St. Pius X began his 1907 encyclical on Modernism, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, with a simple sentence that can help guide us in evaluating the crisis in the Catholic Church today:
“The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called.”
This is a true and vital statement about the role of the pope in particular and the hierarchy in general. To the extent that the pope and hierarchy abandon this mandate, the members of the Mystical Body of Christ will be vulnerable to the assaults of the Church’s enemies.
The question of the SSPX is ultimately not about disobedience, but about what God wants faithful Catholics to do during an abnormal crisis.
Looking more deeply at the meaning of this first sentence from St. Pius X’s Pascendi, we can infer a definite idea about what God wants: He wants His flock to adhere to the deposit of faith and reject everything that could undermine that deposit of faith. Based on this, we can think of countless statements that would be absolutely incompatible with St. Pius X’s understanding, including these three:
- God wants us to think that the truths of the Catholic Church can evolve to contradict what they once were.
- God wants us to make peace with anti-Catholic errors for the sake of promoting Christian unity.
- God is pleased with the errors that lead His flock to stray from the immutable Catholic truth.
Some Catholics might question the reason for framing each of these three statements in terms of God’s will. And yet, it is of course very natural for Catholics to think about conflicts within the Mystical Body of Christ in terms of what God actually wants. Tragically, though, it seems that a profound indifference to what God wants for the Church is both a cause and symptom of the current crisis.
Going a step further, we can consider five aspects of the crisis (among many) which surely offend God. For the sake of avoiding controversy, we can omit considerations of the documents of Vatican II.
The greatest offenses against God today are not accidental—they are the deliberate fruits of decades of ecclesiastical revolution.
Irreverent Masses. Even those who prefer the Novus Ordo Mass to the Traditional Latin Mass must recognize that the changes to the Mass have created many problems, such as: sacrilegious Communions, a profound lack of reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, and widespread abuses in the celebration of the Mass. As a general matter, Rome has done essentially nothing to effectively address these great evils. In fact, the general trajectory of Rome’s work in liturgical matters since the promulgation of the Novus Ordo Mass has been that of making the abuses far more egregious. Because the Mass should be the way in which we honor and love God, transforming it into the most common way in which souls dishonor Him is obviously a great evil.
Widespread Rejection of the Church’s Moral Teaching. The deliberate rejection of the Church’s moral teaching has been widespread since the publication of Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. From that point on, it was evident that the Vatican was essentially indifferent to the spread of a cafeteria Catholicism, which misleads Catholics into accepting some moral teachings and rejecting others. Predictably, this has led to the situation we see today, where Rome shows more favor to Catholics promoting the LGBTQ agenda than to Catholics trying to practice what the Church taught prior to Vatican II. This abomination seems calculated by Hell to render the greatest offense to God while leading the most souls to hell.
The Honoring of False Religions. As part of the ecumenical movement that has flourished since Vatican II, the Vatican honors various non-Catholic religions more than it honors the Catholic religion as it existed prior to the Council. This has led to the religious indifference about which the pre-Vatican II popes had warned: when the leaders of the Catholic Church teach that non-Catholic religions please God and lead souls to Heaven, those with common sense are led to believe that they need not follow the sometimes difficult teachings of the Catholic Church. In addition, the praise for false religions directly offends God because it undermines the truth that God has established only one religion that He wishes souls to follow today.
Persecution of Traditional Catholics. Against this backdrop of the newfound effort to honor non-Catholic religions, one would naturally assume that it is merely a matter of putting Catholicism on the same level of false religions. While this would obviously be a great evil of itself, we have seen something tremendously worse: for the past sixty years, essentially the only religious beliefs that the Vatican will condemn are those that St. Pius X insisted that Catholics could never abandon. We lose sight of how demonically absurd this is, so it is useful to repeat a mathematical example:
- Prior to the Council: 2 + 2 = 4, and nothing else.
- Today: 2 + 2 = anything but 4.
There is no shortage of bishops, priests, and “experts” who insist that this is perfectly reasonable. What, though, do these people think about a God who would allow His religion to be this illogical and wicked?
The crisis is no longer whether the Church has enemies. The crisis is whether Catholics will recognize them.
The Creation of the Synodal Church. Closer to our time, Francis’s creation of the Synodal Church arguably represents the most wicked assault on the Catholic Church in salvation history. We can see this by observing the following:
- Francis introduced the Synodal Church by stating that he wanted to create a “different church” — this is a challenge to the idea that God has established a Church to last until the end of time.
- The premise of the Synodal Church is that its beliefs and practices are discovered through a process of listening to all baptized Christians — this directly opposes the truth, as stated by St. Pius X above, that the Church must vigilantly safeguard the “deposit of the faith delivered to the saints.”
- As we recently saw with the Synodal document in favor of homosexuality, the Synodal Church has been the organization through which the Catholic Church’s enemies attempt to present radically anti-Catholic ideas as being up for debate among Catholics.
We could sadly add other items to this list of evils for the Synodal Church; and we could also identify other categories of ways in which the current crisis offends God. However, these considerations likely suffice for those who are willing and able to observe reality. The picture is clear: the worst offenses against God that we see today are not just the ordinary results of Original Sin; they are the fruits of very deliberate work on the part of the Vatican.
This raises the all-important question of what God wants sincere Catholics to think and do about this alarming reality. Here are the two main options:
- We can proceed as though everything was basically normal and treat today’s Vatican as the mouthpiece of God’s law and will.
- We can recognize that this situation is completely abnormal and therefore do our best to adhere to what the Church has always taught while praying that God will soon intervene to restore order.
So which option above best describes our view? If our viewpoint is most like the second, then it is evident that we should not blindly follow the Vatican, especially when it is opposing what the Church has always taught.
But what about the former option? If someone believes that everything is relatively normal, does that mean that he or she should condemn those who believe that it is best to follow what the Church had taught prior to the Council? Interestingly, there is a Catch-22 involved here: given that today’s Vatican tells us that all religions please God, and all baptized souls are on the way to Heaven, how can it be possible to condemn those baptized souls who happen to practice a religion commonly described as Traditional Catholicism? In other words, those who want to condemn Traditional Catholics for not following the Vatican’s current teaching are contradicting themselves precisely because today’s Vatican teaches that we cannot condemn others for their sincerely held religious beliefs.
The SSPX insists on practicing the same religion that every pre-Vatican II pope knew and defended.
We can look at this same topic from an entirely different angle if we consider the famous story of Leo XIII’s vision of a discussion between God and Satan, in which Satan asked God for time (perhaps 100 years) to destroy the Catholic Church. As the story goes, Leo XIII wrote the famous prayer to St. Michael in response to this vision. Even if we do not believe that any such vision occurred, though, we can see that Leo XIII must have believed that God could permit Satan to have significant power over the Church. This is evident from the following passage from Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s They Have Uncrowned Him:
“Leo XIII (1878-1903) saw this subversio capitis in advance, this subversion of the head; and he described it in black and white, in all its crudity, by composing the small exorcism against Satan and the fallen angels. Here is the passage in question, which figures in the original version but which was suppressed in the subsequent versions by I do not know which successor of Leo XIII, who perhaps found this text impracticable, unthinkable, unpronounceable. And yet, a hundred years from its composition, this text seems to us now on the contrary to be of a burning truthfulness: ‘Behold, very cunning enemies have filled the Church, Spouse of the immaculate Lamb, with bitterness; have watered it with absinthe; they have cast ungodly hands onto all that is desirable in it. Where the See of the blessed Peter and the Chair of Truth were established like a light for the nations, there they have set the throne of abomination of their impiety; in order that, once the shepherd is struck down, they may be able to dispense the flock.’” (pp. 151-152)
Again, one does need to believe Leo XIII had a vision to see that he composed a prayer which described a situation in which Satan and his minions set the “throne of abomination of their impiety” where the See of Peter had been established. Supposing we were able to go back in time and ask Leo XIII which of the following best reflects the approach Catholics should take in such circumstances, which seems like the one he would favor?:
- Catholics should follow enemies of the Church in the abomination of their impiety.
- Catholics should recognize that Satan and his minions are the enemies of the Church and therefore resist their attempts to oppose the Traditional Catholic religion.
Although we do not have the ability to go back and ask Leo XIII this question, all reasonable Catholics surely know that the latter option is the one the pope would tell us to follow. He might even tell us that based on his vision of the discussion between God and Satan, Satan’s efforts to destroy the Church depend upon Catholics unwisely choosing the former option.
Common sense has become one of the most revolutionary virtues in modern Catholicism.
And what if we were able to ask him a second question, one about the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and how we ought to think about the prospect of the Vatican excommunicating members of the SSPX after the episcopal consecrations? As Leo XIV made clear in his June 16, 2026 remarks to reporters at Castel Gandolfo, the issue truly is that the SSPX insists on following the same religion that Leo XIII knew and refuses to accept the errors that Leo XIII condemned:
“Certainly, division among Christians is always a painful matter, but they refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the Church, beginning with various points of the Second Vatican Council. And if they make those choices, I am sorry. But we must move forward.”
So how would Leo XIII respond to a question like the following?:
“Your Holiness, we know that today’s Vatican rejects almost everything you taught about the Faith, and promotes so many of the errors you opposed, which has led to all of the calamities you predicted would occur if Catholics accepted these errors. Even worse, these false shepherds have invented abominations that you probably never imagined. Still, we are not sure whether we should side with those in the Vatican trying to destroy the Church or those who are doing their best to try to follow what you and all of the other pre-Vatican II popes taught. What does God want us to do, Your Holiness?”
We do not have the luxury of asking Leo XIII that question. But it may also be the case that we do not have the right to pretend that we do not know how he would answer it. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
