Of Groundhogs and False Shepherds

 "Judas went out immediately, and it was night." John 13:30

Every year I plant a small garden. (Underline the small." This year, as usual, I planted six 
tomato plants a handful of summer and spaghetti squash, three assorted pepper plants and a few herbs in containers. Things were going fairly well and I harvested a few squash and am just beginning to get some fresh tomatoes.

But the groundhog found the garden and he has devastated my squash plants gradually eating the leaves until my formerly lush plants are almost unrecognizable. He does all his munching and crunching in the dark when we are asleep.

Judas did his dirty work in the dark as well. So do the false shepherds hiding in their dicasteries at the Vatican plotting the next document or synod to attack the faith. 

This is nothing new!

Read the encyclicals of Pope Pius IX about the tactics of the modernists. Here's just a bit from Qui Pluribus, November 9, 1846:

Each of you has noticed, venerable brothers, that a very bitter and fearsome war against the whole Catholic commonwealth is being stirred up by men bound together in a lawless alliance. These men do not preserve sound doctrine, but turn their hearing from the truth. They eagerly attempt to produce from their darkness all sorts of prodigious beliefs, and then to magnify them with all their strength, and to publish them and spread them among ordinary people. We shudder indeed and suffer bitter pain when We reflect on all their outlandish errors and their many harmful methods, plots and contrivances.

This is a perfect description of the synodal process that has been used to undermine the faith on so many levels. The October synod is likely to strike a serious blow at the roots of the faith while the organizers strip away the leaves and attack the branches. Let us pray that the Lord intervenes to prevent it from taking place. 

These men use these means to spread their hatred for truth and light. They are experienced and skillful in deceit, which they use to set in motion their plans to quench peoples’ zeal for piety, justice and virtue, to corrupt morals, to cast all divine and human laws into confusion, and to weaken and even possibly overthrow the Catholic religion and civil society. For you know, venerable brothers, that these bitter enemies of the Christian name, are carried wretchedly along by some blind momentum of their mad impiety; they go so far in their rash imagining as to teach without blushing, openly and publicly, daring and unheard-of doctrines, thereby uttering blasphemies against God.[1] They teach that the most holy mysteries of our religion are fictions of human invention, and that the teaching of the Catholic Church is opposed to the good and the prerogatives of human society. They are not even afraid to deny Christ Himself and God....

It is with no less deceit, venerable brothers, that other enemies of divine revelation, with reckless and sacrilegious effrontery, want to import the doctrine of human progress into the Catholic religion. They extol it with the highest praise, as if religion itself were not of God but the work of men, or a philosophical discovery which can be perfected by human means.

Does this all seem familiar? Aren't we seeing the same evil Medusa raising her snake-like head to deceive and destroy? There is nothing new under the sun as Pope Pius IX illustrates in his encyclical. Are we on the edge of another Western Schism as Pope Francis and his cohort of modernists continue to undermine the faith? They are like my groundhog only much worse, because the groundhog simply does what comes naturally to a hungry little beast. But the cohort surrounding the pope appear to be filled with zeal for evil. They have turned the Pontifical Academy for Life into the same kind bureaucracy found in Orwell's 1984 where every department stood for the opposite of its name. Like them, the Pontifical Academy for Life has become an academy of death with pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia members who  advocate for evil. 

Some demons are only driven out by prayer and fasting. Let us take our obligation as warriors in the Church Militant more seriously. Expose the false shepherds and defend the faith fighting under the banner of Christ the King with Mary as our 12-star general. If you aren't praying the rosary daily, it's time to start.