[Catholic Caucus] The Pope of What?

One Peter Five ^ | April 30, 2026 | Raymond Kowalski

[ebb tide]

[Catholic Caucus] The Pope of What?

There is no doubt in my mind that Leo is the true and valid pope. The question in my mind is, “the pope of what?”

“He is the pope of the Catholic Church,” you might say. Your answer assumes that the Church of Rome is the Holy Catholic Church that was founded by Jesus Christ. You believe that. But you do not — cannot— know that.

There is a difference between knowing and believing. I define “knowing” as when you learn something that is consistently verifiable and universally accepted. “Belief” is a conclusion that you reach about something that is debatable, based on the opinions and credible testimony of others and your own worldview. Your conclusion — your belief— could change.

What prevents something that is believed from being something that is known? Doubt. Uncertainty. The feeling that comes over a sincere seeker of truth that something is wrong; that some of the available evidence contradicts the common understanding about some particular thing; that perhaps proponents of a particular conclusion have a hidden agenda.

I do not doubt that Leo is pope. What I question is whether the institution that he heads, that occupies the Vatican, that is acknowledged by the whole world, is the authentic Catholic Church. I am not saying that it is not the Catholic Church. I am saying that the words and actions of popes since 1963 have caused the nature of the institutional Catholic Church to become debatable.

This assessment is my own, not my agreement with someone else’s analysis. I know my Faith. And I know when something is amiss. I know when the words of popes and events concerning the Church are not what I would have expected, based on my own knowledge and experience. I have been alive and a member of the Catholic Church for all of it.

Others intuit this as well. They recognize, but resist. Which is to say, they believe that the Church of Rome is the Catholic Church, but they resist its manifold irregularities over the past sixty years.

The Catholic Church is indefectible.  I completely agree.  But if I have doubts about the Church of Rome, then where is the indefectible Catholic Church? My answer is, it subsists in the Church of Rome for yet a while longer. After the Ecclesial Assembly in October, 2028, we might have to look elsewhere, yet not outside the Catholic Church.

In these pages on May 9, 2019 (“If You Had All the Time in the World, How Would You Attack the Church?”), I suggested that the way to defeat the Church is to become the Church. Do it slowly, almost imperceptibly, over decades so as not to raise alarm. Tap into the culture and mores of the times. Diminish the Mass, the Eucharist and the priesthood. Allow the usus antiquior to attract and corral the outliers and, in the end, flush them out as “schismatics.”

In a radio broadcast in 1947, venerable Fulton Sheen predicted that Satan would replace the Church with what he called, “the ape of the Church,” possessing all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but emptied of its Divine content. Quite clearly, that is where the Church of Rome is headed in just over two years unless something happens to prevent it.

Fulton Sheen did not say where the indefectible Catholic Church would be found after it had been supplanted by the counterfeit church.  Perhaps Father Joseph Ratzinger gave us a hint in his own 1969 radio broadcast:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and have to start afresh, more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity….But when the trial of this sifting has passed, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.

Spare, O Lord, your people from a sifting such as this.

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TOPICS: Catholic; History; Theology
KEYWORDS: ah8ebby; frankenchurch; synodalchurch; vcii

[ebb tide]

I suggested that the way to defeat the Church is to become the Church. Do it slowly, almost imperceptibly, over decades so as not to raise alarm. Tap into the culture and mores of the times. Diminish the Mass, the Eucharist and the priesthood. Allow the usus antiquior to attract and corral the outliers and, in the end, flush them out as “schismatics.”

[ebb tide]

Ping

[Jeff Chandler]

Tap into the culture and mores of the times

[Claud]

Allow the usus antiquior to attract and corral the outliers and, in the end, flush them out as “schismatics.”

If that was the plan, it has gone badly. Every day the Latin Mass is burrowing deeper into mainstream Catholicism. Francis's draconian measures were not appreciated by anyone except a few stubborn liberals clinging to a dying phantasm.

The biological solution is working as we all knew it would.

[econjack]

Anyone ever notice that a gov’t shutdown doesn’t decrease spending?

[BillT]

The Catholic church was started by Constantine around 300 BC