later appointed by higher up archbishops, a bishop stayed with his flock until he died. He was "married" until death to his town/diocese/region, and could only be "divorced" from it for serious health or moral problems. Rarely were bishops moved from one diocese to another as they are commonly moved about today. (Parish priests usually were assigned to a parish until they died, as well.) Paul VI changed all that and made bishops "retire" at 75. Also, you couldn't be a bishop without a diocese, hence the tradition of naming Vatican curia bishops to be bishops of some long extinct early Church. Vatican II changed that. Bishop Strickland is therefore now still a bishop although he's been deposed by an evil heretic. Bergoglio the Destructor will most certainly not bother to name Strickland bishop of some defunct diocese, unless as an insult it would be, say, Laodicea.

Problems worked their way up the ecclesiastical ladder to the pope for adjudication. The pope was universal pastor in that specific sense, and not pretending to be actual pastor of every diocese and parish on Earth, micromanaging it all. A system existed, worked well, and they kept to it. (Yes, the Orthodox broke off – and on, and off again – and before the Muslims came in the 7th century, the Coptic Church and the Syrian broke off as well. The remote Armenians were probably never part of it to begin with.) Dealing with Luther's narcissistic egomania is an example of how that system worked. 

1. But with the advent of modern communication technology, the papacy could wield absolute power under a domineering kind of pope. 
2. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid before the American Civil War, and although that failed, soon others followed, and Pius IX could "call up" and give direct orders to a bishop in Argentina or Australia in minutes. 
3. Pius IX was certainly domineering, and even said, "I am the Tradition" echoing Louis XIV's "I am the state". Pio Nono it was who called Vatican I and got it to formally declare his special "from the Chair" pronouncements "infallible". 
4. That had been the understanding before, of course, but never codified because a pope only acted infallibly when some issue needed a final ruling. By the nature of the system, a pope's ruling was a "final word". Usually, a pope was kept busy enough just being the actual bishop of Rome, a task they now delegate to others. 
   
5. But with the new technology, Pius IX seemed to think the bishops of the world were his secretaries and "branch managers" and put them on a leash. That may not have mattered much when the bishops were orthodox Catholics, and Ashenden takes the time to read the kindly but final response the great Pope Leo XIII made about Anglican orders. 
6. But now when popes were only in varying degrees orthodox; i.e. the Vatican II popes enmeshed in the Modernist cobwebs, that became a problem. 
7. Finally we have Bergoglio, who has taken Pius IX's absolute power and is employing it to literally deconstruct Catholicism, root and branch. He's formally creating a new Church, the Synodal one.
   

The Universal Church is thus quite divided, and no, I don't include Protestants in that Church, but only Apostolic Churches.

1. The Big Fourteen Orthodox Churches are not in Communion with the pope – definitely and defiantly so – yet they have valid Apostolic Succession and Holy Orders. (They have a problem with their divorce doctrine because some emperor or other demanded it, and otherwise, they're each a "national Church".) And the venerable Coptic Church isn't even talking to the Catholic Church now thanks to The Troll, our Juan Peron on the Tiber.
   
2. Is a "Benesedevacantist" like Ann Barnhardt a Catholic? Or myself?
   
3. Or a "regular" sedevacantist like Louie Verrecchio at AKA Catholic? He doesn't accept ANY of the Vatican II popes. (BTW Verrecchio has an excellent article here about how the Vatican II Church messed up the Collect for Trinity Sunday, with a link to Professor Michael P. Foley's amazing article on the same, here at New Liturgical Movement.) Read those two articles to see what you've been missing as a "Catholic" since Vatican II, both about the sublime doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity and also just how profound the sacrament of Confession actually is. You know, both of those are pretty basic, and we've been robbed blind by these Vatican II cretins.
   

Our Lord Christ Himself said, "If they are not against us, they are for us." (Mark 9:28-41; Luke 9:50) But what about Bergoglio? That man is definitely NOT for Christ, in any way. Bergoglio tears up Church tradition and disregards the Deposit of Faith. Hardly ever does he mention our Lord, and his documents and those of "Tucho-Touchy" Fernandez almost never mention Christ. The entire Synodal Church that they are aborning has very little indeed to do with Christ. So, no wonder there are twelve types of Catholics now.

That is a problem indeed for the desacralizing Vatican II Churchmen and the desacralized laity, and not just for a Calvin Robinson.

AnP