“[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)

Every day in the secular realm, we find new indications that the world is almost completely insane, and the insanity increasingly has a distinctly demonic aspect to it. As demonically insane as the secular world looks now, though, it is the picture of holy sanity compared to Francis’s Synodal Church. Since Easter alone, we have the following manifestations of insane wickedness from Rome:

Almost sixty years after the completion of the Second Vatican Council, it may seem, at first glance, like a pointless exercise to examine John XXIII’s October 11, 1962 speech to open the Council. After all, we would expect that any useful insights from the speech would have been fully revealed by now. And yet, if we carefully deconstruct his speech in light of all that has transpired since the Council opened, we can see the foundation and framework for so much of the crisis in the Church and world. It is almost as though Satan and the Church’s enemies had to forecast their plans from the outset.

“Since Jesus Christ has proclaimed that the special sign of discipleship with Him is that we ‘have love one for another’ (John xiii, 35; xv, 12), can we give a mark of greater love for our neighbors than to assist them in putting behind themselves the darkness of error by instructing them in the true faith of Christ?” (Pope Pius XI, Rerum Ecclesia, 1926)

In his 1951 encyclical on the promotion of Catholic missions, Evangelii Praecones, Pope Pius XII wrote of the great spiritual battle that was raging over seventy years ago:

“Venerable Brethren, you are well aware that almost the whole human race is today allowing itself to be driven into two opposing camps, for Christ or against Christ. The human race is involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue in its salvation by Christ, or in its dire destruction. The preachers of the Gospel are using their talents and energy to extend the Kingdom of Christ; but there are other preachers who, since they profess materialism and reject all hope of eternal happiness, are trying to drag men down to an abject condition.”

“Archbishop Lefebvre stands for a rigid conservatism which seems to have no place for the necessary development which the Council had to undertake to meet the problems of the world in ferment.” (George Patrick Dwyer, Archbishop of Birmingham, 1976)

“A word that frequently surfaced during the team’s discernment at the retreat was ‘messiness.’ Synodality is not always easy to comprehend; it can also be seen to be a complicated process.” (Final North American Synodal Document)

“And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:14)