(LifeSiteNews) — On this episode of The John Henry Westen Show, LifeSite journalist Stephen Kokx joins me to discuss his new book Navigating the Crisis in the Church: Essays in Defense of Traditional Catholicism.
After briefly discussing how Kokx began reporting on Catholic news and understanding the current crisis in the Church, I asked him when he realized something was seriously wrong with the Francis pontificate.
Kokx explained that, like many journalists at the time, he tried to give Francis the benefit of the doubt at first, buying into the “Catholic Inc.” narrative that the media was misconstruing what the Pope said. But after a few months of mental gymnastics, Kokx realized just how bad Francis’ papacy was.
“I said, ‘Look, [these are] not translation issues, this is not the media trying to criticize Francis. This is not someone who is defending the faith of our fathers. And so, I was very fortunate … to not get caught up in all the excuses that we still hear 11 years later from Catholic Inc.,” Kokx said.
I told Kokx that for the first couple of days of Francis’s papacy, I also thought media outlets like Rorate Caeli were overly critical of him and should give him a break. But I realized how bad this papacy was just a few days in, when he praised Cardinal Walter Kasper as a “clever theologian” and promoted his books during an Angelus address.
A bit later, I asked Kokx to explain the crisis in the Church today. He said, “We have men and women in clerical garb, wearing vestments reserved for bishops, priests, popes. And they’re walking around not defending or handing on the Catholic [faith]; they’re giving an imposter version if you will, a neo-Modernist variant [of] what I call in the book a ‘decaffeinated Catholicism.’”
Kokx lamented the fact that some clergy are being dismissed from office, accused of schism, or outright excommunicated.
“We have here a conciliar, pseudo, imposter church eclipsing – as has been told through Marian apparitions – the real Church, which at this time is dispersed throughout the world in small pockets of faithful clergy and others who are deemed outcasts … and really this began at Vatican II,” he said.
Watch or listen to my full interview to hear more from Stephen Kokx.
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