By now (6th September 2019), many media outlets (among them Catholic Herald and Catholic News Agency) have reported on the latest broadside against the upcoming Amazon Synod (and its Instrumentum Laboris) by Cardinals Raymond Burke and Walter Brandmüller.
This is not the first time that either Cardinal has denounced this horrid document. What is new is Brandmüller's declaration that the current crisis surpasses even the Arian Crisis in severity:
"'We must face serious challenges to the integrity of the Deposit of the Faith, the sacramental and hierarchical structure of the Church and its Apostolic Tradition. With all this has been created a situation never before seen in the Church’s history, not even during the Arian crisis of the fourth and fifth century,' Brandmüller added."
That the Church is today facing its worst crisis ever -- worse than the Arian crisis, worse than the Reformation -- is not a new verdict. Many a Traditionalist layman and a handful of clerics have said as much for decades. For a Cardinal to say pretty much the same thing (even if limited to the current pontificate) is entirely something else. A Cardinal who is not an ordinary prelate, but one of the most accomplished ecclesiastical historians of our time: President of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences from 1998 to 2009, one of the foremost experts on the history of the Ecumenical Councils, author of the definitive history of the extraordinarily convoluted Council of Constance, a scholar who was written on some of the worst episodes of the Church's story, a man whose red hat was widely seen as Benedict XVI's recognition of his brilliant historical work. One is almost embarrassed to have to say against the inevitable naysayers and self-decorated apologists that Brandmuller does know his Church history.