Good Catholics, Bad Bishops and Popes: Part I

By: Unknown Centurion

We’ve always had bad bishops and popes. In our nearly two-thousand-year history, the Chair of Peter has been occupied by some of the worst sinners and most worldly scoundrels. We’ve also had some good runs of consecutive saintly pontiffs, even recently, but inevitably as a fallen race in a fallen world, those paragon pontificates are replaced by less prayerful and less perfect popes. While not directly stating where we might be on the spectrum of sinful to saintly popes and bishops, I do wish to list some of the signs of the times and address what a good Catholic is to do when a Bishop or a Pope is more heterodox, or even heretical, than holy.

Signs of the Times

Jesus admonished us to interpret the signs of the times (Matthew 24:3-31; Luke 12:54-59), especially those souls He created for the latter days of trial and tribulation. Scripture tells us of times when evil will be called good and good will be called evil (Isaiah 5:20). And St. Paul describes a time when “a strong delusion” will cause many to believe the lie and not believe the truth (2 Thessalonians 2:11). In his first letter to Timothy, he warns that in the latter times, many will leave the faith, following doctrines of devils, speaking lies, and refusing to marry or to eat meat (1 Timothy 4:1-4).

Paul later writes to Timothy again about the perilous latter days when men of the cloth will be lovers of self, not of God, men with unnatural affection, arrogant, abusive men, who are despisers of those who are good, men who hold to the form of religion, but don’t believe in the power of it. (2 Timothy 3:1-5). Sound kinda familiar? His advice to those subject to such religious leaders is to “avoid them” for they will only be successful with the weak, those burdened with sins or swayed by emotions (2 Timothy 3:5-7). The “counterfeit faith” of such corrupt-minded men who oppose the truth and established religious authority will be exposed as folly for all to see. (2 Timothy 3:8,9). The Church’s greatest evangelist’s advice for those subject to such selfish, sodomic, clerics can be summed up as “avoid and expose”.

Similarly, the Catechism speaks of a latter-day Passion of the Church, before the second coming of Christ. This Passion of the Body of Christ, like the original Passion of Christ, will be an inside job, where those successors of the apostles would, like their spiritual forefathers, cower, abandon, deny, and betray Jesus. This painful passion in the latter times would lead to a great apostasy, also prophesied, where few Catholics earnestly practice their faith and many souls once squarely in the camp of Christ, are lost to the powers of darkness. Whether these prophecies of Scripture are being fulfilled in our time or will be completed in five or five hundred years is not for us to know with certainty.

Nevertheless, we must not forget that we are in the midst of a spiritual war, the victories and defeats of which in the unseen realm, influence and affect the state of the visible world, for good or for ill. Satan, evil and intelligent creature, is the leader of these armies of darkness with allies and those under his influence in the material world, many of whom don’t realize they are deceived and do his bidding. As prophecies of Pope Leo XIII and Fatima have revealed, Satan was or will be given additional power for a period of time, perhaps a century, with some mystics and those with spiritual acuity believing his time may now come to an end. This would explain the frenzied and ferocious pace of gains he has made in all areas of life, infiltrating the most influential secular institutions and even those entities which have been established to oppose him, such as the Church.

Satan’s Target: The Church

In addition to his incomprehensible victories in our once-Christian culture, an intelligent commander would certainly include infiltrating the ranks of his most formidable enemy, corrupting the priesthood through malicious malformation, systemic sodomy, Eucharistic apathy, and liturgical laxity, thereby creating an interconnected web of enemies within, living duplicitous double lives of predation, and the pursuit of power and pleasure. Such a strategy would likely include the promotion of his compromised and complicit double agents to the rank of bishop, worldly men without chests and without a prayer life, who project false piety, demand fealty, ignore the flock, sideline orthodox and outspoken priests, and rebrand episcopal cowardice as collegiality, as they preside over the mismanaged decline of the Church Christ built.

If the Enemy were ever able to orchestrate a secret campaign to elect a Supreme Pontiff from among the bad bishops and compromised cardinals, he could drive away its most fervent believers and damage, demolish, and remake the divine/human Body of Christ into a universal, secular NGO according to the revolutionary spirit of the world and its Prince.

With such a malevolent Manchurian candidate in charge of the universal Church, he would have a bully pulpit to bully the most faithful followers into submission or schism, to create catechetical chaos and confusion, to focus on the here and now and ignore the hereafter, and to profane, desacralize and suppress the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass which is the source of the Church’s power and the restrainer against evil in the world.

This willing or unwitting enemy at the top likely would not come out of the box swinging so as not to expose himself, but hide his anger and heresy behind a false facade of mercy and humility. He wouldn’t openly advocate heresy, which the Holy Spirit would guard against, but begin with ambiguities and loose language open to interpretation which the enemies of the Church could easily manipulate. Because he would never challenge the post-Christian culture, he would be loved by the world (John 15:18) as he gradually reshaped the Church in a more worldly fashion. His plan could likely include slowly removing and retiring the most orthodox defenders of the faith, replacing them with cowards, the compromised, sycophants, and like-minded leftists, even bestowing upon the unseen mafia which elected him greater power and influence.

As his time grew short, and that of his preferred pope, Satan’s outright attacks and covert undermining of the Church’s teaching and tradition would increase in speed and severity, deeply and diabolically dividing and disfiguring the Body of Christ. The Evil One would undoubtedly seek to ban the timeless, traditional Latin Mass forcing all to attend a banal, commonplace, counterfeit, which has removed the majority of prayers and substituted its supernatural, sacrificial nature with a communal-centric meal.

Such an agent of Satan would be the unknown architect of the great apostasy with one in ten self-proclaimed Catholics even bothering to attend Mass in person on Sundays, without lifting a finger to bring the lost sheep back, or even lifting the dispensation which would encourage their return. He would demonize and isolate those who sincerely sought to do God’s will, while kowtowing and catering to the least-common-denominator of sinners in a lower the bar Catholicism which offers little and demands less, leaving people in their sins though believing they are saved. Then with a watered-down Mass and so few who attend it, His power and influence would increase, as the Church’s power derived from full, active, conscious participation in the Mass decreased.

While such a scenario may seem far-fetched to some, and too close to home to others, what is a good Catholic to do in times such as those in the above hypothetical, when most of the universal Church wake up to find that they are indeed “more Catholic than the Pope.”

Do they remain oblivious to and unaware of the supernatural reality that the smoke of Satan has indeed entered the highest levels of the Church, as Pope Paul VI warned? Do they blindly obey the grave sinner in white who, knowingly or not, is doing untold damage to the sacred institution and driving souls into hell like snowflakes? Or do they resist, mount a faithful defense of the faith, to protect the one true Church and the souls for which she is responsible? Or is there an official mechanism in the Church or under canon law, to challenge them on any and all grounds from whether they are authorized, valid, legal, binding, and consistent with precedent, engaging bishops, canonists, tribunals, and even the Apostolic Signatura to debate and decide, rather than cave in and comply, as most of the Church did in the political realm?

If we truly know our Faith, remain in a state of grace, and prayerfully discern what we should and should not do, following our well-formed, clear consciences, we will be blameless before the Lord, even in outward acts of resistance or disobedience to episcopal enforcement of papal restrictions on the full practice of the Faith. How would these bishops, who tout the primacy of even a malformed, clouded, conscience as a convenient excuse for their failure to correct those who call themselves Catholic but fail to follow Church teaching, react when we ignore and marginalize them, citing our well-formed consciences as the reasons we will never comply with their schemes to fundamentally transform the Church?

When it is the orthodox who refuse to comply not the heterodox and when they are the ones who disobeyed not the Catechism, will their tune change from conscience is king to you must obey? It seems the only time they enforce anything it’s against the most orthodox among us. And if we are persecuted, and our persecutors are antichristian popes and cowardly, compromised, and complicit bishops, we must persevere, bearing our persecutions with joy, offering it up, and remaining faithful to Christ, as did the Apostolic Church, while secretly practicing the faith whenever possible, even in home churches and hidden catacombs.

read Part II tomorrow.