As argued in a July 2022 article from The Remnant, the fact that Traditional Catholics disagree on whether or not Francis is actually the pope should not preclude us from agreeing upon an accurate diagnosis of what he represents to the Church today:

“Bergoglio is the anti-Catholic man permitted by God to wield power over the Mystical Body of Christ as the reputed pope, in service of Satan and the globalists, to advance the crisis in the Church through a calculated process of destruction which causes many souls to be lost but which will ultimately purify the Church.”

The Synod on Synodality’s Instrumentum Laboris includes a list of abbreviations for the sixteen documents cited in its text: two from John Paul II, two from the General Secretariat of the Synod, five from Francis, and seven from Vatican II. As we have come to expect, this list does not include any documents promulgated before Vatican II.

Francis’s attacks on Traditional Catholics have become so commonplace that they scarcely seem newsworthy, but on his September 4, 2023 return flight from Mongolia, Francis combined his attack on Catholics with a disturbingly bizarre suggestion that the only Catholic doctrines that we can defend are those truths contained in the Catholic creeds:

“They defend a doctrine in quotation marks, which is a doctrine like distilled water, tastes like nothing and is not the true Catholic doctrine that is in the Creed. And that so many times scandalizes; how it scandalizes the idea that God became flesh, that God became Man, that Our Lady preserved her virginity. That scandalizes.”

“Like the child who takes a perverse pleasure in destroying, it seems that Congar had no greater joy in life than that of witnessing the dilapidation of the treasure of the Church and the destruction of the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ.” (Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, One Hundred Years of Modernism)

“There is only one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one can be saved.” (Innocent III and the Fourth Ecumenical Council of the Lateran, 1215)

“This is magisterium: the Council is the magisterium of the Church. Either you are with the Church and therefore you follow the Council, and if you do not follow the Council or you interpret it in your own way, as you wish, you are not with the Church. We must be demanding and strict on this point. The Council should not be negotiated in order to have more of these... No, the Council is as it is.” (Francis, January 30, 2021 Address)

Blessed Pius IX’s words about “liberty of conscience and worship” from his 1864 encyclical, Quanta Cura, likely sound familiar to many faithful Catholics:

"Liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society.”

While it has always been the case that fallen human beings are prone to both lying and believing lies, many of us have observed a remarkable increase in the propensity of seemingly intelligent people to believe preposterous lies in recent years. In many instances, those of us who have refused to believe those lies have been ostracized by family members, colleagues, and those we had considered friends. How, we must ask, do these otherwise normal people not only believe these preposterous lies but also defend them as though their lives depended upon it?

In his 1846 encyclical, Qui Pluribus, Blessed Pius IX charged the Church’s shepherds with protecting the purity of the Catholic Faith:

“So, in accordance with your pastoral care, work assiduously to protect and preserve this faith. Never cease to instruct all men in it, to encourage the wavering, to convince dissenters, to strengthen the weak in faith by never tolerating and letting pass anything which could in the slightest degree defile the purity of this faith.”

“Almighty and eternal God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we kneel before Your Majesty, and thank You from the depth of our soul for the inestimable gift of the Catholic Faith, which you have deigned to reveal to us through Jesus Christ, True God and True man. We received this divine light in holy baptism and have promised You to keep this faith inviolate until death.” (Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s prayer for the triumph of the Catholic Faith.