One good thing about the pandemic? It put the Francis Road Show to Perdition on hold. The humble pontiff was right in the middle of building his new Tower of Babel when God stepped in: No "Global Education Pact," no Economy Francesco, no World Youth Day, no World Meeting of Families.
Our judgmental pontiff may never see those three fingers pointing back at him, but many Catholics have begun to wonder aloud if his Amazon Synod may have been Heaven's last straw. After all, pagan idols were carried in papal procession right into the Basilica of St. Peter itself.
Pandemic or not, Francis's continued good health is proving that, in addition to being all-knowing and all-powerful, our good God is also all-patient.
At the Amazon Synod, Francis was evidently tasked with making it official that the Catholic Church has surrendered to the world, the flesh and the Pachamama. He nearly botched his lines (especially when Pachamama ended up in the Tiber) but, in the end, he managed to muddle through.
And that's when all hell broke loose.
I was at the Amazon Synod. I witnessed an unconditional surrender, the terms of which agreed to the Masonic proposition that the Catholic Church is just one religion among many equals, thus making even Baptism itself essentially nonessential.
Amazon was hardly the beginning, however. The revolution kicked into high gear when Francis' more subtle predecessor let it be known some fifty years earlier that the Catholic Church had never been essential to salvation in the first place, since all religions are pleasing to God anyway.
Before he was through, "Saint" Paul VI had uncrowned himself, made God into the god of all religions and transformed the venerable Roman Rite into something unrecognizable as Catholic, better understood as a communal meal and much more befitting the banquet table than the altar.
With the altar of sacrifice itself now rendered nonessential, it was no great feat to transform the priesthood into something equally disposable. Stripped of most of their sacrificial duties, priests became "presiders" whose duties and responsibilities could mostly be assumed by the People of God.
Priests-- like the sacrifice, like the altar--had essentially become nonessential.
From here, everything else fell away. Nuns and sisters decided their habits and vows were about as essential as meatless Fridays. And with Baptism, Priest and Altar increasingly nonessential to salvation, millions of Catholics concluded that going to Mass even on Sundays was roughly as essential as the Communion rail.
So when the global pandemic landed years later, guess what was listed as nonessential for the first time in two thousand years. Why? Because it is, thanks to their Holinesses and Excellencies.
And this, dear friends, is the Church that Modernism built.
From the “How Did We Get Here” file, here’s a flashback from the Amazon Synod, filmed just weeks before the Covid Pandemic turned the world upside down.
Perhaps it will help the many newcomers to Tradition to better understand how the Catholic Church came to be transformed almost overnight from something essential into something so terribly nonessential.
