The Bergolian Captivity

By: Unknown Centurion

We live in interesting times – times of authentic, organic, spirit-led revival. These are times of liberation, consolation, transformation, transparency, and accountability. These are unforeseen and unmerited times of joy, hope, grace, and blessings bestowed by God upon not only America, but upon much of the once-Christian West. We see such seeds of restoration and renewal beginning to sprout in Europe, most notably in France, Germany, England, Italy, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, and even in Argentina and Canada. The question is, will this God-given year of radical reorientation, revival and restoration breaking out across former Christendom, pass over His Church?

Surely God cares far more about the salvation of souls than he does a return to common sense and a resurgence of liberty in the United States. Would He give the citizens of the City of Man a reprieve from an all-encompassing socialist surveillance state or a godless globalist government of corruption and control, without also sending a saving spirit of renewal, reorientation, and restoration to the City of God, particularly with regard to its most central act, the Mass, which remains the supernatural source of its power? Because of our free will, He may bless the former and not the latter, unless those in the Church, or enough of us, want it, pray for it, and work for it.

Those residents of reality (i.e. people with clear consciences and undimmed intellects) can palpably sense the welcome return to sanity, virtue, truth, order, faith, morality, and tradition. While those under the disoriented and disordered influence of the world and its Prince oppose it with an inexplicable, irrational, even infernal intensity. Sadly, many of those who run the Catholic Church seem to find themselves in the latter camp, because many are unaware, enemies within, worldly, effeminate, cowards, and don’t believe in the supernatural.

One would expect at least some of her bishops and priests to call for public prayer and make a public plea to the Pope to set the Ark of Salvation on a new course in order to ride this wave of heavenly renewal, letting it carry us closer to our ultimate destination, rather than turn into it and suffer disastrous damage and lamentable losses we cannot afford.

The Jubilee Year

Pope Francis called for 2025 to be a Jubilee Year, in the name of Hope, which coincidentally was the title of his third and most recent autobiography.  Far from a recent invention, a Jubilee Year finds its basis in scripture, and was mandated by God Himself. Leviticus 25 institutes the Jubilee Year as a year of rest (no working the land), restoration (reclamation of ancestral lands) and freedom (slaves to be liberated), where those who have been afflicted receive consolation. Similarly Isaiah 61, spoken by Jesus as being fulfilled in their hearing at the outset of His public ministry, describes the “year of the Lord’s favor” as  a time of consolation (“good tidings to the afflicted”), liberty (“liberty to the captives”), and renewal (“restoration of ancient ruins) (Isaiah 61:1-4).

Jesus told us that the Church has authority to speak in His name (Matthew 28:18-20; Luke 10:16). So, when the Church declares that 2025 will be a Jubilee Year, it is as if Christ Himself called for a year of liberation, consolation and renewal. While those who lead the Church may be myopically thinking of indulgences, doors, and disordered and dysphoric pilgrims (official LGBTQ Pilgrimage), Jesus may be thinking much differently and much bigger, like liturgical liberation which, God-willing, will unleash universal consolation and renewal the likes of which the living generations have never seen.

Yes the Pope has the power to call for a year of jubilee, but he is powerless to effectuate it or set the priorities or parameters of it. God is in charge of that and may have far different and far greater ways planned than Pope Francis, which may even include removing all human and structural obstacles to the renewal and restoration He desires. Perhaps in God’s mind, a year of the Lord’s favor includes radical transparency, severe accountability, exposing, punishing, and removing the lavender mafia and those they promote and protect, along with heretics, Marxists, radical feminists, and exposing and shaming all those who were cowardly and complicit allowing the enemies within to undermine the faith they swore to uphold. For we do see a similar necessary purge and purification breaking out in the federal government of the United States, which could only have been possible by the grace and providence of God.

In reading the Pope’s letter on this Jubilee year, what it is about, and how we are to participate in it, he mentions indulgences, the holy door, covid, refugees, climate change, synodality, Vatican II documents and the recent magisterium. That to me doesn’t sound like the year of the Lord’s favor. It doesn’t speak of Jesus or implore the providential power of God to pour out His graces and accomplish far better than these secular social justice scraps.

This Vatican’s version of the jubilee sadly sounds like the mere materialistic musings, hoping that it will be remembered well and that its legacy of confusion and globalism will continue. Thankfully, the Vatican’s hopes are not God’s hopes, and it sure looks like our triune God is unleashing a supernatural tidal wave of divine mercy, grace, faith, reason, truth, transparency, liberty, localism, consolation, and renewal -please God. Neither synodality nor the “magisterium of Francis” has the power to provide meaningful renewal. Any authentic renewal should begin with repentance which leads to right orientation which leads to right worship which leads to right relationship.

There is a deep, biblical, connection between the Jubilee year and the Babylonian Captivity. In fact, the seventy years of Judah’s captivity was set by God and based upon the number of Sabbath years, Israel failed to keep. God prescribed that every seven years was to be a sabbath year where no planting or harvesting was to occur. (Leviticus 25:2-4) At the end of every seven sabbath years (50 years) was to be a Jubilee Year, which was a super-Sabbath year where captives were released, debts were forgiven, and a family’s ancestral lands were returned. To show that God, who created and sustains everything, is a God of mercy, every fifty years was to be a time of liberation, consolation, rest and renewal.

Scholars believe that Israel never kept the Jubilee year. And Scripture confirms that for 490 consecutive years, they also failed to keep the Sabbath years. So God set the period of their captivity at seventy years (490 years divided by 7 years), according to the number of Sabbath years they failed to uphold. God took them into Babylon “to fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths. All the days of its desolation it kept sabbath until seventy years were complete.” (2 Chron. 36:21).

More than the door, the indulgences, and the welcoming of LGBT pilgrims, the best thing the Church could do during this Jubilee Year would be to provide liturgical liberation by lifting the restrictions imposed by the ironically named Traditionis Custodes, which could unleash incomprehensible consolation within the Church, reverberating throughout the material and spiritual worlds, and provide the renewal of the earth according to the Lord’s desire, making it not just a nominal year of hope, but a true year of the Lord’s favor.

The Bergolian Captivity

More and more people are awakening to the reality that we are living in a Bergolian Captivity. It is a time of arbitrary, autocratic rule, a period of obfuscation, undermining, corruption, and concealment. It is an era where practicing homosexuals and borderline heretics are promoted and protected and our most pious practitioners are persecuted and demonized. It is the climactic end of a dark period of the Church where after the Church artificially contrived a comparatively lame liturgy to replace the reverent, rightly-ordered and oriented re-presentation of the salvific sacrifice of Christ, a great apostasy of Biblical proportions ensued.

Unlike the Babylonian Exile, Catholics were not carried away to another country against their will; they just stopped showing up to their intact churches on Sundays, and the fewer and fewer that did, likely received fewer and fewer graces. And unlike the Babylonian Captivity, right worship was not effectively eliminated by an external enemy, but by the person installed to protect, preserve, and promote it. Recently, it’s become more of a spiritual exile than a physical one, in that those zealous for the faith of their fathers have been effectively prohibited from participating in anything other than the new order of the Mass, created not out of whole cloth, but partially written on a cocktail napkin in the late 1960’s by a dark and dubious figure.

Many pious, practicing Catholics feel like they are in a liturgical exile, where they cannot practice the faith of their fathers and worship God as He prescribed. This presents a potentially monumental problem, for it is not simply about how we want to worship God, but about how God wants to be worshipped. The Old Testament is replete with exacting specifications provided by God as to how He was to be worshipped across many chapters and books. Scripture also describes the disastrous and even deadly consequences for failing to worship God in strict accordance with His divinely dictated standards, specifically for profaning or treating that which is  sacred irreverently (see Leviticus 10:1-3 and 2 Samuel 6:6-8). If this was true when deviations concerned incense and the ark of the covenant, why would it not be true, even more so, when it concerns a revolutionary committee’s less reverent rewriting of the rubrics for the re-presentation of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of the Son of God?

If God was so super specific and strict about how He was to be worshipped in the Old Testament, which was only a mere shadow, and involved the slaughter of sheep’s and goats, why would we not expect Him, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, to demand strict adherence to an infinitely greater manner of worship involving the re-presentation of the passion, death, and resurrection of His only begotten Son? And if the punishment for deviations from His design and decrees in matters of worship under the old covenant, were swift and severe, including death, why do we think we can worship him so casually and carelessly, as we want not as He wants and come out unscathed?

Perhaps many of the ills of the Church in the last few generations are the direct result of our messing with the Mass, remaking on our own, it as we saw fit, stripping it of some of its sacred nature and orienting it away from God and toward ourselves?  If imposing the restrictions on the Mass of the Ages has caused only subjugation, indifference, and degeneration, would not we expect that by lifting these restrictions, might lead to an opposite reaction of true liberation, consolation, and renewal of the Church and the world?

The New But Not Improved Mass

Mass is the central act of our faith. The Mass in effect in 1969 was the result of over a thousand years of organic, Spirit-led development, and in an instant, a modernist committee created a contrived counterfeit which was imposed, perhaps deceptively, upon the universal Church. Did the stripped down, simplified “new mass” increase or decrease the faithful’s understanding of the Mass as the re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ to the Father on Calvary where we unite our sacrifices to the sacrifice of Christ and receive His Body and Blood, and the infinite merits and graces of the Cross are dispensed down through the ages? And was the Church’s stated goal of “active participation” worth the great apostasy of souls that followed, really worth it?

Of course, despite the unnatural way it was invented and the deceptive way it was approved, the Novus Ordo Mass is both valid and licit. But is it as efficacious and otherwordly, befitting the supernatural nature of the salvific divine sacrifice of Christ? For though the merits of the Mass are infinite, the manner in which they are dispensed are not. The unlimited merits of the Cross can be limited by our disposition, be it unworthiness, lack of understanding, lack of participation, lack of reverence, indifference, among others. They can also be limited by the casual, conversational, careless, even egotistical manner in which the priest re-presents the once-for-all cosmic sacrifice, peppering it with ad-libs and anecdotes to make it more “entertaining”.

Add to this the fact that more than half of the prayers and solemn gestures of the Tridentine Mass were eliminated, the orientation of the sacrificer was reversed (from Ad Orientem to Versus Populum), turning his back to God and his face toward the people, sacred chant to God was replaced with modernist hymns about ourselves, and that regular Mass attendance has dramatically dropped by 66%, it’s obvious that far fewer of Christ’s infinite merits are applied in our time. And because the Mass is the source of the Church’s power (CCC 1074), due to the unforced error of the late 1960’s and the recent unnecessarily imposed liturgical exile, it may be running on 5-10% power, which explains where we are, and how we got here, as a Church and a world.

If you have a far inferior product which can’t compete with another in a side-by-side comparison, then of course you’d want the better version banned. It’s similar to the way hardcore Islamic countries ban bibles and criminalize evangelization. But unlike Islamic countries, there are many other options to Catholicism in the West, including Eastern Orthodoxy, the SSPX, thousands of Protestant flavors, being spiritual but not religious, or full-fledged secularism.

Yet, rather than admit that after fifty-five years, the new Mass was a failed experiment by every meaningful metric and restore the more reverent re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ, the revolutionaries who run the Church double down, restricting the ancient Mass and persecuting its practitioners. Even the Coca Cola Company realized their “New Coke” was a failure and restored the original in short order as millions of consumers rejected the new formula.  Imagine if they, like the Church, stuck with their new invention, refused to manufacture the original, and demonized and alienated their most loyal customers.

Intolerable restrictions have not only been imposed on the Mass of the Ages, but also on attending similar traditional Catholic liturgies of the Eastern Rite, celebrating Mass Ad Orientem, kneeling to receive the Eucharist on the tongue, and almost anything except the withering, watered-down Mass of the Boomers. Has the Church taken away these important freedoms to exert control on the some of the twenty-five percent who still go to Mass, or so that more people won’t get to experience what they’re missing, knowing if they did, many would clamor for the reverence, beauty, awe, and mystery befitting the act that saved and redeemed the world.

Before the recent restrictions, ninety-eight percent of Traditional Latin Mass Catholics attended Mass at least once a week, compared to Novus Ordo Catholics who attended at a rate of just under 25%. Which makes you wonder why would you impose severe restrictions on the Mass with nearly one hundred percent attendance instead of the version where fewer than a quarter regularly attend? If your goal was salvation of souls, wouldn’t you want to make the traditional liturgy more accessible and available rather than less?

Many of the Church’s most faithful sons and daughters have left for Eastern Orthodoxy because they believe our liturgy may not be rightly-ordered and supernatural, but disoriented and unnatural. True our separated Eastern brothers still possess a beautiful ancient Divine Liturgy, along with apostolic succession and the Holy Eucharist, but they also are a deeply divided federation of schismatic sects beset by doctrinal disorder and catechetical chaos. Plus, if this liturgical exile is the just punishment for our many sins, we should accept it in humility and repent, offering up this period of sacrifice and deprivation on behalf of and in reparation for our fellow Catholics, not seek to avoid it in a selfish effort to save, or satisfy ourselves.

Rather than abandon the ark of salvation we should faithfully endure our liturgical exile as did the far more dire deprivations and severe captivities of Maximilian Kolbe, Walter Ciszek, and the persecuted Christians in China, Japan, and throughout Asia. We should do what we can to remain faithful and offer the most solemn sacrifice we can, uniting it to the perfect unmodified sacrifice of Christ, overcoming the inherent obstacles to reverence, awe, right praise and thanksgiving. We can pray and sacrifice daily that the days of our exile be shortened, and join with other Catholics in asking our pastors and bishops for more reverent Masses (Ad Orientem, altar rails or kneelers to receive the Eucharist on the tongue while kneeling, Gregorian Chant, more incense, fewer Eucharistic Ministers and more Latin). We can also pray that a worthy successor to St Peter be chosen, not by campaigning or a conspiracy among cardinals, but by the Holy Spirit to restore and renew the Church and the world.

The Babylonian Captivity

The Babylonian Captivity is widely regarded as the worst biblical event in the history of God’s chosen people. After years of idolatry, indifference, and infidelity, God allowed the Babylonians to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem and march the residents of the Southern Kingdom into a seventy-year exile in Babylon. Perhaps the most painful part of this painful period was that the Jews were unable to worship the Lord according to the law, since the only place they could offer their sacrifices had been destroyed. Yet even after they were liberated, many Jews refused to return to the Holy Land and remained in Babylon.

For God, it’s not just about human freedom, but freedom to worship which is the basis of His relationship to mankind. The Babylonian Captivity came to an end in an unlikely way. It took a flawed, pagan leader named Cyrus to not only release Judah from bondage but return them to their homeland with great riches and a decree to rebuild their Temple and restore the right worship they were unable to practice during their seventy-year captivity. Right worship, not liberation, was also the reason why Moses was sent to Pharoah to request the release of Israelites so that they could participate in a religious feast in the wilderness (Exodus 5:1).

Liberation, consolation, and renewal will occur in the Church, maybe even during this year of the Lord’s favor, whether by conversion or conclave, God will not be denied. Even our own Cyrus the Orange recognized the urgent need to liberate pro-life and traditional Catholics and throw off the shackles of a corrupt, controlling institution through radical transparency and the elimination of anything contrary to the mission which robs men of their property, dignity, and liberty.

In addition to the entrenched enemies within and their ideological allies who have orchestrated the current captivity, chaos, and crises, there are many, maybe more, in the upper echelon of the Church who recognize the dire need for repentance, reorientation, and renewal, but lacked the freedom and courage to resist, thus extending their self-imposed exile.

Perhaps cowardly cardinals, bishops and priests will regain their courage and their voices and do what is right and necessary to allow the renewal which God is accomplishing outside the Church to overshadow it, or at least don’t stand in His way. For yes this may be a time of grace, blessing, and a year of the Lord’s favor, but it may not be merely gratuitous; it may be because we need this time of renewal to repent, reorient, regain our strength and courage and regather an army of light to face the apocalyptic storms of darkness which may be building on the horizon.