BY NOW, the news of the death of “Pope” Francis on Easter Monday morning has reached you. It was not a surprise by any means. After many weeks of battling the traumatic effects of pneumonia at the age of 88, the life of a man who purportedly occupied the papal chair while publicly rejecting many tenets of the Catholic religion, reveling instead in what he called “the existential peripheries,” came to an end.
In his final days, Francis seemed only desirous of sealing his legacy, which was applauded by millions of fans. It was not a surprise that his final testament used two catchwords of the Masonic overthrow of Christian civilization: “peace” and “fraternity.” Who does not want world peace and brotherhood? Hence the beguiling effectiveness of these phrases. We were made, all of us, for peace and fellowship. True peace and brotherhood, however, only come in this fallen world from the spiritual values of the Catholic religion as revealed by the One, True God, not from the secular humanitarianism and ecumenism Francis triumphantly proclaimed and promoted. God, he said, “willed the plurality of religions.” Or as Pontius Pilate famously said, “What is truth?”
If Francis came to recant of his part in what one commentator aptly calls the “spiritual coup de’état” of Vatican II, it was in his private moments only. May God have mercy on those well-intentioned souls disastrously affected. How few are equal to the skillful and bold seductions of this great counterfeit — a religion that mimics the true Faith in much the same way a counterfeit dollar bill reproduces most of the real thing. How many people, as Gerry Matatics points out, if they saw a counterfeit $100 bill would recognize it as false, unless they stopped and examined it closely, unless they already knew well the details of the real thing?
Will the successor of Francis be a conservative or as boldly radical and worldly as Francis?
The question preoccupies an army of pundits and analysts. The atmosphere of speculation is very much like that before a presidential election and even a major sports championship.
The reality, however, is that while it is not of zero consequence just how openly opposed to true doctrine, morals and worship his successor as head of the Vatican II Church will turn out to be, this man will not bring to a halt the inexorable slide into almost universal apostasy — a falling away foretold by the prophet Daniel, St. Paul and Jesus Christ himself. This continuing decay of faith is inevitable for the simple reason that Francis’s successor will not possibly be a true pope of the Catholic Church. The men who will elect him have all rejected the Faith (while holding to key elements of it) and thus, like Francis, are not even members of the Church and have no standing to elect a pope. They are not true cardinals.
That, by the way, is the most simple truth about Francis and all the men taken as popes since the false election of Angelo Roncalli in 1958: he was not Catholic and, according to canon law and teachings of the true popes, a non-Catholic cannot hold office in the Church; is not eligible for election and would immediately lose office upon the commission of public heresy even if validly elected. No tribunal is necessary to proclaim or adjudicate this exclusion. No one on the face of the earth can alter what is a matter of divine law. These men, as it would happen, proceeded to strip the altars of the Catholic Church with breathtaking audacity, abolishing the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, denying a long list of Catholic doctrines and engaging in a well-concealed, progressive war against the institution of the family.
The so-called “liberal Catholicism” these men preached was simply not Catholicism, no matter how popular. “Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected: ‘This is the Catholic faith, which unless a man believe faithfully and firmly; he cannot be saved’ (Athanas. Creed),” Pope Benedict XV wrote in Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, repeating what had been taught and held by all popes from the days of Christ. The counterfeit can easily be identified if one truly examines what these false popes said and did, which is a matter of abundant public record, and by the fruits of the Vatican II tree.
And so too with “Traditionalist” Catholicism. It too promotes serious errors on the nature of jurisdiction and the setting up of independent operations with no papal mandate, something seemingly orthodox commentators rarely discuss. The devil always comes at us from both the right and the left, his classic strategy of delivering his knock-out blows from multiple directions.
The Jesuit Francis from Argentina had charisma and many gifts, including the gift of making his beliefs well known, however much he surrounded them with infuriating and sometimes blasphemous equivocations. When asked about flagrant violations of moral law, he would often say in so many words, “God loves everyone.” What he would not say to the simple-minded who listened was that this love only seeks the eternal good of the person, never the harm. That good only lies in ultimate union with the ground and origin of our being. Strange that men who constantly preached the divinity of man and the “dignity of the human person” were so utterly opposed to the source of true dignity.
May this moment following Francis’s death in the sweet aftermath of Easter Sunday, a time when no one now denies that the papal throne is vacant, be a time when God’s love and mercy descend in greater abundance on this fallen planet and dispel some of the confusion and blindness. May God have mercy on those innocently misled. May he lift up and console those who in simplicity and sincerity revere the papacy and mistakenly saw Francis as a symbol of its perpetual grandeur, majesty and holiness. May he inspire some to say, “Wait a minute, was he really what the world said he was?” and even, “Am I what I say I am?”
May God have mercy on the soul of Francis as well.
Let us bear in mind that Francis would have been an utter unknown, he could never have played his highly-publicized part in this unfolding drama if secret world rulers with inconceivable might and inconceivable enmity had not plucked him from below — a reckless and audacious exemplar of the sentimental and bewildering New World Religion they wished to accompany a cruel and dehumanizing world empire — , and if vast multitudes, as incurably blind as that famous mob in the courtyard of Pontius Pilate, had not shouted from the rooftops, “Hail Caesar! He is our king!”
The captivating failures of those on high and the relentless nature of this distressing, public spectacle are temptations that may cause us to lose sight of our own nothingness and the promise of Christ’s glorious return. Let us resist, and nourish this sustaining hope every day in the invisible chambers of our hearts and minds.
