“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 disperse the flock.” (Pope Leo XIII’s “small exorcism” prayer, as quoted in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s They Have Uncrowned Him, pp. 151-152)
In a recent article on The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny website, Stuart Chessman wrote of the conversion of Michael Warren Davis (a former editor of Crisis Magazine) to Eastern Orthodoxy:
“Undoubtedly, many more Catholics are considering the step Michael Warren Davis has now taken. The ‘fault’ for this, however, resides squarely with the pope, the Catholic hierarchy and the clergy. It is their outrageous and scandalous conduct that motivates some faithful to seek in Orthodoxy respect for Christian tradition, a reverent and beautiful liturgy and, above all, a focus on the spiritual, on the union of the individual and the community with God. . . Orthodoxy will always remain an attraction for a minority. Yet, at some point, on some issue and in some way we all may be forced to decide between loyalty to the clerical establishment or to the truth.”
As Mr. Chessman wrote, at some point “we all may be forced to decide between loyalty to the clerical establishment or to the truth.” At present, though, how many of us are actually compelled to disobey an order given by Francis or his collaborators?
Catholics are tempted to leave the Church today because they see that it is under attack from Satan. But Satan does not need to attack his own assets — he attacks what belongs to God. Our tasks are to be faithful and docile to God’s will by adhering to what the Church has always taught and trying to become saints.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was forced to make that type of decision in the 1970s (years before he consecrated the four bishops without Rome’s approval), and many of us who attend the Traditional Latin Mass today should thank God that the archbishop chose to continue forming and ordaining priests rather than succumb to Rome’s pressure to abandon his fight to preserve the Traditional Catholic priesthood. In his biography of Archbishop Lefebvre, Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais described the tension involved in having to decide between loyalty to the truth and loyalty to Rome:
“In fact ‘the masterstroke of Satan has been to trick the Church through obedience into disobeying her Tradition.’ The Church was going to destroy herself by obeying revolutionary principles brought inside the Church by the authorities of the Church. From 1968 onwards, did not Paul VI himself speak publicly of the ‘auto-demolition of the Church’? On June 29, 1972, he admitted: ‘Through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God . . . Satan . . . has come to spoil and wither the fruits of the Council.’ Paul did not want to see where the crack was. Marcel saw it and denounced it: it lay in the break with Tradition. Already, however, the Archbishop felt that his foresight would get him condemned: ‘Satan has played a masterstroke: those who keep the Faith are condemned by those who should defend and propagate it!’” (p. 468)
The notion that it was Satan, rather than Paul VI or John Paul II, who caused the crisis is critical because it reminds us that all of this is part of the battle between God and Satan that has plagued mankind since Adam’s fateful decision in the Garden of Eden.
Most of the time we rightly focus on the particular circumstances of our involvement in that battle, but recalling the bigger picture can help guide us when we begin to question how we should fight and what we must defend. For instance, if we see our primary adversary as Francis, Cupich, or Tucho, then it is fairly reasonable to do everything we can do to distance ourselves from them, and perhaps even leave the Church. How, though, does all of this play out in the overall battle of salvation history?
One valuable frame of reference for the overall battle comes from the life of Pope Leo XIII, as described in a 2013 Catholic News Agency article:
“On October 13, 1884 Pope Leo XIII, just after celebrating Mass, turned pale and collapsed as though dead. Those standing nearby rushed to his side. They found him alive but the pontiff looked frightened. He then recounted having a vision of Satan approaching the throne of God, boasting that he could destroy the Church. According to Pope Leo XIII the Lord reminded him that his Church was imperishable. Satan then replied, ‘Grant me one century and more power of those who will serve me, and I will destroy it.’ Our Lord granted him 100 years. The Lord then revealed the events of the 20th century to Leo XIII. He saw wars, immorality, genocide and apostasy on a large scale. Immediately following this disturbing vision, he sat down and wrote the prayer to St. Michael. For decades it was prayed at Mass until the 1960’s. Like many of the Church’s spiritual defenses, it was discontinued in the second half of the 20th century.”
This seems to tell us much about what took place after the papacy of Pope Pius XII, the last pope to truly combat the Modernist and Liberal ideas about which Pope Leo XIII and his pre-Vatican II successors had warned. All of the attacks on the Church (which have become increasingly visible since the Council) have been from Satan, even though the only malefactors we see are those unfortunate clerics who have advanced his cause. So our response to circumstances of the battle in which we find ourselves must transcend our reactions to bad clerics and be guided by a desire to please God rather than Satan.
Obviously Leo XIII did not decide that he must leave the Church and join a non-Catholic religion when he learned that God was granting Satan this power to try to destroy the Church. Nor would he have imagined that Catholics in our time would find any legitimate safe harbor from Satan’s attacks by fleeing the Catholic Church. He knew that faithful Catholics would have to do what they have always had to do in the face of similar onslaughts from Satan: do their best to adhere to the beliefs and practices of the Church, and try to become saints.
When Leo XIII had the vision of Satan asking God for power to destroy the Church, he did not flee. Instead he composed the prayers to St. Michael the Archangel.
Here we can consider the three most common responses to what we see today: going along with those who follow Satan in attacking the Church; leaving the Church; or remaining in the Church and fighting those who are attacking the Church.
Going Along with Those Who Follow Satan. The majority of nominal Catholics today practice a religion that Pope Leo XIII would not have recognized as Catholic. These nominal Catholics fully embrace many of the errors that he and his pre-Vatican II successors had denounced as contrary to the Catholic Faith. The fact that Francis and the ostensible Roman hierarchy give such nominal Catholics peace should come as no real comfort — when Satan is attacking the Church with more ferocity than ever before, you are surely doing something wrong if you do not feel some persecution.
Leaving the Church. As Mr. Chessman observed, more Catholics today are understandably considering whether to leave the Church. It should be evident, though, that this would have been one of Satan’s primary goals in attacking the Church. So those who leave the Church are trophies for Satan, which perhaps helps explain why Satan allows certain “second best” alternatives to the Catholic Church to experience some relative freedom from his assaults.
Remaining in the Church and Fighting. When Leo XIII had the vision of Satan asking God for power to destroy the Church, he did not flee. Instead he composed the prayers to St. Michael the Archangel. We ask St. Michael to defend us in battle rather than to show us some way to escape Satan’s assaults because we can only escape Satan’s assaults by joining his side. Moreover, we should be confident that we must remain and fight because we see that Francis and his collaborators are dedicating such tremendous efforts to make us give up the fight or leave. It is also telling that those who remain in the Church and fight are often vilified by those who go along with the other two paths.
So we must remain in the Church and fight, but this does not relieve us from the tension involved with the fact that today we have either a very bad pope or no pope at all. On this question, though, it is absolutely essential to consider two distinct aspects of the question of a bad pope: whether we can disobey him; and whether the existence of a heretical pope would undermine our Faith.
Disobeying a Bad Pope. In The Catechism of the Crisis in the Church, Fr. Matthias Gaudron cited Cardinal Thomas Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa Theologica:
“If someone, for a reasonable motive, holds the person of the pope in suspicion and refuses his presence and even his jurisdiction, he does not commit the delict of schism, nor any other whatsoever, provided that he be ready to accept the pope were he not held in suspicion. It goes without saying that one has the right to avoid what is harmful and to ward off dangers. In fact, it may happen that the pope could govern tyrannically, and that is all the easier as he is the more powerful and does not fear any punishment from anyone on earth.” (p. 217)
Along the same lines. Fr. Gaudron also cited St. Robert Bellarmine:
“Just as it is licit to resist a pope who attacks the body, so also it is licit to resist him if he attacks souls or disturbs the civil order or, above all, if he tries to destroy the Church. I say that it is licit to resist him by not doing what he orders and by impeding the execution of his will.” (p. 216)
We have not only the option but also the responsibility to disobey any teaching or direction from a bad pope that runs contrary to what the Church has always taught and practiced. In his True Obedience in the Church: A Guide to Discernment in Challenging Times, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski provided the clear principles that can guide us in these questions:
“We must begin by seeing that it is not obedience that comes first, but truth and charity; and this is why obedience, rightly understood, is not blind. In the order of being, there is first the truth, and the love of this truth; and then, obedience is the only appropriate response to truth, the only appropriate response of the will to truth that is to be loved for its own sake. Take away truth, and you take away love; take away love, and you take away the root of obedience.The New Testament insists on obedience to the Lord’s commandments as the manifestation of true charity.”
Truth and authority should always align, but where they diverge we must always choose truth.
Dealing With a Heretical Pope. There is an entirely separate question today related to whether the existence of a heretical pope would negate Our Lord’s promises that the Catholic Church will never fail. Today, the primary proponents of the argument that the Church cannot have a heretical pope believe that there has not been a pope since Pope Pius XII, and they often cite St. Robert Bellarmine to support their contention that a pope would automatically lose his office if he fell into heresy. Obviously this holds some logical appeal: how can a heretic be head of the Catholic Church?
A heretical pope is not solved by having no pope — it is solved by cooperating with God’s grace to remove the heretical pope and replace him with a Catholic pope. And if we cannot do that, then we must “beg the Lord that He would apply the remedy” and resist the bad pope in the meantime.
Here, though, is St. Robert Bellarmine’s defense of the Church against Protestants who argued that Catholics had no recourse against a pope who would try to destroy the Church:
“I respond: No wonder, if the Church remains without an efficacious human remedy, seeing that its safety does not rest principally upon human industry, but divine protection, since God is its king. Therefore, even if the Church could not depose a Pope, still, it may and must beg the Lord that He would apply the remedy, and it is certain that God has care for its safety, that He would either convert the Pope or abolish him from their midst before he destroys the Church. Nevertheless, it does not follow from here that it is not lawful to resist a Pope destroying the Church; for it is lawful to admonish him while preserving all reverence, and to modestly correct him, even to oppose him with force and arms if he means to destroy the Church.” (De Controversiis, On the Church: On Councils, On the Church Militant, On the Marks of the Church, p. 220)
So the saint is saying that there could be times when the Church should try to depose a pope — and the grounds for doing so are the same ones that would apply to Francis — but would not be able to do so. In other words, St. Robert Bellarmine understood that one could not simply call Francis (or John XXIII, Paul VI, etc.) an anti-pope and be done with the matter. A heretical pope is not solved by having no pope — it is solved by cooperating with God’s grace to remove the heretical pope and replace him with a Catholic pope. And if we cannot do that, then we must “beg the Lord that He would apply the remedy” and resist the bad pope in the meantime.
Catholics are tempted to leave the Church today because they see that it is under attack from Satan. But Satan does not need to attack his own assets — he attacks what belongs to God. Our tasks are to be faithful and docile to God’s will by adhering to what the Church has always taught and trying to become saints. This requires fortitude, prudence, charity, and all of the other virtues so often lacking in those who try to convince us that we must leave the Catholic Church in response to Satan showing us how much he hates the Catholic Church. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
