“The Church has faced crises worse than this one before.” True—or false?
Of several popes who flirted with heresy, only two seem to have crossed a line: Honorius and John XXII. Honorius made one error in regard to Christology; he did so in a letter to a bishop. And for this he was posthumously anathematized and excommunicated as a heretic by an ecumenical council and by several of his successors in the papacy. John XXII preached a false position about the beatific vision in a series of sermons—an error that was immediately attacked by theologians of his day, some of whom were thrown into prison as rebels. John retracted his error on his deathbed; his successor Benedict XII promptly issued a bull dogmatically defining the contrary position. Could anyone in his right mind dream of comparing the versatile disaster of the Francis papacy to either Honorius or John XXII? It’s like comparing Stalin to mischievous Boy Scouts.
“Well, at least there have been other crises comparable to this one.”
Without a doubt, the Arian crisis was exceedingly bad: for several decades, only a handful out of the hundreds of bishops of nascent Christendom were orthodox, concerning the very point that defines Christianity! Yet today, the vast majority of the world’s thousands of bishops no longer maintain major elements of Catholic tradition; fail to preach the Ten Commandments, and even contradict them (think of Amoris Laetitia); abandon the defense of consistency between the universal ordinary Magisterium and the papal Magisterium (think of the death penalty issue); renounce the proclamation of Christ as the Son of God and the only Savior of mankind (think of the direction taken by ecumenism and interreligious dialogue: Assisi, Pachamama, Abu Dhabi). This is a collective madness, a wickedness in high places never before seen on such a scale. It’s not just the Emperor who has no clothes on; it’s the entire court—all his officials, too, in a sort of government of gymnosophists.
The current situation combines every earlier heresy. Arianism of varying shades is back in business; we see paganism, polytheism, and pantheism returning. Paul VI had already allowed Protestantism, together with Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic sentimentalism, to invade the sanctuaries of our churches, after first ensuring their evacuation in a global frenzy of iconoclasm; since then, these trends have seeped into every other area of the Church. Erastianism or the subordination of the Church to the secular State is assumed now as an unavoidable and unchallengeable norm, something we will see plenty more of as Western nations continue to go in a hyperprogressivist direction—or as they course-correct by way of neopagan right-wing parties that will certainly have no affection for a religious body that promoted immigration, feminism, and LGBTQ tolerance, among other social blights.
What we are looking at is nothing less than “the synthesis of all heresies”—Modernism—on full display. We are living in the worst, by far the worst, crisis the Church has ever seen, in twenty centuries of history.
Over the years I’ve read a lot of books on Church history as well as on modernity, but the single best book on Church history with an emphasis on the modern age is Henry Sire’s Phoenix from the Ashes (published by Angelico Press). Sire takes the approach of examining Church history through the perspective of its moments of crisis. How did the Church react when its fundamental dogmas or structures or practices were rejected? We need to take a close look at how the immune system of the Body of Christ defends itself against deadly viruses, and what happens when the health of the body is weaker than it should be. Indeed, what would happen if the body were to develop an autoimmune condition and start attacking itself?