If we can get past the sheer insanity of this statement, we can see its resemblance to one found his Amoris Laetitia from 2016:

“59. Our teaching on marriage and the family cannot fail to be inspired and transformed by this message of love and tenderness; otherwise, it becomes nothing more than the defence of a dry and lifeless doctrine.”

Quite simply, Francis wants to change doctrine, so he needs to overcome those who defend a “rigid” view of Catholic doctrine. Understandably, one part of that strategy involves narrowing the scope of what cannot change to those truths contained in the Catholic creeds.

It is therefore a strategic blunder, with disastrous consequences, to cede the doctrinal battlefield to heretics.

Another aspect of Francis’s strategy to allow for dramatic changes has been to mischaracterize the holy wisdom of St. Vincent of Lérins on the limits of doctrinal change. To better understand what Francis is attacking when he gaslights Catholics about St. Vincent, here is what the First Vatican Council said about the development of Catholic doctrine:

“For, the doctrine of faith which God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence, also, that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding ‘Therefore […] let the understanding, the knowledge, and wisdom of individuals as of all, of one man as of the whole Church, grow and progress strongly with the passage of the ages and the centuries; but let it be solely in its own genus, namely in the same dogma, with the same sense and the same understanding.’ (Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 23, 3).”

This teaching opposes almost everything Francis and today’s innovators want to accomplish, especially with the Synod on Synodality. Tellingly, when Francis quotes St. Vincent of Lérins to describe the limits of doctrinal development, he omits the all-important passage from St. Vincent in the quotation above. Recently, for instance, he used the following citation of St. Vincent to advocate for greater acceptance of homosexual lifestyles in the Church:

“‘I would like to remind those people that indietrismo (being backward-looking) is useless, and we need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals as long as we follow the three criteria that Vincent of Lérins already indicated in the fifth century: doctrine evolves ut annis consolidetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate [i.e. consolidating with the years, developing with time, deepening with age].’”

Clearly he wants us to believe that he plans to adhere to the limits given by St. Vincent, otherwise he would have no reason whatsoever to quote the saint who is known for articulating the limits on doctrinal development. But, in a classic bait-and-switch, Francis omits the actual limits proposed by St. Vincent, replacing those limits with a statement on the permissibility of doctrinal change.

Indeed, generations of Catholics have never been taught anything that leads them to seriously consider that the Catholic Faith is immutable. When Catholics who know the Faith fail to vigorously defend it against all errors, those who are less certain end up abandoning the Faith.

Professor Romano Amerio’s elaboration on St. Vincent’s criteria in his 1985 book Iota Unum helps us understand Francis’s aim:

“It is really a matter of the essential nature of the Christian religion, which does not change endlessly as do its historical accompaniments. . . A legitimate development of an idea occurs when it expounds within itself; a mutation happens when it goes beyond its own limits and moves towards something else.”

Francis and his Synodal collaborators want to cause a mutation of Catholic doctrine, so they must disregard St. Vincent’s standard that any development of doctrine must retain the same sense and same understanding it has always had.

Professor Amerio died in 1997, well before Francis arrived on the scene. So why was he attuned to this debate on the legitimate development of doctrinal development? As he wrote in Iota Unum, Vatican II’s focus on “change” opened the door for misunderstandings about what must always remain the same:

“The council failed to emphasize the changeless foundations underlying the development of religious truth because it was preoccupied with the changeable and dynamic aspects of the Church.”

Francis and his Synod have brought the issue of doctrinal mutation to its furthest limits to date, but the problem has been plaguing the Church in a truly damaging way since the Council.

In all of this, the objective has been to change as much Catholic doctrine as possible without triggering sufficient opposition (especially from the bishops) to call the entire operation into question. In this sense, Francis is gaslighting Catholics so that they accept what they should unequivocally reject. So what can we do about it?

Regardless of the positions we have taken in the past about Francis or Vatican II, we must realize that today the enemies are unambiguously exploiting the appearance of errors for the sake of insulting God, damaging the church, and leading souls to hell.

Francis is letting his gaslight shine before the world, which should alert us to the great need to follow Our Lord’s teaching that we who have the Faith must let our light — which is the light of the immutable Faith He left us — shine before the world. The unopposed persistence of errors does not merely signal that the Church has changed its position on doctrinal matters, it also indicates that the limits of doctrinal change indicated by St. Vincent of Lérins no longer apply. We counter this by insisting on unadulterated Catholic truth.

It is therefore a strategic blunder, with disastrous consequences, to cede the doctrinal battlefield to heretics. We can see that the vast majority of Catholics no longer have the proper sense of the immutable nature of the Faith — indeed, generations of Catholics have never been taught anything that leads them to seriously consider that the Catholic Faith is immutable. When Catholics who know the Faith fail to vigorously defend it against all errors, those who are less certain end up abandoning the Faith.

Regardless of the positions we have taken in the past about Francis or Vatican II, we must realize that today the enemies are unambiguously exploiting the appearance of errors for the sake of insulting God, damaging the church, and leading souls to hell. At a certain point — and it seems like we have now reached it — shepherds need to truly consider that they cause a grave scandal by remaining silent. If they have been silent on the errors of Vatican II or Francis thus far, they can still honor God if they simply put into practice the words of St. Vincent of Lérins, who knew that the situation we face today could happen without calling into question the indefectibility of the Church:

“What then will a Catholic Christian do, if a small portion of the Church have cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith? What, surely, but prefer the soundness of the whole body to the unsoundness of a pestilent and corrupt member? What, if some novel contagion seek to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the Church, but the whole? Then it will be his care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty.”

Those who refuse to do this are Francis’s greatest allies as he gaslights the world into believing that everything other than the Catholic creeds are subject to radical change. We must recognize that Francis and the globalists want to silence us because they know that they are powerless against simple Catholics who cooperate with God’s grace to defend the immutable Catholic Faith. We do not know how much more time God will give us — now is the time to choose to fight for the truth rather than pretend that God is honored and served by burying the talents He has given us (Matthew 25:24-30). Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!

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