Posted on 09/01/2025 6:14:26 PM PDT by ebb tide
If we think seriously about what it means for the Catholic Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, to suffer a crisis of internal infidelities rather than external attacks, we can conclude that we are facing something almost unparalleled in salvation history. If we can measure the magnitude of the fall by the spiritual dignity of the ones falling and the degree of the harms caused, the post-Vatican II crisis is arguably worse than any in history except those caused by the fall of the angels and the sin of Adam and Eve.
One of the realities about the ongoing crisis in the Church that we might tend to overlook or under-appreciate is the fact that God has permitted us to see so many unmistakable signs that there are grave problems. In other words, we do not need to be learned theologians or even all that attentive to see these signs — even non-Catholics who pay relatively little attention to Church matters can immediately recognize the profound crisis. When flamboyantly anti-Christian men are elevated to the rank of bishop or cardinal while faithful Catholics are persecuted by the hierarchy for simply wanting to attend the Traditional Latin Mass, we know with absolute certainty that we face one of the gravest situations in the history of Christianity.
Indeed, if we think seriously about what it means for the Catholic Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, to suffer such a crisis as a result of internal infidelities rather than external attacks, we can conclude that we are facing something almost unparalleled in salvation history. If we can measure the magnitude of the fall by the spiritual dignity of the ones falling and the degree of the harms caused, the post-Vatican II crisis is arguably worse than any in history except those caused by the fall of the angels and the sin of Adam and Eve.
Like the falls of the angels and our first parents, the fall that we can rightly describe as the Vatican II revolution has been fueled by sinful pride.
To appreciate this, we can consider the following partial list of the ways in which pride has displayed itself throughout the crisis:
We could unfortunately add many other manifestations of sinful pride to this list. All of it has been carried out illegitimately in the name of the Catholic Church and reveals a mindset that places much more weight on the heterodox ideas of sinful men than the holy teaching that the Church had perfected through the centuries under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. The proponents of the Vatican II revolution have effectively said to the Church and world that they know better than God — in this they have followed the fateful decisions of Satan and the bad angels, and Adam and Eve.
And much like the fall of Adam and Eve, the catastrophic effects of these sins impact all mankind. Relatively few people in the world fully understand why the Vatican II revolution is evil, but the entire world experiences the consequences. The reason should be clear: whereas the true Catholic religion given to us by God will sanctify souls and lead communities and nations to peace, a version of the Catholic religion that has been manipulated by modernists and liberals will lead souls astray.
Of course there have always been prideful members of the Mystical Body of Christ, acting as “cancers” that oppose the work of God. But in the wake of Vatican II, that cancer spread throughout the Church such that the healthy portion was almost eliminated, and is perpetually threatened by the cancerous portions.
This has been painfully confirmed over the past several decades by the fact that formerly Catholic nations have accepted contraception, abortion, and divorce. In nations like the United States which were never Catholic, we witness similar phenomena as nominally Catholic politicians and voters consistently support immoral laws. If we step back and think rationally about the situation, though, it should be evident that this is the entirely natural outcome of men following a version of the Catholic faith that has been marred by the prideful innovations of sinful men.
Dom Eugene Boylan provided another dimension to this analysis is his This Tremendous Lover:
“There is a special deformity in pride when we consider it in a member of Christ’s Mystical Body. Pride makes a man live by himself for himself; but as a member of Christ, a man must live by Christ and for Christ. The proud man, then, opposes the life of the Mystical Body of Christ; he is like a cancer in that Body and, in fact, we can properly designate him as anti-Christ. For other sins evade God, so to speak, but pride opposes Him.” (p. 69)
Of course there have always been prideful members of the Mystical Body of Christ, acting as “cancers” that oppose the work of God. But in the wake of Vatican II, that cancer spread throughout the Church such that the healthy portion was almost eliminated, and is perpetually threatened by the cancerous portions.
Still, God has not abandoned His Church or those faithful souls who seek to follow what the Church has always taught. Two passages from This Tremendous Lover can help us appreciate how God’s punishments of sinful pride can help souls return to Him:
“It is only when God withdraws His help and leaves the proud man to his own devices that it becomes evident what a man is worth without God. God sometimes does withdraw His usual help in order to make man humble enough to allow His grace to sanctify him. Otherwise his pride would avert God’s mercy.” (p. 69)
“Very often, too, pride is such an obstacle to God’s plan that He deliberately withdraws His grace, and leaves a man to his own weakness, in such a way that the shame of the consequent sins of the flesh may lead him to humility. Finally, one cannot forget that the animal passions in man were chained and subject to the easy control of his reason until he refused to submit his higher powers to God by the sin of pride.” (p. 70)
Both passages emphasize the way in which God often withdraws His grace from the prideful souls who resist Him, for the sake of inspiring humble repentance. While we cannot know with certainty whether God has worked in this way in the current crisis, we know from experience and observation that many souls have indeed been “converted” to Traditional Catholicism after becoming aware of how devoid of God’s grace the Vatican II revolution is.
Because pride is such a dominant component of what has led the Church to this point in the crisis, we should know that all those who seek to please God must proceed along the path of humbly seeking to follow what the Church has always taught.
Because pride is such a dominant component of what has led the Church to this point in the crisis, we should know that all those who seek to please God must proceed along the path of humbly seeking to follow what the Church has always taught. Perhaps in the first years after the Council we might have thought that humility demanded obedience to the shepherds who were implementing so many innovations. Over time, though, it has become obvious that those innovations have produced lethal fruits. As such, true humility today demands that we reject the unholy innovations of the Vatican II revolution and follow what the Church taught prior to the Council as faithfully as possible.
However, it seems that we must also be on guard against the temptation to think that we will be the ones to solve the crisis in the Church. Our fight for what the Church has always taught simply follows from our duty as Catholics; but it is not the case that our Catholic duty calls us to make decisions that only God can make. Once we decide that we should, for instance, declare the the occupant of the papacy to be an anti-pope and anathematize those who disagree, we have gone well beyond preserving what the Church has always taught and entered the realm of running ahead of God, imagining that He will follow. Absent reliable inspiration from God to take such steps, we risk trying to solve the crisis that was caused by pride with other acts of pride. What we need instead is humble submission to what the Church has always taught — which includes the rejection of all unholy innovations — and a trustful surrender to God’s loving providence for all else. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
Ping
Thank you for posting this, Ebb Tide.
V-II is when I left.
Breeding, teaching, evangelization will fix all of your concerns.
This is what the Holy Spirit is telling you.
Pull a Curly...pull out a bigger cigar!
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