(LifeSiteNews) — Over the past several years, LifeSiteNews has published a variety of positions and opinions on whether Francis is the pope. And, as John-Henry Westen recently observed, serious Catholics have been pondering and debating the question of the papacy with greater frequency (and intensity) as Francis’s unholy occupation of the papacy drags on:
It seems inarguable that as we get further into the reign of Francis, Catholics are asking with increasing frequency if he truly is the pope of the Catholic Church. Whether online, among family and friends, or just in their own minds, Catholics are struggling to explain what is happening in Rome when compared to the teachings of Christ’s Church.
Whether their published opinions emphasize it or not, essentially all serious contributors to the debate recognize that we must beseech God’s intervention to resolve the crisis of the papacy. God is permitting this crisis for some reason and can end it in an instant. Moreover, there is no real sense in which we can find an ingenious solution to the problem that would resolve the matter against God’s will.
Although all serious discussions of the crisis with the papacy involve at least an implicit recognition that we must try to discern and follow God’s will, we can of course make that component the primary focus of our analysis. So, instead of asking whether Francis is the worst pope in history or an antipope, we can set that particular question aside for a moment and ask another: why might God be permitting this crisis in the papacy?
Throughout salvation history, and in our own spiritual lives, we know from experience that God allows us to undergo certain trials for our correction, purification, and punishment. And while we may usually bear the brunt of a certain trial in response to our personal faults, it often happens that God will permit larger groups of people to experience certain trials even though some people within that group have served God with great fidelity. Given that we are currently undergoing a tremendous trial in the entire Catholic Church, it is reasonable to ask if the purpose of this trial is for our correction, purification, and punishment due to the infidelity of some portion of the Mystical Body of Christ.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò recently provided us with an interesting focal point for this discussion with an assertion from his November 30, 2024 essay on the papacy:
To answer these legitimate questions, we must put aside the fiction given us by the media. We must first understand that the antithetical vision of a ‘santo subito’ [immediate saint] Ratzinger and an ‘ugly and bad’ Bergoglio is convenient for many. This simplistic, artificial, and false approach avoids addressing the heart of the problem, that is, the perfect coherence of action of the ‘conciliar popes’ from John XXIII and Paul VI to the self-styled Francis, including John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The goals are the same, even if pursued with different methods and language. . . . In reality, Ratzinger and Bergoglio – and this is precisely what conservatives do not want to recognize – constitute two moments of a revolutionary process that contemplates alternating phases that are only apparently opposed to one another, following the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A process that did not begin with Ratzinger and will not end with Bergoglio, but rather that goes back to Roncalli and seems destined to continue as long as the deep church continues to replace the Catholic Hierarchy by usurping its authority.
Although this line of reasoning may tend to alienate some Catholics of good will, the argument is well worth considering in connection with whether Francis’s hostile occupation of the papacy represents a trial meant for our correction and purification (and perhaps punishment). Thus, even if Francis is the only successor of Pius XII who we would be willing to evaluate as a potential antipope, we should find it tremendously disconcerting to imagine that all of the “conciliar popes” promoted a revolutionary process that leads souls away from God.
If Archbishop Viganò is correct in his assertion, then we can visualize the entire revolutionary process as one in which the occupants of the papacy since Pius XII have essentially been attempting to take the Church down an impermissible path. All along the way there have been wrong-way signs, some of them larger than others. If, during the papacy of Benedict XVI, we saw fewer wrong-way signs and generally enjoyed the scenery, this does not necessarily mean that he had abandoned the impermissible path. With Francis, the path has become much less pleasant — and the wrong-way signs have become far more obvious — but (according to Archbishop Viganò’s position) it is the same path upon which John XXIII wrongly embarked.
If John XXIII and his successors were truly attempting to take the Church down an impermissible path, we should readily acknowledge that this would be contrary to God’s positive will. We can make the analysis more concrete by considering one truly revolutionary change promoted by John XXIII: the ecumenical movement.
Thus, let us assume for the sake of argument that God actually wants His Catholic Church to believe and teach the following truths defended by Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical “concerning some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine,” Humani Generis:
Some say they are not bound by the doctrine, explained in Our Encyclical Letter of a few years ago, and based on the Sources of Revelation, which teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing. Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation.
In other words, what if God truly wants the Catholic Church to teach that all people ought to belong to the Catholic Church (and follow its teachings) if they wish to save their souls? For those who have studied the Catholic Faith, it certainly seems reasonable that the Catholic Church’s hierarchy would unwaveringly teach the world this all-important truth (with the ordinary exceptions). Indeed, we could even say with some confidence that it would be insane or malicious for members of the Catholic clergy to teach people that they could find a path of salvation through the practice of a Protestant religion: such a message would generally serve to make it substantially less likely for the recipient of the message to become (or remain) Catholic.
However, this is precisely what we find in the ecumenical movement initiated by John XXIII, furthered by Vatican II, and promoted by Paul VI and his successors. It has become such an accepted belief that all Christian religions are viable paths of salvation that relatively few Catholics directed any criticism at the Synod on Synodality for its unambiguous position that all baptized people are members of the People of God and the Synodal Church.
We do not need to limit this line of reasoning to the question of false ecumenism because, tragically, there are other facets of the ongoing revolution that violate what the pre-Vatican II popes had unambiguously asserted. Carrying the banner of “living tradition,” the revolutionaries have convinced many Catholics that it is perfectly reasonable for the Church to teach something today that fundamentally contradicts what the Church had taught prior to the Council. And yet the following words from St. Pius X’s Oath Against Modernism should tell us that such contradictions are not only unreasonable but heretical:
I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously.
Truth does not change over time to contradict what it once meant. For decades, though, Catholics have been taught by the false shepherds that dogmas actually can change to mean something else. This may help explain why Paul VI abolished the requirement for clerics to take the Oath Against Modernism.
In light of all of this, we can ask another question: why would we expect God to grant us a genuinely Catholic pope when we persist in rejecting the invaluable truths He gave us through Pius XII and his predecessors? Being God, He can certainly rectify the situation without any effort on our part to combat the errors that have plagued the Church since before most of us had heard of Jorge Bergoglio. Nonetheless, we know that throughout salvation history people have petitioned God’s grace by turning away from error and fighting for His truth.
As blasphemously grotesque as it is, Francis’s new Synodal Church helps us understand much about the “revolutionary process” described by Archbishop Viganò. In hindsight, we can see that many of the wrong-way signs of the past sixty years — such as interreligious prayer meetings, doctrinal evolution, diminished roles for the clergy, continuous changes in the liturgy, and rampant “cafeteria Catholicism” — were all harbingers of the Synodal Church. This should help us understand that the remedy to the problem of the papacy is not a pope who will simply take us back a few decades to an earlier point on the impermissible path. Rather, it seems that God is permitting the current horrors so that we will realize that we must go back to the path defended by Pius XII and his predecessors.
Regardless of whether God is permitting the wrong-way signs of Francis’s hostile occupation of the papacy as encouragement for us to return to the unadulterated truth defended by Pius XII, though, we know that we all have a duty to combat the errors so prevalent among nominal Catholics today. In his recent essay, Archbishop Viganò called all of us to do this, by “resisting in faith”:
To the many scandalized faithful, to the many confused and indignant priests and religious, to the few – at least for now – who raise their voices to denounce the coup perpetrated against the Holy Church by Her own Ministers, I address my encouragement to persevere in fidelity to Our Lord, the Eternal High Priest, the Head of the Mystical Body. Resist strong in faith, the Prince of the Apostles admonishes us (1 Peter 5:9), knowing that your brothers scattered throughout the world are undergoing the same sufferings as you. The sleep in which the Savior seems to ignore us while the Barque of Peter is tossed by the storm, must be for us a spur to invoke His help all the more, because only when we turn to Him, leaving aside human respect, inconsistent theories, and political calculations, will we see Him awaken and command the winds and the sea to calm down. Resisting in faith calls for the struggle to remain faithful to what the Lord has taught and commanded, precisely at the moment in which many, especially at the top of the Hierarchy, abandon Him, deny Him and betray Him. Resisting in faith implies not fainting in the moment of trial, knowing how to draw from Him the strength to overcome it victoriously.
By all means, serious Catholics should debate whether Francis is the pope. But, as Archbishop Viganò wrote, “the sleep in which the Savior seems to ignore us while the Barque of Peter is tossed by the storm, must be for us a spur to invoke His help all the more.” If we want to effectively invoke God’s help today, we need to abandon the impermissible path of false ecumenism and doctrinal evolution that led us to the point at which it appears that all is almost lost. If more Catholics, particularly in the hierarchy, would resolve to abandon the impermissible path of revolution, we may find that God grants us a pope who returns the papacy to the true path. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!