A lot has certainly taken place since the last essay that I wrote commenting on the escalating crisis in the Church. Since then we have seen the Viganò testimony, the pope's non-denial responses to his own cover-ups, and a long list of excuses from complicit prelates in the Church who are, and have been, responsible for the crisis that the Church is now facing worldwide. For the moment, it does not look like the situation is going to improve any time soon; nor did I think that it would. The evil prelates in the Church, Pope Francis and his henchmen, are clearly in the grip of the devil, and they will use all of the power they have amassed in the Church to get their vengeance on anyone who so much as looks at them the wrong way. These are clearly not the people that we can expect to clean up the current crisis, as I already said. It is entirely of their own making. The most that we can expect from these devils is cosmetic changes. Pope Francis has already called for a synod of bishops to meet in February 2019 to address "the protection of minors and vulnerable adults," with no mention made of the ecclesiastical third rail of rampant homosexuality among clergy and seminarians. In other words, the real problem will once again be ignored, just as it was in 2002.
I could go on about the current sexual abuse crisis in the Church and how disgusted that I and other faithful orthodox Catholics have become at the disreputable bastards currently running the Church; but there are plenty of people already doing that. Adding another voice to the milieu would not make much of a difference. I want to call attention to the broader ramifications of the current crisis. Many people have pointed out that the sexual abuse crisis has cut across basically everything else that the Church tries to do. How can people take the Church seriously and consider being received into the Church with all of the sexual abuse that has taken place? How can any faithful Catholic seriously propose to unbelievers that their salvation depends upon being in communion with the likes of Pope Francis and his devils in the clergy? How can the Church claim any moral authority over society when she cannot even clean up her own affairs? This crisis makes basically everything that the Church has to offer seem vacuous, shallow, and ridiculous.
It is obviously not a pretty picture. But it goes beyond that; and there is, I am confident to say, a silver lining in the midst of the dark clouds. What we are seeing right now is not so much the destruction of the Church, either in reality or in the view of contemporary Western societies. It is, in fact, the destruction of the post-Vatican II settlement in the Church.
For those who may think that it is daring of me to link the current crisis to the council, I am not the only one to do this. Many others, most of them orthodox but not traditionalist Catholics, have made this same connection before me. That is why I am confident in what I have to say. I am not, in this case, the only one to see what is taking place. Two different priests that I know, both of them sincere, orthodox Catholics have commented that this crisis basically is the self-destruction of post-Vatican II Catholicism. This means, among other things, that the credibility of the contemporary Church hierarchy, who have insisted for decades on the Second Vatican Council and its reforms, is totally shattered; and that as a result, orthodox and faithful Catholics have no reason to believe them when they make their claims about the supposed necessity of conciliar reforms. This includes the liturgy and everything else that the council did.
I have said before that I do not deny that the Second Vatican Council was a legitimate ecumenical council, and that the authorities in the Church hierarchy could do what they did. But that they could do it does not mean that they should have, or that what they did was necessarily good. Like popes, ecumenical councils are only guided by the Holy Spirit in a limited way. That the Holy Spirit protects the Church on earth from error does not mean that non-dogmatic statements of the Church are necessarily inspired or free from error. And the Second Vatican Council made no dogmatic statements. Nor did any of the liturgical reforms touch on anything dogmatic, as bad as those reforms were. I have no time for the theory that the new liturgical forms of the Roman Rite are invalid or illicit because of the changes. The changes were surely not for the better, but they did not make anything invalid or illicit.
However, it is nonetheless the case that the credibility of the bishops when they say that these reforms were good or necessary is equally destroyed along with their credibility on everything else. If the bishops in the Church as a whole cannot be trusted with something as necessary as protecting children and adults from homosexual rape by clergy, they cannot be trusted with anything. And the mentality in the Church that led to the reforms led at the same time to the sexual abuse. As Pope Francis once put it: "Let's not be naïve." The reforms in the Church during and after the council, both liturgical and otherwise, were all about tearing down what the Church had built up for so long. If the liturgy, that most sacred of things, is apparently not as sacred as we thought, what else isn't sacred? If the integrity of Church sanctuaries and the rituals of the Roman liturgy are apparently not inviolable, what else is not inviolable? Keep in mind that most of the sexual abuse cases that have come to light in the last sixteen years took place between 1965 and 1974, coincident with the sexual revolution. And the Church was engaging in her reforms at the same time.
Besides the destruction of credibility among the bishops on the liturgical reforms, the other things that have taken place in the Church in the last fifty years are also falling apart. For the last fifty years, the Church has left doctrines "on the books" but then ignored disciplining anyone who taught or did anything against those doctrines. If the bishops could ignore the need to discipline heretical and modernist clergy, it's no surprise that they would do the same with sexual abuse. And when the bishops weren't ignoring the need for urgent action to combat heresy and modernism, they were actively promoting heresy and modernism themselves, along with perpetrating the inevitable sexual acts that go along with such things.
It's all a very bleak picture, no doubt. So where is the silver lining? With the post-Vatican II settlement in the Church falling on its sword, the faithful as a whole can recapture the reality of the Church. There can be a return to tradition and orthodoxy in liturgy and doctrine. The Church can become holier than she was before. She will almost surely be smaller, possibly even persecuted, but she will be better off than she was before. I do not know how or when the devils in control of the Church, Pope Francis and his henchmen, will be dealt with, but obviously I hope it will be soon. When we are ultimately rid of these evil men, the Church can then, slowly, begin to heal herself. There is no doubt that all of this coming out now is from God. Despite how dark it may seem, God is always in control, and He is allowing this painful correction in the Church for her own good, and for the good of all of the individual faithful in the Church. All most of us can do is hope, pray, and continue to do what we know to be right. Ignore the pope and his devils in the hierarchy. Remember St. Paul: "If anyone comes to you, even if he is an angel, preaching a doctrine other than what you have received, let him be anathema." The times are indeed difficult and the Church is surely suffering, but through suffering comes greater virtue.
