Although the competition for most heretical and dangerous statements is fierce in the new document from the Synod on Synodality, Instrumentum Laboris, paragraph 20 offers this top contender:

“[A] synodal Church is founded on the recognition of a common dignity deriving from Baptism, which makes all who receive it sons and daughters of God, members of the family of God, and therefore brothers and sisters in Christ, inhabited by the one Spirit and sent to fulfil a common mission.”

In his Letter to Friends and Benefactors from the Feast of St. Joseph in 1978, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre wrote of the “great mystery” of the Church’s crisis, which he called the passion of the Church:

“Providence has allowed this painful crisis in the Church for our sanctification and in order to give more brightness to the pure gold of its doctrine and its means of redemption. This passion of the Church is a great mystery, for it reaches chiefly its hierarchy, its scholars, who seem to no longer know who they are and the reasons of their being appointed.”

Archbishop Lefebvre arguably did more to explain the nature of the Church’s crisis than anyone else since Vatican II, but he nonetheless saw it as a “great mystery.” Moreover, he believed that God permitted the terrible crisis “for our sanctification and in order to give more brightness to the pure gold of its doctrine and its means of redemption.”

Although many colleges no longer teach Shakespeare’s plays, the fact remains that he was arguably the greatest master of the English language to ever write. If we were to find a new play from him, the world would take notice. If the play happened to be a devout portrayal of the trials and hopes of persecuted Catholics, Catholics would rejoice. It is an even more extraordinary blessing that God allowed him to conceal the devout Catholic allegory within a play that was performed before James I’s court.

In his Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, Bishop Rudolf Graber quoted a 1968 article from the Paris journal of the Grand Orient de France, “L’Humanisme,” foretelling the future of the Church:

“It is not the scaffold that is awaiting the Pope, it is the rise of local Churches organizing themselves democratically, rejecting the dividing-line between clergy and laymen, creating their own dogma and living in complete autonomy from Rome.” (p. 71)

“In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors — all the ancient priests, bishops and kings — all that was once the glory of England, the isle of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter.” — St. Edmund Campion

Since Francis’s introduction of his Pachamama idol and the subsequent beginning of the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic, we have witnessed some of the most profoundly bizarre and disturbing events in history. The nauseating succession of perversities has left many people despondent, but we know that God permits these evils for a reason. While it might be presumptuous to pretend to know God’s precise reasons, it would be foolhardy to imagine that He wants us to refrain from trying to draw lessons.

“Behold this Heart, which, notwithstanding the burning love for man with which it is consumed and exhausted, meets with no other return from the generality of Christians than sacrilege, contempt, indifference, and ingratitude.” (Our Lord’s words to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque)

“[I]n spreading religious faith and in introducing religious practices everyone ought at all times to refrain from any manner of action which might seem to carry a hint of coercion or of a kind of persuasion that would be dishonorable or unworthy, especially when dealing with poor or uneducated people.” (Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae)

“I am campaigning, AS MUCH AS I CAN, against a consecration of the World to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, because I can see the danger that a move in this direction would constitute.” (Yves Congar, My Journal of the Council, entry for September 17, 1964) 

“Yes, truly, Vatican Council II is the ratification of liberal Catholicism. And when it is remembered that Pope Pius IX, eighty-five years earlier, said and repeated to those who were visiting him in Rome, ‘Be careful! There are no worse enemies of the Church than the liberal Catholics!’ — then can be measured the catastrophe that such liberal Popes and such a council represent for the Church and for the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, They Have Uncrowned Him, p. 222)