A Pew Research Center survey of 6,485 U.S. adults from September 20-26, 2021 (Few Americans Blame God or Say Faith Has Been Shaken Amid Pandemic, Other Tragedies) yielded further evidence that the fruits of Vatican II’s ecumenical experiment have been putrid. The headline findings from the survey included the following:

• Catholics twice as likely as Protestants to say people who don’t believe in God can go to heaven
• Most Catholics, but not most Protestants, say some non-Christian religions can lead to eternal life

Details of the survey indicate that only 16% of Catholics surveyed (compared with 31% of all Christians) replied that “my religion is the one true faith leading to eternal life in heaven.” In addition, 72% of Catholics responded that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” and 61% of Catholics responded that “some non-Christian religions also can go to heaven.” Presumably an even higher percentage of Catholics would have responded that non-Catholic religions can lead to heaven were it not for the fact that 10% of so-called Catholics responded that they did not believe in heaven.

Indeed, if Francis’s version of Catholicism is right, how can we avoid the conclusion that the efforts of St. Edmund Campion were misguided at best and very likely wicked?

 In a 1957 interview with Fr. Agustin Fuentes, Sister Lucia described one of the reasons why she was convinced that we are living in the end times:

“She [the Blessed Virgin Mary] said to my cousins as well as to myself that God is giving two last remedies to the world. These are the Holy Rosary and Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. These are the last two remedies which signify there will be no others.”

Faithful Catholics generally heed this good counsel by saying the Rosary every day and practicing at least some special devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Even so, perhaps we undertake these devotions out of a sense of pious duty, without appreciating the practical significance of looking to Mary in these perilous times.

In his 1943 encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ, Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII wrote of the resemblance between Jesus Christ and His Church:

“From the outset it should be noted that the society established by the Redeemer of the human race resembles its divine Founder, who was persecuted, calumniated and tortured by those very men whom He had undertaken to save.”

“Every one therefore that heareth these my words, and doth them, shall be likened to a wise man that built his house upon a rock.” (Matthew 7:24)

The First Vatican Council’s decree on Faith sets forth the basis for our believing all the truths which the Catholic Church teaches:

“Since human beings are totally dependent on God as their Creator and Lord, and created reason is completely subject to uncreated truth, we are obliged to yield to God the Revealer full submission of intellect and will by faith. This faith, which is the beginning of human salvation, the Catholic Church professes to be a supernatural virtue, by means of which, with the grace of God inspiring and assisting us, we believe to be true what He has revealed, not because we perceive its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself, Who makes the revelation and can neither deceive nor be deceived.”

It is easy to dismiss, or at least mock, Francis’s “Synod for a Synodal Church.” Everything about the Synod seems intentionally ridiculous. Truly, it is designed to humiliate the Mystical Body of Christ, with the premise that God got some things right but now we must let sinful men give it a shot.

So the very process of the Synodal path would lead to a different faith because it will be a human faith, even if it has some resemblance to Catholicism.

It would, of course, be bad enough if it were simply a process of reevaluating everything about the Church. Even if the process yielded a church which resembled the Catholic Church during her most glorious years, it would still be sinister because it would be a church created by the consensus of men rather than the authority, wisdom, and love of God. In his The Catechism of the Crisis in the Church, Fr. Matthias Gaudron describes this fundamental fault of the Synod: the process by which personal judgment leads to the supernatural faith being replaced by a purely human faith:

“Faith does not depend on our personal judgment, but on the authority of God who reveals Himself and who can neither deceive nor be deceived. Thus it is necessary to receive everything that God has revealed and not take only that which seems good to us. Therefore someone who makes a choice about the revealed deposit of faith and does not want to accept it as a whole imposes a limit on God, for he lets his reason have the last word. He who acts in this way no longer has a supernatural faith, but only a human faith, however numerous the points on which it may be in accord with supernatural faith.”

So the very process of the Synodal path would lead to a different faith because it will be a human faith, even if it has some resemblance to Catholicism.

As Michael Matt described in a recent Remnant TV video, Francis has now decided that even Our Lord’s Good Samaritan parable can be distorted to advance the globalist agenda:

“Do you know what comes to mind now when, together with popular movements, I think of the Good Samaritan? Do you know what comes to mind? The protests over the death of George Floyd. It is clear that this type of reaction against social, racial or macho injustice can be manipulated or exploited by political machinations or whatever, but the main thing is that, in that protest against this death, there was the Collective Samaritan who is no fool!” (October 16 video message)

Reading this we may forget that the Good Samaritan helps a wounded man rather than terrorizing everyone who has even the slightest superficial resemblance to the robbers. Setting that aside, what are the wounds to be healed by these so-called Good Samaritans? For Francis, decency, common sense, and traditional beliefs are among the “wounds” that must be “healed” before his globalist friends can radically reshape the world. His version of the Good Samaritan heals by destroying.

Men like Francis continually push the boundaries of offenses they can commit against God.

In his October 9, 2021 address to open the Synod, Francis put the Church and world on notice that he intended to change the Church, invoking the pseudo-Catholic inspiration of Yves Congar: 

“Father Congar, of blessed memory, once said: ‘There is no need to create another Church, but to create a different Church.’  That is the challenge. For a ‘different Church,’ a Church open to the newness that God wants to suggest, let us with greater fervour and frequency invoke the Holy Spirit and humbly listen to him, journeying together as he, the source of communion and mission, desires: with docility and courage.”

Suppose you are a faithful Catholic in 1948 and you read the following passage from the book Bishop Fulton Sheen had recently written, Communism and the Conscience of the West:

“The third temptation in which Satan asked Christ to adore him and all the kingdoms of the world would be His, will become the temptation to have a new religion without a Cross, a liturgy without a world to come, a religion to destroy a religion, or a politics which is a religion — one that renders unto Caesar even the things that are God’s. . . . Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counterchurch which will be the ape of the Church, because he, the Devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the Mystical Body of Christ.”

In the final talk of the 2021 Catholic Identity Conference, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò delivered what is perhaps the most absolutely vital message for Catholics today:

“Our duty in this historical moment is to fight the good fight in order to acquire those merits before God that may lead Him to shorten the time of tribulation . . . the outcome of the battle is most certain and inexorable but the duration of the persecution depends on us . . . it depends on our testimony of faith and of courageous defense of truth.”

Prior to Francis’s release of Traditionis Custodes, many traditional Catholics never had to think seriously about whether they accepted what Benedict XVI and Francis described as “the binding character of the Second Vatican Council.” Such faithful Catholics could attend the Tridentine Mass, learn the Faith from traditional catechisms and the writings of the saints, and have devout and fruitful lives without ever hearing of Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes, or Nostra Aetate, let alone knowing their contents.