Catholics to Face Hard Choices After Synod on Synodality (sic)
The Vatican will attempt to effectively erase much of the Bible
In a few years (if Christ has not returned by then), the Catholic Church will be divided into three or more churches, each claiming legitimacy. Catholics will be forced to the true Church—and it won’t be easy. Choosing will require Catholics to abandon or defy a tenet the Church has taught constantly since the time of the Apostles.
New Public Revelation
For centuries, Protestants have warred against Catholics over sacred tradition, but rarely over the text of the Bible itself. But, if Gerhard Cardinal Müller is right about the ongoing Synod on Synodality (and there’s every reason to believe he is), the next scripture war will be between faithful Catholics and the Vatican.
What Müller sees is nothing short of a papal schism1 as Bergoglio attempts to surrender Christ’s bride (the Church) to the secular world. He will do this by rewriting scripture to promote divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, and female clergy while adding radical environmentalism and global government to the Bible.
Worse, Bergoglio and his favorite bishops and cardinals will claim divine revelation—a form of gnosticism—demands the changes. In short, Bergoglio and the Vatican are seeking a divorce from the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Apostles.
Listen to this clip of Raymond Aroyo’s recent interview with Cardinal Müller:
One of the most sobering lines in this interview comes from Raymon Arroyo. He quotes Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary-general of the synod of bishops, who said about remarriage and homosexual unions. Via National Catholic Register’s transcript of the Arroyo interview:
“These are not to be understood simply in terms of doctrine, but in terms of God’s ongoing encounter with human beings. What has the Church to fear if these two groups within the faithful are given the opportunity to express their intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience? Might this be an opportunity for the Church, to listen to the Holy Spirit, speaking through them also.”
In other words, the Holy Spirit, according to Grech, instructs people to divorce and remarry or have sex outside of marriage, including homosexuality. Because the Vatican intends to impose these new morals on all Catholics, these supposed personal revelations will be treated as public revelations. The old Gospels and epistles will need to be rewritten to conform to God’s mysteriously shifting plans for salvation.
God Cannot Change or Be Changed
Every Christian knows that God is immutable. Philosophically, God’s mutability is anchored in the fact that He Is. God is the essence of everything. Yet a few Catholic prelates intend to change a teaching that every Christian since the Apostles has accepted as dogma.
For evidence, we turn to a Protestant website, Reformation 21, where we find this excellent paragraph on the immutability of God:
Through the testimony of Scripture, we see all the more clearly the beautiful reality that God cannot change. God has made himself known to us in Jesus Christ, who as the divine Son of God is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature“ (Heb. 1:3). And in his resurrection glory as our Redeemer, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and forever" (Heb. 13:8). In both the deity and incarnate work of our Savior, we see the same truth blazing forth: our God cannot change. He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth (Westminster Shorter Catechism, 4).
I use this Protestant example to demonstrate the universality of Christian faith on this point. Universality, that is, until Bergoglio and his flaming bishops go hold of it. Now, according to Grech and Bergoglio, God is changing. He is, apparently, erasing scripture and, with it, 2,000 years of Catholic teachings and apologetics.
Apostolic Succession or Immutable God
Once the Synod’s “reforms” are in place, Catholics will have to choose between Apostolic succession (Jesus Christ founded a Church with Peter as its head, giving the Apostles (bishops) the power and authority to consecrate new bishops) and the Immutability of God. If you follow the Vatican, you must give up on immutability. If you follow the Church’s constant teaching, you must accept that God has left us without a head on earth.
In short, Bergoglio and the Vatican are seeking a divorce from the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Apostles.
This is why I say Catholics will face a hard choice. At least, the 30 percent of Catholics who believe any teachings of the Church will face a hard choice. (Arguably, if you do not believe in transubstantiation and the real presence, you cannot believe anything else the Church teaches.)
The 70 percent who call themselves Catholic but deny the Church’s teaching authority, the real presence, and most of scripture will cheer the papal schism. They really won’t notice a difference.
Traditional Catholics, on the other hand, will suffer deep wounds, but will not hesitate in accepting that God has, indeed, left us without a leader for a time. Trads will rely on their deep understanding of Church teaching since the time of the Apostles to keep the faith even when the church hierarchy has lost it. Traditional Catholics will seek the leadership of faithful prelates and priests, particularly priests of Institute of Christ the King Soveriegn Priest and the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Some will simply migrate to the Society of St. Pius X.
But among the 30 percent of Catholics who believe at least the most important teachings of the Church are many so-called “conservative” Catholics. These are the JPII Catholics. They tend to be politically conservative as well as doctrinally orthodox. They cheered the return to tradition ushered in by John Paul II and Benedict. They express profound allegiance to the pope and to the Vatican. In short, they believe what the Church has always taught.
For this group, the coming papal schism will be excruciating. They tend to despise Traditional Catholics who adhere to the pre-Vatican II rites while simultaneously rejecting the modernists with almost equal fervor. Think of Bishop Robert Barron, Fr. Mike Schmitz, and Monsignor Charles Pope. Or, for that matter, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
Conservative Catholics are generally well-formed on the catechism of JPII and have a reasonable knowledge of constant Church teachings. They are quick to note the Novus Ordo Mass is “licit and valid,” but revolt against rampant liturgical abuses that turn many a Mass into perverted freak shows.
For conservatives, total fidelity to the pope is paramount. They tend to believe that obedience to the pope is identical to obedience to Jesus Christ Himself, that even if the pope errs, we must believe and obey his error. They rely heavily on Matthew 18:18, that whatever the pope binds on earth is bound in heaven, even if the pope binds egregious error—even if the pope is an anti-christ. In other words, conservative Catholics seem to believe that the greatest sin of all—worse than hating the Holy Spirit or worshiping demons—is questioning the orders of the bishop of Rome. To hear Catholic conservatives talk about the papacy, one might conclude Jesus taught the first and greatest commandment was “love the pope with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul.”
Cardinal Müller’s answer to Arroyo’s question well articulates the decision Catholics must soon face:
That is the individual experience, as the same level as objective revelation of God. And God is only a wall to you, which you can project your proper ideas, and to make certain populism in the Church; and surely everybody outside of the Church who want to destroy the Catholic Church, and the fundaments, they are very glad about these declarations. But it is obvious that is absolutely against the Catholic doctrine. We have Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. And it is definitely closed and finished in Jesus Christ. ... This is absolutely clear: that Jesus has spoken about the indissolubility of matrimony. And how is it possible that Cardinal Grech is more intelligent than Jesus Christ, where he takes his authority to relativize, to subvert of God?
The Bergoglio infiltrators are projecting their own pseudo-gospel onto the face of God and finding themselves well pleased with the reflection. But Christians have always believed that public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle, John, in about 90 A.D.
This sets up an apparent no-win situation for Catholics hoping to remain Catholic:
Do I break with the pope?
Or do I break with Jesus Christ?
Simply put, one cannot serve God and mammon. If you follow the pope, you will be following the many on the wide road to perdition. If you follow Christ, you must accept that His Church is, for the time being, without an heir of St. Peter. You must be open to the idea that Christ provided a head to His Church on earth, but did not guarantee that seat would never be vacant—and for long stretches.
Our Problem Is Both Old and New
We’ve had imposter popes in the past, but always one living person was the true pope. That might not be the case once Bergoglio formerly breaks from the Church by attempting to nullify the teachings of Jesus Christ.
For the time being, it’s reasonable to believe that God has kept Pope Benedict alive this long precisely because Francis is an imposter. It would make sense that God would want His children to have a living pope, even if that pope were incapacitated and living under house arrest in the Vatican.
But that doesn’t relieve the faithful Catholic of the need to constantly pray for discernment on this matter. It is not a matter of mundane Church politics. Rather, it rests at the very heart of our understanding of what Christ established. A wrong answer could mean an eternity in hell, and every answer but one is wrong.
I don’t look forward to the decision that’s coming my way. But that’s no excuse to avoid the decision. The easy way is to go with the flow, and the flow will be to do whatever Bergoglio tells you—a gross perversion of Our Lady’s instruction to the servants at the wedding in Cana.
The answer, rather, is to listen to the Blessed Virgin Mary and do whatever Jesus tells you. And Jesus told us in rather simple language: detach from this world, pick up your cross, and follow Him.
For almost 2,000 years, the Bishop of Rome provided a human example for following Christ. Soon (if not already), we will have to rely on the Church’s constant teachings regardless of what that bishop says. This will lead to many dangers. We will lose a lot of our brothers and sisters on the way.
Bergoglio has made the path to paradise not just narrow but treacherous, as well. The shoulder is soft and steep and false spurs abound. We will be tempted to ditch the ancient map and explore paths less travelled. Those paths are not dead ends—they lead us back to the wide, paved, and well-lit road to hell on which Cardinal Grech and his ilk provide handy baskets to carry snacks for our journey.
And all the troubles in the world emanate from this one problem: the Church’s prelates, including the pope, put more faith in their own imaginations than in the Eternal Word of God Almighty.
Tread carefully, friend, and hold tight to the map. And don’t take gift baskets from strange bishops.
“Papal schism” is a situation in which the pope and Church leaders sever ties with the Church of Jesus Christ, as opposed to factional schisms in which members of the Church break away from the teaching authority of the pope.