“THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE ANTI-CHURCH CURRENTLY CO-EXIST IN THE SAME SACRAMENTAL, LITURGICAL AND JURIDICAL SPACE”.
This is a quote from Fr. Linus Clovis from a speech he gave to the Rome Life Forum on 18 May, ARSH 2017. This is a clear, succinct definition of the current situation, and as with all statements that are true and clear, it carries a tremendous capacity to both edify and console.
The virile man wants to know what is going on around him. He wants a clear, accurate description of objective reality, no matter how ugly, because the virile man is constantly seeking to formulate and execute the best possible response and path forward. The virile man does not ever plop down on the ground, declare the situation too difficult or too unpleasant, and disengage in favor of a quietistic, passivistic, self-righteous pity-party. I am reminded of the great line uttered by then-Colonel Chesty Puller at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir: “We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.” Puller’s line could be applied without modification to the situation in the Church today.
When it comes to the supernatural reality of The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, this process of synthesizing the dataset and finding the one true answer is obligatory, precisely because we know that The Church is Real, it is Visible, and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it. We KNOW that there is a visible, knowable truth in this situation, and that the response and path forward is not only discernible, but is discernible by laymen – that is, “the sheep”.
DO NOT for a moment be browbeaten into believing the lie that unless you have a degree in Theology, are a Canon Lawyer, or are a cradle Catholic, that you are unqualified to engage your intellect and discern the “voice of the shepherd” from that of the faithless hirelings and the wolves. This lie is in direct opposition to the Good Shepherd Discourse – the words of Our Lord and Savior Himself.
I am hard-pressed to think of a group of people who have been as much of a collective failure over the past fifty years as Catholic Theologians, Canonists and cradle Catholics. Remember, these are the very people who sat and watched in a state of complete flaccidity the near-total destruction of the Catholic Church and the de facto apostasy of something like 90% of Catholics in the West, and did basically nothing to stop it. The notable exception would, of course, be Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
How many dissertations have been written and man-hours consumed trying to square the circle of the OBVIOUSLY failed Second Vatican Council? How much time has been wasted on the pipe dream of “reforming” the Novus Ordo liturgy? How exactly does one “reform” something that was conceived in malice in the first place? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, well north of 95% of Catholics today contracept without any hesitation or qualm, and north of 60% say they are in favor of sodomitical pseudo-marriage. Given this, I am further hard-pressed to think of a group of people who so lack the self-awareness to recognize their own truly catastrophic failure, and will still, with straight faces, appeal to their academic credentials, and even more laughably to their ETHNICITY as a proofset of their exclusive competence.
Furthermore, precisely because we will all stand alone before Jesus Christ at our Particular Judgments, and God being a loving, merciful God, the Divine Providence has unfolded such that the words of Christ to the disciples of John the Baptist echo through time with the same strength and volume as the day they were first uttered: Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen. The answer is obvious. It is right in front of you. Christ always, always lays a path. That path is narrow, and there are gates along the path that we all must pass through, but THERE IS A CLEAR, OBVIOUS, VISIBLE PATH.
And so, slowly, slowly, more people are acknowledging the obvious: Bergoglio is an Antipope. Further, they are realizing that it was the invalidity of Pope Benedict’s “partial resignation”, which, again, is GLARINGLY OBVIOUS given all of the evidence, first and foremost being Pope Ratzinger’s words, followed by Pope Ratzinger’s peculiar and totally unprecedented actions, and requires the willful suspension of disbelief at the absolute minimum to ignore.
It bears mentioning at this point that there are still far more people acknowledging the truth of the Bergoglian antipapacy than it would appear. Most “trad Catholic” websites are still actively, aggressively purging all mention of this Antipapacy qua antipapacy from their comment boxes, and many dedicate a non-trivial amount of time to ad hominem attacks and outright defamation, causing many people to recoil for fear of being called “crazy”, “dippy” and most pathetically, “sedevacantist”. I have said it before and I will say it again: to hurl the accusation of “sedevacantism” at a person who argues that the entire issue is the fact that Pope Benedict XVI is the one and only living Pope, and has been all along, is not only flatly mendacious, it is a tacit admission of failure. Since they can’t honestly engage the dataset without having a big fat knot form in the pit of their stomach, a knot which indicates that they need to acknowledge a truth that would A.) cost them donation revenue OR, B.) cost them their job, retirement benefits, or potential for career advancement and/or C.) cause them to be shunned from their (oftentimes extremely dubious) social circles, the only response they can make is to lash out in anger, sadly falling for the satanic gambit of making a binary objective state, namely the occupancy or vacancy of the See of Peter, into a political football and schoolyard taunt implying mental instability and a tendency toward subscribing to irrational conspiracy theories.
What I hear from people consistently is that the explanation of what has happened with regards to the invalid partial resignation of Ratzinger, and the subsequent Bergoglian antipapacy is entirely logical, and beyond that is completely backed-up by all of the objective evidence AND Canon Law, and ties together not only the myriad prophecies of both the ascendancy of an apostate church seated in Rome, but also reconciles the words of Our Blessed Lord, especially with regards to His promises to us about the special nature and protection that the Petrine See would carry throughout time.
One of satan’s most clever chess maneuvers has been the setting up of the board such that the Office of the Papacy is under attack by both sides. Clearly, Antipope Bergoglio is consciously hellbent on destroying the Church, and also the Papacy itself, because the Papacy is the Rock upon which Christ built and sustains The Church. Antipope Bergoglio’s power comes not from Christ, because Bergoglio is of the antichrist, and may well be the False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist, the anti-John the Baptist. Antipope Bergoglio’s power comes from pure thuggery, and capitalizing on the faithlessness, blackmailable degeneracy, fear and intense effeminacy of the clergy today. Bergoglio desires, consciously, to utterly and permanently destroy The Church and stand astride its broken corpse, establishing an apostate anti-church which will hail him as its founder.
BUT, what we also see, and what more and more people are noticing, is that the people of the so-called “Trad-right” of the spectrum who refuse to acknowledge the Bergoglian antipapacy qua antipapacy are ALSO frantically tearing down the papacy, because the only way they can come anywhere close to coherence is to argue stridently that which NOT ONE OF THEM would have argued ten years ago today, namely that the Papacy is and always has been of minimal import, and that everything Bergoglio has said and done is completely within the bounds of Our Lord’s promises to Peter, which really didn’t mean much at all, as it turns out.
In other words, to confess Bergoglio as Vicar of Christ, one must necessarily adopt a completely Protestant and schismatic view of the Petrine Primacy. And so, while satan’s black pieces have the king in check, white, with each move, abandons and exposes the white king, preferring instead to form a defense around a small, dimwitted, psychopathic BLACK PAWN.
Which brings up another point to ponder. If, solely for the sake of argument, we say that Bergoglio is, in fact, the pope (which he isn’t and never has been), and that everything he has done is completely “within bounds” with regards to the special protections of the Petrine Office, and given that evil never, ever rests… WHY DIDN’T THIS HAPPEN A LONG TIME AGO?
If the Pope has the capacity to literally destroy the Church, or as Professor Josef Seifert put it, “destroy the entire moral doctrine of The Catholic Church” – a statement which has got Professor Seifert FIRED by his FrancisApostateChurch Archbishop – why, oh why, didn’t satan do this a LOOOOOOONG time ago? Why didn’t Paul VI Montini, sodomite, Commie-lover and all-around bad man, do it? Why didn’t Alexander VI Borgia, between sex romps with Giulia Farnese and goodness knows what other whores, do it? Why didn’t Pope Benedict IX, a man that St. Peter Damian accused of homosexuality, pedophilia and bestiality, and called “a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest”, WHY DIDN’T HE DO IT?
The answer is simple and obvious to anyone who believes in the words of Our Blessed Lord. None of these men were able to do what Bergoglio has done and continues to do, because all of these men were The Vicar of Christ. As such, they were given the supernatural NEGATIVE PROTECTION that is intrinsic and unique to the Papacy, and is a key reason why so many of us converts entered The Church. Someone HAS to be in charge. The buck HAS to stop with someone. And precisely because, after reading about some of the deplorable scoundrels that have occupied the See of Peter over the years, what do we see? Not one of them ever overturned the table, or even tried. In nearly 2000 years, only a supernatural protection could explain the continuous existence of the Church Militant and the consistency and coherence of its infallible teaching.
The reason Antipope Bergoglio continues to do that which would be metaphysically impossible for a Pope to do, is because Bergoglio isn’t the pope. With Antipope Bergoglio, satan is unhindered by the Petrine Promise, and thus we have on this chessboard a black pawn who can move to any square, at any time, and not only does white raise no objection, white is ignoring its own king and actively protecting and enabling the black pawn.
The challenge from here forward will be to discern when the apostate anti-church which is currently still occupying the same sacramental, liturgical and juridical space as the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, finally breaks away. A word of consolation: while I obviously can’t predict what exactly the “breaking away” will look like, I can say this with confidence: It will be obvious to those not blinded by their own effeminacy. God is not a jerk, and He isn’t trying to give us “the shake”. When it happens, we will know it. Sadly, MANY people, including many people who profess “Traditional Catholicism” will follow Antipope Bergoglio into the apostate anti-church, and will do it proudly. And many so-called Trad Catholics are actively singing the praises of the schismatic Eastern Orthodox and declaring Vatican I and formally defined dogma to be “wrong”. I am reminded of Our Lord’s words in John 16: “the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you, will think that he doth a service to God.”
Finally, the only way to be able to discern the sound of a beloved’s voice is by having a personal relationship with said person. In this case, the only way to be able to discern the Voice of the Good Shepherd, Our Lord Jesus Christ, is to have a PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP with Him. The two main ways of accomplishing this are The Sacraments and PRAYER. No prayer, no relationship. No relationship, no way to discern His Voice. For rote prayer, nothing beats the Rosary. Such richness of contemplation! Also, every day should include, if possible, time before Our Lord reposed in the Tabernacle, with you “just looking at Him”, while He just looks back at you.
I will conclude with Canon 748:
Can. 748 §1. All persons are bound to seek the truth in those things which regard God and His Church and by virtue of divine law are bound by the obligation and possess the right of embracing and observing the truth which they have come to know.”
I hope this helps.
Pray for Pope Benedict, the Papacy, and Holy Mother Church in terrifyingly visible eclipse, outside of which there is no salvation.