By Steve Bolton
“I have come to bring division.”
Jesus
gave this startling mission statement in both Luke 12:49-53 and Matthew
10:34-37, where he continues, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace
to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to
turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members
of his own household.' Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is
not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not
worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy
of me.” If the next pope is actually a loyal follower of Jesus, he will be an
equally divisive figure. Soft-pedaling has become such a bad habit among the
clergy in the last few decades that few Catholics today are made aware of the
unpleasant sticks like this that Jesus included among the pleasant carrots in
his teachings. This includes the “dark half” of the Beatitudes, in which he
gives warnings like these: “Woe unto you when you are rich, for you have
received your consolation…Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that
is how their fathers treated the false prophets.”[1]
Most of the wayward Catholics of America and Europe want a tame but popular pope
they can speak well of, who will foster a false appearance of unity by
downplaying or even betraying the difficult teachings of Jesus.
The
Catholic Church is dying in the West precisely because the vast majority of the
clergy are entirely willing to approve false teachings in return for personal
popularity, through too much fluffy talk about unity and peace, when in fact
they are rubber-stamping treason and peace at any price. The Devil can only
operate in shades of grey, so the sword Jesus spoke of is meant to cleave it
into its constituent colors of white and black, so that men can see clearly
what good and evil are. To put it as plainly as possible, evil men, in every
age and every nation, do not want others to see the sharp dividing line between
the two, so they attempt to obscure it. Quite often, the sins they commit
amount to acts of war, while the peace they speak of is meant to disarm any
opposition before it can fight back, which is not Christian. Despite the fact
that he spoke of the sword and whipped the money changers in the Temple,
neither Jesus nor any of his followers ever advocated war for its own sake, but
they did not forbid us to fight back against the undeclared wars of others. In
fact, it is sometimes our duty to stand up for those whose rights are being
violated; Christians are enjoined to turn the other cheek against wrongs
committed against themselves, but it is cowardice to turn a blind eye wrongs
committed against others, for the same reason that it is obviously evil to
allow a mugger to freely beat an old lady. The worst modern example of this is
the slaughter of more than one billion babies worldwide through abortion in the
last four decades, which is an act of war so vast and so horrible that the mind
can barely conceive of it, against an enemy that cannot possibly fight back;
for them, the Apocalypse has already come. Attempting to build unity in
atmosphere where such crimes can occur without any semblance of resistance
actually amount to whitewashing them; there is no peace from such a surrender,
only a peace of the grave for the innocents who will continue to be victimized
by whatever brand of injustice evil men choose to permit. The only way to
authentic unity and actual peace is to either convert them, or to physically prevent
them from inflicting injustice on others – but neither action is possible if
people only have a vague notion of what they should be converted to, or what justice
is. This is why Jesus taught highly specific things, whereas their enemies
always speak in terms of glittering generalities, such as vague appreciations
for “love” and “peace,” without sharply defining what they are.
The Structure of Authority in the
Catholic Church
Clear
definitions are required before definite action, so anyone who wants to
frustrate those actions will always try to water down them down first. For two
millennia, the papacy has been the sole reliable defender of the dogmas and
doctrines of Christ, without which Christian action is impossible. The point of
bringing division is not for the sake of division, for the ultimate goal is authentic
unity, which can only come when the whole world chooses to become Catholic. The
problem is that a certain section of the populace, in every epoch of history,
has simply balked at the idea of following the commandments of Jesus, his
forerunners or his successors; they are almost always concentrated among the
rich, the powerful, the beautiful and the popular among every society, who
don’t want to be told that there are strict limits on the gifts they have been
given. For the last 2,000 years, and even further back to the days of Moses,
there has always been some faction among the fortunate who want to smudge the
dividing line between good and evil. Because they tend to be concentrate among
the upper crust of any society, they often have the temporal power to inculcate
their views in the secular power structure and among the common people, or even
to persecute the Church. The same is true in the present age, in which the
spoiled rich nations of North America and Europe are clamoring for change in
the Catholic Church, while remaining completely ignorant of the fact that the silent majority among
the poor, the illiterate and the downtrodden in Latin America, Africa and other
parts of the Third World are joining it in droves for precisely the opposite
reason. The Church really is dying in the West, but the Good News is that the
West doesn’t matter half as much as it once did. The stage is set for a schism
of epic proportions that will dwarf the Reformation in its consequences. The
schism, in fact, has already been under way for decades, and has only been
hushed up through the inaction of wpopes like John Paul II, Benedict XVI and
many of their predecessors, as far back as Pius XII (1939-1958), all of whom
were great men but exceptionally poor administrators. The Church may be able to
avoid an open break at the next conclave in March, but it will be progressively
more difficult to contain the unrecognized split for much longer. Nor should
the electors at the papal conclave attempt to contain it, for the sooner we
elect a pope who’s willing to actually perform his duties, the sooner we can
rebuild.
It
might be possible to retain some of the hundreds of millions of Catholics who
have already left the Church in the hearts by caving in and changing teachings
they don’t like, but the problem is that then the Church wouldn’t be Catholic.
As I wrote several months ago in Mali
and the Return of Mohammed, the only person with the authority to define
what Islam actually consists of was Mohammed, and how he chose to define it is
now set in stone as a matter of historical fact; people can pass off a
counterfeit version of it, as many Westernized Muslims do, but it is not
actually Islam. Likewise, the only persons with the authority to define the
U.S. Constitution and its amenders, and the meanings they assigned to its words
are all unalterable matters of historical fact; any time the Supreme Court
cites any other arguments for its decisions besides the historical evidence for
what the framers and amenders thought, then they are rewriting it, not
interpreting it, which they do not have the Constitutional power to. Likewise,
definite statements can be made about what Christ taught; he must have said
certain things and did not say certain other things, which are matters of
historical fact, regardless of whether we know those facts. Christianity is not
something malleable; by logical necessity, certain brands of it must be closer
to the truth, just as 2 + 2 = 6 is closer to the correct answer of 4 than 2 + 2
= 3,200. Catholicism is the brand of Christianity which has consistently
claimed for 2,000 years to have been invested with the infallible authority to
say what those teachings are, but not with the power to change them one iota.
This does not mean that any statement by any clergyman is divinely protected,
for Catholic teachings are invested with different levels of authority that
follow a clear hierarchy. At the top are the decisions of ecumenical councils,
which occur just once every few generations, but only when accepted by the
pope, who has a similar guarantee of papal infallibility under rare conditions.
This
is a much maligned and misunderstood term that in no way implies that popes are
free of sin (although in comparison to the rest of humanity, most of them have
generally been quite heroic) or that every utterance out of any pope’s mouth
must be obeyed. In fact, it’s a quite unpleasant gift, because what it amounts
to is a guarantee that in certain situations, God will stuff a sock in the
pope’s mouth to keep him from saying bad things. Without this negative charism,
Benedict XVI could conceivably wake up tomorrow and tell the world that it must
accept the dogma that skipping rope is a sin. Infallibility merely means that
God will step in and prevent the ecumenical councils and popes from making
arbitrary decisions about doctrine like this. He provides less protection for
the next highest rank of teachings, those promulgated by popes in documents
like encyclicals and bulls, which nevertheless require “religious submission of
the will.” No such guarantee is given to the next rung down the ladder, among
the pope’s designated representatives at the Vatican, such as the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith. Below that rung is the individual teaching
authorities possessed by the bishops, then down to their priests, both of whom
are charged only with repeating doctrines, not creating them. Catholics are
taught to obey valid teaching authority, but it is not valid for a lower rank
to contradict the rulings of a higher rank; therefore, it would be an act of
disobedience to obey the false teachings of a bishop who claimed that the pope
was wrong, just as it would be for a private to obey the orders of a corporal
rather than the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Most of the bishops of the West have been in precisely such a state of
rebellion against the papacy for decades now, on a wide range of issues which
they have no authority to reinterpret to their liking. This whole structure of
authority all seems quite airy and theoretical, like many other philosophies
concocted by human beings throughout history which ended up having little
bearing on reality – until you become familiar enough with history to realize
that the teachings of every other denomination and every other secular
philosophy have always changed from one generation to the next. Check the
records of any Protestant denomination to confirm for yourself that none of
them could possibly have the same supernatural protection. Communism is another
clear example, because although it was often portrayed as a monolithic menace
in the 20th Century, there was quite a bit of variation in it
between Cuba and China, or Czechoslovakia and Cambodia; even within the Soviet
Union itself, Communism was a very different thing under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev,
Brezhnev and Gorbachev respectively. The Catholic Church is the only
institution which has managed to maintain the same body of doctrine for more
than a single generation, let alone two millennia. I know this because like a typical
muckraking journalist, I set out to disprove what I thought was a preposterous
claim, by sorting through as many encyclicals, ecumenical documents and other
source I could, spread out across every epoch and conceivable topic. I couldn’t
do it. All I found was century after century of the Church repeating the same
miracle of preserving the same teaching against all odds and all manner of
persistent outside pressures. For example, in the case of usury, the Church
infallibly defined many times throughout the Middle Ages that taking any
interest at all is a mortal sin, and that no one is obligated to pay it; anyone
who disagrees with this is not to receive Christian burial. For hundreds of
years, merchants badgered the Church to change it, but as Pope Alexander III
told them, his office had no power to abrogate this dogma. Nor has it been
abrogated since. There is a Vatican Bank now and dioceses routinely charge
interest, plus Catholics are no longer taught to use interest-free banking, but
this has all been accomplished through a handful of letters sent out in the
1830s from an office at the Vatican, not by a statement of a pope or church
council under conditions of infallibility; in fact, even the arguments used in
the letters themselves contradict Pope Benedict XIV’s stern condemnation in the
1745 encyclical Vix Pervenit, which
is not infallible but still at the level where it requires religious submission
of the will. This scam pioneered the use similar shady tactics since then, to
create the appearance that many other teachings can be ignored or changed as
well, such as those forbidding divorce and other sins that are popular today.
As a result of the usury debacle, the world has been tormented by incessant
banking crashes and onerous debt peonage, all of which have made the rich
richer and further impoverished the poor of the whole planet. As a result of
the similar scams which have followed since then, the world is now also awash
in broken families, starvation, rampant militarism, rapid depopulation and legalized
child murder. In this way, heresy is not merely a lie about what Catholicism
is, or tampering with a divine message, but a menace to the peace and safety of
the world.
All
of the voices which are calling for the Church to “modernize” or “change” or
“update” its teachings, on the grounds that it is “out of step” with the people
of the West, are wasting their time because they can’t possibly succeed, nor
should they. Such demands have failed for two millennia and counting. If you’re
asking a valid church council or pope to repudiate any of its dogmatic
teachings, particularly on morals, then you’re wasting your time banging your
head against a wall, as I once did. Many external aspects of the Church could
be validly changed, such as the language of the Mass, changing the style of the
music, building cathedrals with different kinds of architecture or the like,
but such things have never been part of the Church’s infallible teaching
Magisterium, unlike its unpopular moral commandments on topics like
contraception. As I have written many times before, good cases can be made that
every one of these commandments protects society against some form of
self-destructive or unjust behavior; for example, birth prevention is rapidly
sapping the strength of Western civilization through a half-dozen different
side effects that I listed in The Love of Life vs. the Love of Money: The Clash of
Catholicism and Commercialism in the Contraception Controversy. Those who disagree with my conclusions are free to
disparage that teaching or any other, but turnabout is fair play, because
freedom of speech and the press are not equivalent to immunity from criticism
of critics themselves. Either way, if history is any guide, they cannot
possibly succeed in overturning these teachings, at least through the means of
valid church council or infallible papal proclamation. Anyone who wants to
consult the original documents released by these institutions over the last two
thousand years cannot help but conclude that they are divinely protected
against serious error – whether they want to be or not – in what amounts to a
miracle preserved in paper. The rest of the Church does not enjoy the same
guarantee though. Nor are the church councils or pope forced to teach what they
should; they are only prevented from teaching what they should not under
certain strict conditions. Nor can the pope force people to accept his
authority. This leaves open numerous avenues of attack which heretics can
exploit to gut the authority of these institutions, including many forms of
subterfuge which were pioneered in the usury scam and perfected around the time
of the last valid church council, Vatican II (1962-1965).
A Requiem for Heresy: Two Thousand Years
of Futility and Counting
The
easiest means of resisting the Church has always been to simply ignore its
teachings while simultaneously remaining a member, which constitutes heresy, or
leaving it altogether, which is the quintessence of apostasy. When parishioners
continue to take Eucharist in a state of heresy they compound their sins with
sacrilege, but the best the pope can do it warn them that this is the case; all
a formal excommunication is simply a public warning that a person has already
chosen to excommunicate themselves, by voluntarily leaving the Church. He
cannot force heretics to stop taking it, aside from firing local pastors who
provide it anyways or having their parishioners arrested for trespassing, which
would require the cooperation of local civil authorities. The papacy has no
secular power. It has some wealth, but most of that is in the form of church
buildings which cannot easily be sold and converted to cash. Its armed forces
consist of about 500 Swiss guards. As Stalin once sneered, “How many divisions
does the pope have?” The joke was on him, because a few decades later, the
Soviet Army suddenly ceased to exist without a shot being fired, but the papacy
was still firmly in place. This has been the fate of every movement which has
sought to break the Church, all of which have been broken themselves on the
rock of Peter like ships against a rocky reef. Furthermore, as I discuss in
great detail in The Falling Away, a consistent trend can be seen in every age
of Christian history, in which various sects have broken away from the Catholic
Church only to come to naught, while the Church
has always continued to grow,
without pause. Whether or not Isaiah 9:7 is meant to be taken literally, “Of
the increase of his government and peace there will be no end” has been
literally fulfilled in every age up to the present. The Church always appears
to be in decline, because the places where it is well-established tend to grow
tired of it, especially after it brings them better material benefits; as the
saying goes, “The Church is the mother of prosperity, and the daughter killed
the mother.” Yet at the same time, it has always gained more members and
increased the size of its territory among poorer and humbler people than it has
lost among the wealthy and arrogant centers of civilization.
This
is the Cliff’s Notes version of how we came to account for a sixth of the
world’s six billion souls, despite having our backs to the wall in every
generation. The Church started off with Jesus and a handful of followers being
persecuted in Israel. By the time the Romans had finished scattering the Jewish
people to the four winds in 70 A.D., the Church had already spread throughout
the Empire. For half a thousand years, the Middle East and North Africa were
the center of the Church, till Mohammed’s followers conquered these lands, when
it proceeded to make even more converts among the Vikings and other barbarians
of northern Europe. Despite the fact that the papacy was headquartered in Rome,
Eastern Europe represented the bastion of Christian civilization until the
Great Schism of 1054. A strange thing happened after the Eastern churches
balked at papal authority though: they immediately stopped making converts. The
Greek, Russian and other Eastern Orthodox churches were once centers of
crusading zeal, but after they left the Catholic fold, their accomplishments in
theology and proselytization instantly came to a dead halt. Nor have they
resumed in the last thousand years. The Western European heretics who broke
away in the so-called Reformation have had the opposite problem: for the last
500 years, they have succeeded in nothing except splintering into ever-smaller
sects, whose doctrines get narrower and nuttier with each passing generation.
To put it simply, the Eastern Orthodox cut off their feet and became immobile,
while the Protestants cut off their heads, and have been running around like
chickens bereft of them ever since. Yet at the same time the Reformation was
apparently bringing the Church to ruin, it was quietly and quickly converting
most of the Western Hemisphere.
The
same pattern still holds in the present age. During the last century the
headlines in the North America and Western Europe have been full of opinion
polls which show disastrous declines in the numbers of so-called Catholics who
attend Mass weekly, or who have lost faith in the mandatory moral teachings
against crimes like abortion, divorce, contraception and homosexuality, not to
mention sins that the right wing is fond of, like hoarding, using monopoly
power, charging unjust prices, paying unjust wages, usury and speculation. At
the same time, the Catholic Church and those brands of Protestantism which are
closest to it have succeeded in converting much of sub-Saharan Africa in the 20th
Century alone, in one of the fastest conversions of a continent in history.
Likewise, they are beginning to make promising inroads throughout East and
Central Asia, particularly in South Korea, China and India. Whenever the Church
finds itself unwanted, it merely goes elsewhere and becomes bigger than ever.
And when heretics break away from it, they end up embracing even stupider and
more vile ideas than the heretics who came before them. Almost all of the heresies
of the first millennium A.D. were controversies about the nature of Christ,
which were quite advanced topics that mistakes could understandably be made
about. The popular mistakes of today are crude moral ones that lead directly to
injustice against other human beings. Arius would never have dared to permit
abortion; Nestorius can point his finger at this generation from beyond the
grave, for he would never have dreamed of commending divorce or gay marriage.
Of course, these long-term global trends cannot continue indefinitely without
something giving way, because there is only so much territory left that this
battle between fidelity and infidelity has yet to touch. Furthermore, these
processes are actually speeding up with each passing century. On top of that,
the foolish teachings that heretics are willing to swallow keep getting uglier
all the time. The same melodramatic pattern is being replaying in our
generation, except on a global scale. The enemies of the Church have almost
succeeded in eradicating it from San Francisco all the way to Vladivostok; the
buildings still stand, there is still a valid priesthood in place, but the
sacraments they hold do people little good because they don’t believe in
Catholicism itself. Yet the Church is still growing at a torrid pace, this time
among the downtrodden and humble people of the Southern Hemisphere and Asia. For
all of their wealth and self-centered arrogance, the world doesn’t revolve
around America and Europe. This was true in 1900, when Europe accounted for 24
percent of the world’s population, and it’s certainly truer a century later,
when its share had fallen to 12.9 percent thanks to self-inflicted depopulation
through abortion and contraception. Even in terms of secular forms of power
like wealth and military equipment, the West’s influence is shrinking with each
passing decade anyways, as I detail in The
Retreat of the West. An astute pope would inform America and Europe that we
don’t need them, but they will soon need us if they continue to squander their
temporal power so rapidly.
Rejection
of the authority of the pope may succeed in driving the Church from one corner
of the earth, but this has never stopped it from augmenting its authority in
two more, much like the hydra of Greek myth. The numbers of false Catholics who
obstinately refuse to recognize this hard fact is swelling, so we can expect
millions of them to continue to clamor for changes that can’t and shouldn’t
ever come to fruition. This includes much of the Western clergy, most of whom
lost their faith long ago; just one rejection of a single mandatory dogma or
moral teaching makes a person guilty of the mortal sin of heresy, and most of
the clergy accept at least a few of them, in a wide variety of combinations.
Since the days of Jesus, the Church has been plagued with what is sometimes
called the Judas Factor: rebellious clergy who commit treason against it for
worldly motives. As Jesus himself said, “Have I not chosen you, the Twelve, and
one of you is a Devil?”[2] In the present age, as people have voluntarily fallen
away from the Church in the West, it is more apt to say that 11 out of every 12
are devils, for very few of them are willing to teach the people under their
care the whole of Catholicism, especially the difficult parts. As I mentioned a
moment ago, the intensity of heresy and the violence with which the Church is
rejected has increased to unprecedented proportions in our day. One of the
symptoms of this has been the sinking of the clergy to new depths, one of which
is the deafening silence about the holocaust of abortion in every pulpit, or
any other form of injustice for that matter. Another is the perpetration of
injustice by the clergy of themselves, the most noxious form of which is the widespread
molestation scandal. Another form that was evident throughout the whole last
century was the physical abuse of students by dour nuns, who became a running
joke in pop culture for routinely paddling their charges with rulers without
just cause, thereby driving most of them out of the Church. Perhaps the most
dangerous form for the papacy, however, is the threat personified by Cardinal
Richelieu (1584-1642), a French cleric renowned for betraying the Catholic
cause in the Thirty Years’ War. Such men misuse their offices out of a love of
the honor it reflects on them, the accolades they receive in public, the money
that sometimes comes from their position, and most of all, the dry thrill of
exercising power. These men are even more dangerous than the archetypical
priest with a mistress or whatever, for they love pride, the Original Sin, and
money, the very root of all evil. Many of them are so-called conservatives or
traditionalists who dress well, speak articulately, never have a hair out of
place and are entirely orthodox about ceremonial matters – just like the Pharisees
and Scribes that Jesus warned against so often in the New Testament. It is
these people who succeed most often in undermining the papacy, through stratagems
that are insanely clever but entirely cowardly.
The
counterfeit arguments in favor of usury that eventually led to the blasphemous
establishment of the Vatican Bank were just the beginning of the intrigues that
they have succeeded in perpetrating in modern times. They gained influence and
grew in numbers rapidly around the time of Vatican II, which was rife with
political machinations of every imaginable kind. For a good introduction to
these maneuvers, I suggest reading and listening to the works of Fr. Malachi
Martin, who was the leading exorcist in America until his death in 1999. Some
of the council’s detractors go too far in their criticism, for it enjoyed a guarantee
of infallibility and did not swerve from past doctrine a single iota. The
problem was that it used such open-ended, airy language that heretics found it
easy to claim that it did. For example, since the beginning of the Church, haughty
bishops have perpetually claimed to share power with the pope to a far greater
extent than they actually do, in what is sometimes been labeled the conciliar
heresy. Now it goes by the buzz word of “collegiality,” a term which is being
deliberately misunderstood to undermine the pope and the mysterious negative
charism his office depends on. Most of the bishops – including that supposed
bastion of orthodoxy, Cardinal Tim Dolan – now openly espouse that heresy, on
the grounds that Vatican II document Lumen
Gentium approves it. To pull off this lie, conciliarists deliberately
ignore the explicatory note Pope Paul VI included with that document to clarify
it. Another recent example was the decision to allow altar girls in the 1990s.
I have no problem with that decision, since it is not a dogmatic matter of life
and death and covers subject matter that really can be changed, but it was promulgated
in a particularly sleazy way. It came as a surprise to Pope John Paul II, who
had promised not to permit altar girls – until unidentified authorities at the
Vatican released documents approving it, without any of the usual document
identification numbers. Similarly, it is often said that John Paul II gave an
address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996 which approved the theory
of Darwinian evolution. The text of the address does not say this, nor was it actually
written by the pope. Later on, it came out that the pope never even gave the
address. It was simply a document written by clergy who passed it off as the
teaching of the pope. As Martin, a Vatican insider and confidant of the pope,
makes clear in his writings and radio addresses, this is but the tip of a large
of iceberg of such sly ruses executed throughout that pontificate. By the
1990s, John Paul II was a virtual prisoner at the Vatican, hemmed in by staff
who loathed him and couldn’t wait till he passed on, so that they could take
another stab at changing doctrines they didn’t like. They impressed on him to
retire for more than a decade and he resisted them for a reason. We cannot
discount the possibility that Benedict XVI’s unprecedented retirement
announcement is the result of similar intrigue, in an effort to maneuver him
out of the way. At the time he was elected in 2005, I suspected that cardinals
who put him in power wanted another weak pope who would be too frail to resist
them, which is exactly what happened. Throughout his pontificate, Benedict XVI
was unable to lift a finger against the smorgasbord of abuses which have
metastasized throughout the Church for the past generation. Last year he gave biographer
Peter Seewald an assessment of what he hoped to accomplish for the remainder of
his papacy: “From me? Not much. I am an
old man and the strength stops. I think what I have done is enough.”[3]
Aside from holding onto his office, Benedict XVI didn’t accomplish anything at
all except allow the multiple cancers eating away at the Church to continue
growing unchecked. This suits the
rebellious wing of the clergy just fine, because the longer their abuses
continue, the more they will be treated as precedents that will be difficult to
uproot.
The Pope’s Job Description
Benedict XVI is perhaps the only public figure on the
planet deserving of admiration, because he represents the only faction that is
still sane, at least by the standards of our ancestors; I applaud him for
speaking out against usury and many other crimes, for his viewpoints are
entirely orthodox. John Paul II deserves measured admiration for many of the
same reasons. Yet the job of the pope is not to be a glad-handing politician,
or to cultivate popularity, or to have peace at any price. The job description
of the pope is this: he is the only man charged with the responsibility of
saying exactly what Catholicism is, of laying down the dividing lines of what
is and what is not Catholic. It has an objective reality of its own which cannot
be tampered with; just as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony becomes an entirely
different song if too many of the notes are changed, so too does Catholicism
become a different philosophy if its doctrines are altered in the slightest
degree. The pope is accountable for making it clear to the widest number of
people what this thing called Catholicism consists of. If they don’t like it,
they are then free to reject it; it is not his task to water it down, or
downplay unpopular elements, to make it appear more palatable. It accomplishes nothing to retain or gain
members who called themselves Catholic if they’re not really Catholic. Those
who are asking the pope to redefine Catholicism are essentially asking him to
lie about it. It is exactly like expecting a man to describe an elephant by
substituting a description of a duck-billed platypus. It would be a lie to say
that the elephant laid eggs and had a beaver’s tail, but the easiest way to lie
would be omit the trunk and other tell-tale parts of an elephant from the
description. Jesus said very definite things, which are a matter of historical
fact; it is plausible to say that the pope doesn’t know what those facts are,
but it is madness to suggest that the doctrines Jesus laid down are malleable.
If we go by the accounts given in the Bible, which are the only accounts we
have to go on, then Jesus said very specific and difficult things: do this and
you’re in, do that and you’re out. Period. He died to give us this message and
many others have died since then to preserve it. I have a hunch that in a very
short time, large numbers of people will be called on to die to preserve it
through another generation. As we speak, millions are dying because it hasn’t
been preserved anywhere except in the office of John Paul II and Benedict XVI
(with the exception of the teeming millions of new converts in the Third World,
who are invisible because they are poor).
Heresy has led directly to the unprecedented holocaust of abortion,
which has claimed a billion lives worldwide in just 40years; it kills millions
more through starvation each year, because the Church is looking the other way
at capitalist heresies like usury and hoarding of the means of production,
which take food out of the mouths of the poor. Heresy is not just a lie, or
even merely sacrilege in the sense that is tampering with a divine message, but
can lead directly to death and injustice in this world, not just the next. It
is also arrogance incarnate, for every heretic thinks that they know better
than the Catholic Church without ever bothering to consult the 2,000 years of
wisdom accumulated in the writings of their theologians and saints.
The
primary purpose of the papacy is to act as ombudsman for humanity, who will
point out all of these truths, regardless of the cost. None of the popes in
recent memory has done this, including supposed “greats” like John Paul II. He
might have been greatly popular across the planet, which is a problem, because
it is bad “for you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their
fathers treated the false prophets.” None of the recent popes have been
heretics, but they have been exceptionally weak administrators. Perhaps they
have additional considerations to take into account which the public, including
myself, do not know about. Maybe they have been afraid to speak out for fear
that the Apocalypse would happen on their watch and wanted to preserve a valid
priesthood capable of granting valid confessions to the people of the world
before they died like flies. Perhaps they have calculated that it would be
better to have a valid priesthood in place which can supply the sacraments to
the one out of every hundred Americans or Europeans who aren’t heretics,
regardless of whether or not they taught evil things. On the face of it,
however, it appears that they are being blackmailed with the threat of losing a
lot of buildings and money if the Western bishops were to break away in an open
schism. If so, then they have made a fatal miscalculation, because the
innumerable secondary schools, nominally Catholic colleges and other such
institutions are of little worth if they are not actually Catholic. We may be
better off without them, if they all they accomplish to misrepresent what
Catholicism is.
What the world badly needs is a strong pope like Pius
IX (1846-78) or Leo XIII (1878-1903) who tells it like it is, regardless of the
consequences. These men were not crabby, but they were resolute in the midst of
crises which seemed certain to wash away the Church altogether; more often than
not, they made the world feel uncomfortable, rather than all warm and fuzzy on
the inside. They directed their followers to get down to the difficult life-long
chore of changing their characters in a very specific way. They knew that it
was logically impossible to change the teachings of the Church, just as it is
absurd to treat morality as a relative thing, for both are matters of
discovery, like finding the right answer to an equation, not of invention or
personal taste. A strong pope in the same mold would say things like this
·
The richer you
are, the more likely you are to go to Hell, as St. Chrysostom and all of his
fellow writers among the saints taught.
·
As the Catechism
of the Catholic Church says, divorce is a mortal sin, regardless of whether or
not it is followed by adultery through remarriage. It is a crime that
represents treason against the family.
·
Torture is
unacceptable, regardless of whether or not it is labeled “enhanced
interrogation” or other such Orwellian label.
·
Homosexuality is
itself a hate crime. All perversions of any kind are really just different
forms of sex addiction, which involve a fascination with breaking taboos.
·
Abortion is
cold-blooded, premeditated baby murder in each and every circumstance, as all
of our ancestors believed until just a few decades ago.
·
Many of the
individual teachings of capitalism are heretical, including the belief that
employers can pay whatever wage or charge whatever price they can get away
with, i.e. the prevailing wage or price. Nor can one licitly get rich gambling
in the markets or by hoarding the means of production. These teachings go all
the way back to the days of Moses.
·
Wearing a uniform
does not give anyone a free pass into Heaven, including members of the armed
forces. That depends on whether or not they live up the responsibilities
implied by those uniforms, which may sometimes involve the unpopular duty to
refuse illegal orders, such as to kill innocents in battle.
·
Contraception is
a mortal sin that undermines society in many different ways. Population growth
is good, not evil.
·
Class prejudice
is a particularly vile sin. As Jesus said, “the love of money is a very great
sin.” Furthermore, numerous passages in the Bible echo the opinion of Sirach
13:24, that “poverty is only evil in the sight of the ungodly.”
·
No one can
receive interest for any reason, including the Vatican Bank. Nor is anyone
obliged to pay interest on any loans they have agreed to, as many popes have
stated in the past. Anyone who balks at this cannot receive Christian burial,
as stated in Canon 25 of Lateran II.
·
Like the rich man
in the parable of Lazarus, merely ignoring the needs of the poor is sufficient cause
for eternal damnation, as Chrysostom said. This might also be true of those
Westerners who see the pictures of starving children on television commercials,
yet do nothing for them.
·
Every other
religion is defective in some way. Authentic ecumenism does not imply watering
down doctrines to suit the liking of other denominations and religions, but to
explain clearly what they are, so that they can understand what they are
accepting or rejecting. Proselytization is necessary, not something to be
ashamed of.
·
It is mortally
sinful to balk at any of these commandmnts, which come directly from the
Magisterium, which is the Mind of Christ and spring from pure love of the
victims they protect from injustice. Anyone who merely disbelieves them cannot
take Eucharist without committing sacrilege.
I’m
sure both the Left and Right of the political spectrum can find plenty to balk
at in this list, which is favorable to neither of them. If you don’t like it,
take it up with the Jewish carpenter who set down these laws, before he takes
it up with you. The purpose of all this is not to be mean and crabby, but to
prevent those who want to commit injustices against others from carrying out
their crimes with a clear conscience, in which case their souls are also saved.
Unfortunately, some people want to do them so badly that they will cast around
until they find a convenient excuse. If the population of the West was actually
Catholic, they would have no problem swearing an oath not to do them at every
Mass, which the next pope could theoretically require. It might be a wise move
to do precisely this until each one of these crimes are stamped out across the
planet, or so that all of humanity clearly gets the message that God won’t
tolerate them. Yet I sincerely doubt the next pope would even be able to
reinstitute the relatively tame Oath Against Modernism which all priests
serving between 1910 and 1967 had to swear at the beginning of their service,
at least not without a major revolt. He could also instantly stamp out other
rampant abuses by fiat, such as forbidding the American churches from handing
out false annulments like candy; this practiced incensed the normally
mild-mannered John Paul II to no end, since they are meant only for extreme
situations like shotgun weddings, yet he did little about it. Sooner or later,
some pope is going to have to perform the second set of tasks in his job
description, which is to apply discipline to the rest of the clergy. The sooner
it happens the better, because the longer such discipline is lacking, the
tougher the final reckoning will be.
The Greatest Schism and the Next Peter
There will come a showdown at some point in which the
gigantic schism that has already occurred in the Church has to be brought out
into the open. It will not be pleasant, but it will be healthy, in the same
sense that vomiting is healthy when one has swallowed poison.[4]
At some point, we will get a capable pope who will have the strength to tell
the whole world exactly what Catholicism is in no uncertain terms, at which
point most of the false Catholics who live in the West will publicly balk,
thereby requiring public discipline. This includes most of the Western bishops,
few of whom would approve of all the dogmas listed above, and none of whom would applaud them loudly
and publicly. They already voluntarily excommunicated themselves long ago, and
a good pope would merely remind them of the explicit choice they have made
through their own free will, addled by pride. They have succeeded in making the
world forget that the papacy has the power to remove bishops at will,
regardless of how badly they choose to misinterpret Vatican II. Pope Pius VII
(1800-1823) once fired all the bishops of France, mainly for political reasons
in his struggle against Napoleon, so tossing them out on their backsides for ingrained,
arrogant defiance of Church teachings ought to be easy enough. When asked back
in the 1990s what he would do if made pope, Malachi Martin didn’t hesitate to
say that he’d simply fire one third of the bishops in America immediately.
“Just be gone on Monday,” he said. Since then, the Church here has slid even
further thanks to lack of discipline, so many more than that might have to be
let go as unceremoniously as possible. To illustrate just how bad things are, I
wrote a four-page letter detailing numerous serious abuses – including the
clergy approving of abortion and priests balking at direct commands from the
Vatican not to sell merchandise during Mass – to the best man we have in
America, Cardinal Tim Dolan. He simply swept it all under the carpet with a
couple of quick sentences saying this was merely a matter for my bishop and I
to discuss. This was not only a clear example of how the conciliar heresy is
practiced in America, but a continuation of the culture of buck-passing and
whitewashing that made the pedophilia scandal possible. Another factor that
made it possible was the clamor of the public itself for easy-going clerics who
would not criticize adultery from the pulpit. They got what they asked for, in
a faction of clergy who believed whole-heartedly that sex is no big deal, but
money and power are very important. It was the rejection of Catholicism by the
rank-and-file that made this possible. This is because the Catholic Church in
America has never aimed at fostering a counter-culture of any kind; during the
century between the Civil War and the 1960s, its main focus was on assimilating
immigrants into America’s commercial culture, not teaching them to stand out
from it. Throughout much of that time it has been a bastion of haughtiness; the
American bishops were the ones who led a walkout at Vatican I (1868-1870), for
example. One of the most loyal products of the American clergy, Archbishop
Fulton Sheen, once said, “If you want your children to lose their faith, send
them to Catholic school.” The reason for this is plain as day: they’re not
Catholic. They’re designed to produce yuppies who won’t make waves as they
nestle themselves as snugly as possible into the power structure and a bland
suburban lifestyle, not rebels who will make heroic sacrifices for just causes.
Our universities aren’t Catholic either, so we can cut them loose without much
regret, if necessary. Until we can replace them with institutions that teach
Catholic positions in every academic field, such as Christocentric history, Thomist
psychology, the economic theory of distributism and the like, then they are
merely obstructions.
Millions of wayward Catholics are going to cling to such
worldly trinkets when the Last Schism comes out into the open. This painful
event will be a prelude to authentic growth, but it will be even more painful
and the growth will be delayed the longer it takes for a strong pope to take
the reins. One of the worst things that could possibly happen is the election
of another muddling pope like those of recent memory who would maintain the
appearance of false unity through their silence, by not sharing their orthodoxy
with the rest of us or refusing to discipline their clergy. An even worse
possibility is that someone from the wayward American branch of the Church
would be elected, but this is thankfully unlikely, because cardinals have
historically been chary of granting more influence to the great powers of the
world in this way. America is a small and distant corner of a very large
organization that thinks it has more importance than it actually does, thanks
to its wealth and superpower status. It is entirely likely that at this
conclave or another within the lifetimes of any readers, open warfare will erupt
on sharp dividing lines: on one side will be heretics who mainly serve in the
declining churches in the rich, white nations of the north of the planet,
pitted against orthodox Catholics in the fast-growing churches in the poor,
non-white nations of the south. Race, class and geography will likely intensify
the split to the boiling point. Once a strong pope is finally elected, teeming
millions of Westerners are likely to disobey him right off the bat, but will be
even more likely to do so once they see is black or brown, especially once he
starts canning their favorite clergy left and right. It is entirely possible
that in the schism to come, the Western bishops will pull some kind of scam to
contest the election and perhaps impose their own choice, in the form of an
anti-pope who can change the teachings they despise precisely because he
doesn’t enjoy papal infallibility. I’m praying to see a black or brown face
elected at the next conclave, because whenever I see one in confession, I know
they’re going to talk straight to me. I have met several from Kenya, every one
of whom stood head and shoulders above their peers; they are not only the best
black role models on the planet today, but among the few model Catholics. Of
course, much of the hierarchy does not want to see black or brown faces in the
papacy, precisely because they know that the jig might be up once one of them
gets into office. So-called “liberals” and so-called “conservatives” both see
this conclave as an opportunity to impose their own unorthodox agendas, but as
I explained in Poxes from Both Houses: How the Liberal-Conservative
Feud is Contributing to the Decline of Western Civilization, the real division is between orthodoxy and unfaithfulness.
Both the Richelieu faction and the excessively lenient faction in the Western
branches of the Church are cognizant of the fact that the real threat to their
power comes from the fervent South, which is probably why they have been
employing the usual sneaky machinations for months to see that it doesn’t
happen. I planned to write on this subject long ago, once I heard the alarming
news that the number of cardinals from the West was actually increased last
year at the expense of the Third World nations where the Church is growing like
wildfire, out of all proportion to their numerical strength or orthodox
credentials. For example, there were
only 58 European electors at the last conclave in 2005, including 20 Italians,
but now there are 61 and 28 respectively.[5]
Given the sheer amount of blatant subterfuge carried out in the last few
decades at the Vatican, under the noses of popes who felt helpless to stop the
torrent, you can’t tell me honestly in the light of such news that political
maneuvers began long ago to prevent a strong pope from emerging. Such
machinations may succeed in preventing the appearance of a schism, but they
only make the actual schism worse in the long run. We already lost America and
Europe long ago because of laxity and they’re not going to be brought back by
kowtowing and rewarding them for their insolence. At best, we will be able to
salvage a minority of the parishioners in each region, who may have to travel
far from home to find a valid Mass once their local churches break away. At
least the remaining churches will have the important advantage of actually be
Catholic, unlike most contemporary “maintenance parishes” where parishioners
are only being maintained in their sins.
Sooner
or later, tears are going to be shed, for the watershed moment when all of
these things come to a head can only be avoided through intrigue for so long.
We will shed fewer of them if we rip it off like a Band-Aid, rather than letting
the rot progress into gangrene. It may become necessary to lop America and
Europe off entirely like decomposing limbs before they infect the whole planet.
If the corrosion is allowed to progress that far, then the eventual schism will
be so painful that the whole world will feel it, regardless of their choice of
religions. The Catholic Church is the largest and longest-lasting organization
in world history, one representing a sixth of the world’s people, so if it is
destabilized, the rest of the planet will go with it. After a process of
elimination that has taken several millennia, the number of major religions
left is now down to six: Catholicism and Islam, both of which claim a billion
followers, plus a billion more Eastern Orthodox and Protestants, as well as a
few hundred million Buddhists and Hindus. Much of the planet also follows
Mammon, i.e. the de facto religion of the West’s commercial civilization. This
winnowing process has not stopped, which begs the question of which one is
going to be eliminated next. Because we’re living through The Falling Away
predicted so long ago, as well as a post-Cold War political system Samuel P.
Huntington has termed “The Clash of Civilizations,” it appears that Catholicism
might next on the chopping block in that clash. Yet this would be against the
whole trend of history for the last two thousand years, which hints that it
will survive to the end of what amounts to a last-man-standing contest.
Regardless of how foolishly the clergy manage the Church at this conclave or any
other, or how many millions of lives and souls they doom because of their bad
management, we have a divine guarantee which has been empirically vindicated by
history: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church; and the gates
of hell shall not prevail against it.” What we need is another Peter, a man
eager to take the risk of being crucified upside down in order to give the
world truth and justice. Once we have another pope like him, those gates will
be opened wide, and they will fail.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[3]
Pentin, Edward, 2013, “Theories Abound on Pope's 'Real Reasons' Behind Surprise
Announcement,” published at the Newsmax website on Feb. 19, 2013.
Available online at
[4] I
am paraphrasing a brilliant comment in Chesterton, G.K., 1999, The Man Who
was Thursday: A Nightmare. Project Gutenberg: U.S. Available from Project
Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1695
[5] Philip
Pullella, Philip, 2013, “Pope May Change Conclave Rules Before Leaving: Vatican,”
published Feb. 20, 2013 at Reuters.com. Available online at http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/20/us-pope-resignation-conclave-idUSBRE91J0NG20130220
