The Impact on the Catholic Church from Division: Not Pretty!

At the Last Supper, Jesus prayed that all might be one. That reality seems further away than ever. It's easy to understand how the division between religions is disastrous for the world. Religious wars throughout the millennia illustrate that so clearly no one with eyes and ears can miss it. What's more difficult to understand on a spiritual level is the division among Catholics who claim the same religion, but are more and more divided.

I'm not talking about the division between cafeteria Catholics who pick and choose among doctrines and those who embrace the fullness of the faith. I'm talking about the division between our spiritual shepherds and laity who claim to embrace the faith, but persecute those who refuse to abandon the faith of our fathers practiced for centuries. 

I'm still reading Archbishop Lefebvre's Open Letter to Confused Catholics. The Chapter on "True and False Obedience" shows how little has changed since 1986 when the book was published. In fact, the division is worse than ever with faithful Catholics actually being thrown out of our churches. We are the unwelcome stepchildren of our abusive fathers. Sad! Do our shepherds not realize the damage they are causing to the faith?

Here's what the archbishop describes:

Division affects the smallest manifestations of piety. In Val-de-Marne, the diocese got the police to eject twenty-five Catholics who used to recite the Rosary in a church which had been deprived of a priest for a long period of years. In the diocese of Metz, the bishops brought in the Communist mayor to cancel the loan of a building to a group of traditionalists. In Canada six of the faithful were sentenced by a Court, which is permitted by the law of that country to deal with this kind of matter, for insisting on receiving Holy Communion on their knees. The Bishop of Antigonish had accused them of "deliberately disturbing the order and the dignity of religious service." The judge gave the "disturbers" a conditional discharge for six months! According to the Bishop, Christians are forbidden to bend the knee before God! Last year, the pilgrimage of young people to Chartres ended with a Mass in the Cathedral gardens because the Mass of St. Pius V was banned from the Cathedral itself. A fortnight later, the doors were thrown open for a spiritual concert in the course of which dances were performed by a former Carmelite nun.

Are not many of these abuses still taking place? How many parishes have told Catholics they can't pray the rosary together in Church after Mass? It happened in one of my own former parishes. People being instructed to stand for Communion and continue standing until everyone receives. We heard that at a beach parish numerous times, a parish, incidentally, where the tabernacle was in the back of the church. The people physically turned their backs on Christ every time they entered the "worship space." 

And more...Demanding that the faithful receive the Lord of the universe in the hand? Yup...common during COVID and still happening. Secular organizations, like zoning commissions, used to block traditional groups from opening churches where the people can worship in the same manner as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Dominic, St. Therese of Lisieux St. Gianna Molla and all the saints up to Bugnini the Mason's Mass imposed after Vatican II. Friends, and even families, divided because those who embrace the Mass of the Ages attend SSPX chapels: the religious wars on a small scale.

Yup! The persecution continues, divisions only become wider. 

The archbishop goes on: 

Two religions confront each other; we are in a dramatic situation and it is impossible to avoid a choice, but the choice is not between obedience and disobedience. What is suggested to us, what we are expressly invited to do, what we are persecuted for not doing, is to choose an appearance of obedience. But even the Holy Father cannot ask us to abandon our faith. We therefore choose to keep it and we cannot be mistaken in clinging to what the Church has taught for two thousand years. The crisis is profound, cleverly organised and directed, and by this token one can truly believe that the master mind is not a man but Satan himself. For it is a master-stroke of Satan to get Catholics to disobey the whole of Tradition in the name of obedience.

And that's the crux of the matter. I think it was Bella Dodd who said that the Communists believed they would destroy the Church through the requirement of obedience. You see it: the bishops' bending their knees to orders from the hypocritical Rome of "synodality" down to the minutia about what can be printed in parish bulletins. And when a bishop stands up and refuses to divide his diocese by ending the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass), what happens? He's thrown out to the cheers of the liberals and the wreckovation of that diocese.

We are, indeed, in a crisis and it's time Catholics stopped letting themselves be spun around like whirling dervishes by the wolves in roman collars. They want a new church where the laws of God are extinguished and the "rights of man" are elevated to sacraments. We live in challenging times. Let us all pray with Jesus at the Last Supper that we all may be one, not in a false unity, but under the banner of Christ the King, in unity with the Holy Catholic Church of the apostles and martyrs.

Pray for the Church and read Archbishop Lefebvre's book. You don't have to buy it; click the link above for the PDF. It's a great prescription for eliminating confusion, a red pill in fact.

May Jesus Christ be praised!