There is little question among more observant Catholics that the current situation in the Church is critical, especially as one watches the train wreck which the Vatican increasingly resembles. History, fortunately, comes to our rescue, however. I mean that, looking over the past centuries, it becomes apparent that as regards the Western Church we can see a recurring cycle of reform and decay every 500 years. Beginning with the great reforms of St. Benedict and Pope St. Gregory the Great in the latter 6th century we witness how their reforms shaped and gave rise to the Carolignian renaissance. Still, corruption gradually crept in and by the 10th and early 11th centuries a very dark period emerged for both the papacy and Church discipline. Just when it seemed things could get no worse under the infamous papacy of Benedict IX, a new Ecclesial reformation sprang up under the guiding hands of St. Peter Damien, Hildebrand who became Pope St. Gregory VII, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

The following few centuries would see the Medieval Church reach its greatest glory in the 13th century guided by St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic, and St. Thomas Aquinas to name just a few luminaries. Once again though, faith and moral discipline began to wane as corruption set in at both the papal and local levels so that by the time of another corrupt Pope, Alexander VI, the stage had been ably set for Martin Luther’s revolt. Again, it was not until the latter half of that 16th century that a genuine Church Counter-reformation began to take effect led by new saints of great stature: St. Charles Borromeo, St. Philip Neri, Sts. Ignatius and Francis Xavier, and Pope St. Pius V who finalized the great reforms of Trent as well as securing the expulsion of the Muslim Turks from Christendom at Lepanto.

500 years from Pope St. Gregory the Great to Hildebrand’s (Pope St. Gregory VII) reforms. 500 more years elapsed from the late 11th century reforms to the late 16th century reforms at Trent under Pope St. Pius V. We are currently standing 500 years out from the revolution of Luther and Calvin and the Church again seems to be at her nadir, especially when viewing the current papacy. This suggests that we are again on the eve of another great reform movement in the Church. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we need to survive the current imminent disaster, trusting that God already has the next Hildebrand or Borromeo lined up to reverse the course of a (Masonic) trajectory which appears to lead towards the Church’s planned demolition. It is a situation similar to what Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher were facing in Henry VIII’s England, again just 500 years ago.

We now have someone occupying the Chair of Peter who appears to have utterly lost (or betrayed) the constant Faith of 2,000 years. Standing behind him are bishops and cardinals either too fearful or too corrupt to acknowledge the obvious present danger. Just a few examples illustrate the point. After giving the Eucharist to a group of Finnish Lutherans (in 2016), parading a pagan Pachamama idol into St. Peter’s basilica, the heterodox Francis doubles down with informally dropped inanities such as “hell may well be empty,” and “there is no answer to why God the Father allowed Christ to suffer so terribly,” or that the Blessed Mother “wasn’t born a saint,” (a categorical denial of the Immaculate Conception). Meanwhile the German bishop’s conference is preparing formulated blessings for gay “married” couples and Bishop John Bonny of Antwerp, Belgium advocates euthanasia for “sick or old people.” Yet the silence from the Vatican on such matters is deafening, excepting the periodic criticisms of those “rigid” American Catholics. But as for Francis’ heterodox off-the-cuff bombshells, don’t expect any correction or clarification of his favorite whoppers coming from his hand-picked doctrinal watchdog, Victor “Tucho” Cardinal Fernandez.

Fernandez is embroiled in his own controversies stemming from his early literary aspirations which resulted in erotic books on the Art of Kissing and la Pasion Mistica, a blasphemous, recently discovered 1998 sex manual which its author, the ecclesial Alfred Kinsey, refused to disavow but simply dismissed critics with a casual “I would probably not write it now” remark. What he would, and did, write now is a deceptive, ambiguously worded instruction as head of the Dicastry for the Defense of the Faith titled Fiducia Supplicans, which provides for the possibility of blessing homosexual couples, not merely individuals, thus creating both uproar and confusion about the very nature and purpose of Church blessings. The wave-it-off solution to the controversy arrived at by Tucho’s boss is to suppress Fiducia in Africa while giving it standing elsewhere, meaning that the “one, universal” Church is now in the position of proposing two opposing yet fully approved moral standards, dependent only upon which continental surface you happen to be standing! It would appear that the real division in the Church is not coming from “rigid” Traditional Catholics but from the Vatican itself which cannot bring the all faithful to adhere to a single moral standard.

Under Francis it seems that the doleful 1973 prophesies of Our Blessed Mother to Sr. Agnes Sasagawa in Akita, Japan are coming to fruition. “The work of the devil will infiltrate into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres, churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromise and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.” When the chief doctrinal guardian of the Church is himself a linguistic pornographer it almost goes without saying that priests and consecrated souls would be leaving the service of the Lord because the scandal has become so great that weaker souls will fall into hopeless confusion. Even more than the heresy and heterodoxy steadily emanating from the hierarchy these days (which most laity don’t even recognize), it is the scandal coming from on high that is most damaging to the faithful.

Ever since the McCarrick scandal loudly erupted more than five years ago, the problem of homosexuality among the clergy has only been hidden more deeply, and thus worsened. There is still no systematic effort to root out the “lavender mafia” that has embroiled the Church in scandal after scandal. Quite the opposite, sexually abusive priests such as Fr. Marco Rupnik S.J. and gay cheerleaders like Fr. James Martin are openly welcomed and praised by the Argentine cabal in the Vatican. But this pandering to sexual minorities is doing great damage to the Church and opening up the door to schisms, just as happened in the Anglican Church over the past several decades.

St Basil the Great, a Church Father and Doctor wrote as far back as the 4th century, “A cleric or monk who persecutes (i.e., abuses) adolescents or children, or who is caught in a kiss or other occasion of indecency, should be publicly beaten and lose his tonsure, and… his face to be smeared with spittle… worn down with six months of imprisonment, and three days every two weeks to fast on barley bread until sundown. After this, spending his time separated in his room for another six months in the custody of a spiritual superior… subject to vigils and prayers, and he should always walk under the guard of two spiritual brothers, never again soliciting sexual intercourse from youth by perverse speech or counsel.”

It is hard to imagine such punishment being meted out today, but that is likely because too many present-day clerics, like Francis, imagine that hell is empty. Churchmen in the past were not so deluded on this vital point. They feared the fires of hell because they knew that God is not only merciful, He is also supremely just. Christ himself warned about hell many times, especially for those who were initially given the faith yet failed in their duties. “I tell you many will come from the rising and setting sun to feast with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. but the subjects of the kingdom shall be cast out into the darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” (Mt. 8: 11-12)

For the Medieval Catholic, penance for one’s sins was not a light matter. The severity of the penance had to fit the severity of the sin, a concept that modern Christians have totally lost sight of. Even after contrition and forgiveness, reparation still needs to happen which means that light, little penances done here will require a much greater degree of suffering in purgatory. We cannot see God while still in an impure state. We must be fully cleansed of all manner of imperfection before we are presentable to God, and the early Church understood this reality completely, which is why the penances doled out to penitents were so extreme by our current standards.

Modern day clerics like James Martin and “Tucho” Fernandez are deluding themselves, and worse, their many followers, that the sexual sins they treat so lightly are going to be waved away by divine justice on the day of judgment. In fact the clerical abuses and general homosexuality which these men simply rationalize around is not anything new. The Church has been struggling with the same problem since the beginning. Nor was it that St. Paul was homophobic but that the ancient world was rife with various sexual perversions which had to be rooted out of the new Christian communities for their very survival. (See Romans 1: 24-28 and 1 Corinthians 6: 9-20. Recall that boy prostitution was a staple of Roman society.) In response to clerical incontinence St. Peter Damien wrote Liber Gomorrhianus about the year 1051 and is an illuminating, if terrifying, picture into clerical sexual and homosexual abuses in the 11th century. I will post just a few paragraphs from Peter Damien’s monograph but I would recommend reading the entire work, which can be found online.

“A certain most abominable and exceedingly disgraceful vice has grown in our region, and unless it is quickly met with the hand of strict chastisement, it is certain that the sword of divine fury is looming to attack, to the destruction of many. Alas, it is shameful to speak of it!

“The cancer of sodomitic impurity is thus creeping through the clerical order, and indeed is raging like a cruel beast within the sheepfold of Christ with the audacity of such liberty, that for many it would have been much more salutory to be oppressed by the yoke of worldly duties than to be surrendered so freely to the iron rule of diabolical tyranny under the pretense of religion. It would have been better to perish alone in secular dress than to also drag others to destruction… And unless the force of the Apostolic See opposes it as quickly as possible, there is no doubt that when it finally wishes for the unbridled evil to be restrained, it may not be able to halt the fury of its advance.

“Certainly this vice, which surpasses the savagery of all other vices, is to be compared with no other. For this vice is the death of bodies, the destruction of souls, pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the intellect, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, introduces the diabolical inciter of lust, throws into confusion, and removes the truth completely from the deceived mind. It opens up hell and closes the door of paradise… it cuts off a member of the Church and casts him into the voracious conflagration of raging Gehenna.

“Therefore I weep over you, O miserable soul, with so many lamentations, because I do not see you weeping… if you had lowered yourself in humility, I would have exulted in the Lord with all that is in me; if the worthy compunction of a contrite heart had shaken the hidden recesses of your soul, I would have rightly taken delight with a dance of ineffable joy. You are most greatly to be wept over because you do not weep.”

Today we all need to be weeping over the insanity which is rapidly advancing its way through the Body of Christ on earth. Only two American bishops that I know of have called out the moral ambiguity in Fiducia Supplicans for the repulsive sophistry which it truly is, Archbishop emeritus Charles Chaput of Philadelphia and cancelled Bishop Joseph Strickland. Where is the outrage from all the rest, because they are the ones being set up for failure and public ridicule by the likes of crafty Tucho Fernandez and the Vatican mafia? Try as they might to interpret it in a Catholic light, when read carefully it reveals a contradictory and cynical twisting of the Church’s constant teaching that one can never encourage or bless what is objectively evil. Faithful Catholics all need to be asking their own bishops why they will not seriously question such deliberate, calculated ambiguity and word twisting as did the courageous African bishops.

One can only imagine what St. Peter Damien’s response to such ecclesial mouthwash would be today. We can be sure he would have immediately realized that it was not just a few abstract talking points but real immortal souls that are at stake here. Christ said, “Blessed are the Pure of Heart for they shall see God.” This also means the impure heart will never be able to see Him. Hence the mute watchdogs, silent Church leaders, are tempting the very wrath of God to fall down on our heads by not opposing evil when it is manifestly present. But it is not yet too late. We must encourage, cajole, even put pressure on our local prelates to resist the current Vatican’s false polemics. Let them hear your voice! Those who truly believe will heed the advice of Our Lady of Akita who admonishes, “Pray the prayers of the Rosary. I alone am able to save you from the calamities which approach. Those who place their confidence in me will be saved.”

St. Basil; St. Peter Damien; St. Gregory VII; all you holy Angels and Saints ~ Pray for us.

Francis J. Pierson + a.m.d.g.