While all the current excitement concerning the Filial Correction is certainly understandable (especially within the more traditionally believing Catholic community), such excitement must be tempered with an ample measure of reality.  Simply because dozens of scholars, clerics and interested parties have signed on to a document more formally titled "Correctio filialis de haeresibus propagatis" or, in English, "A Filial Correction Concerning the Propagation of Heresies," does not at all mean that it will have the effect desired by the signers and their supporters. 

One can hardly expect that Pope Francis will behave as if he has been whistled and pointed to by a referee in a basketball game, and will respond by sheepishly raising his hand to acknowledge his foul.  To the contrary, the Holy Father and his appointed referees have been whistle blowing and pointing at conservative and traditional Catholics, and, likewise, those who are in these camps are responding with the same kind of incredulity and outrage that we witness coming from the Vatican now, at the publication of the Filial Correction, or that we saw a year ago at the publication of the Dubia of the four cardinals.  The reality, then, is that the current theological gridlock that has resulted in horn honking and road rage on both sides of the Catholic highway isn't likely to be broken anytime soon, and it isn't going to be broken at all without ample anguish and pain and suffering for all.

What gets lost in all of this is the simple fact that the Catholic Church actually has a very simple mission, and that is to spread the gospel message of salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ at the cross to a world that is suffering and perishing in sin.  That's the "old" evangelization and it hasn't changed since the Lord Himself, at the end of Matthew's gospel, issued his final command before ascending into heaven and leaving the apostles to the task at hand:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted.  And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age. (Matthew 28: 16-20).

Descended from these original eleven disciples on this mountain top in Galilee are the bishops, archbishops, cardinals and curia of the modern Catholic Church.  In that uncanny way that it has, the Biblical account foretells the truth of the Church through all the ages and even into our own time.  They saw the risen Jesus and they worshiped him; but some doubted.  Standing in the midst and at the head of the disciples was Simon Peter.  As the first pope, and as the symbol of all popes to come, he foretold of both those who would stand as a rock for the faith, and those who would be consumed by doubt and deny the Lord, as he had done.  

Jesus speaks directly to this doubt when he tells them that, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me."  If those who plainly saw him resurrected from the dead and standing in their midst doubted him at this moment, how much more difficult would it be for those who would come after to accept his claim of all earthly and heavenly authority?  Some would, for as the Lord told Saint Thomas in John 20:29, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe."  Among these are the saints who have guided the Church through time, and who were so blessed as to believe and then see, and taste, and then participate in Christ in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist.  And, as they led the faithful to do likewise, so the Church flourished.

However, many would be the doubters, and it has been their tendency to translate their doubt of Christ's authority, and the denial of His Holy Presence, into a faith in their own selves and others of like mind.  Consciously or unconsciously, this kind of egocentrism opens the soul to the influence of the diabolical, and this leads to the acceptance and promotion of ungodly persons and things as godly.  In turn, this grave error is spread like poison -- like a disease -- to the doubting among the faithful, who, because of their doubt, have not been immunized in Christ's Body and Precious Blood through the power of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist.  When the soul is in doubt and doubt spreads, it becomes the disease of apostasy.  And the symptom of this disease is heresy and the acceptance of it as truth.  At the Vatican II Council, a particularly virulent strain of this disease called "modernism" was introduced into the Body of Christ, and, in the Church in our day, and especially during the reign of Pope Francis, this disease has become an epidemic.

While the modernist form of the disease is particularly devastating, the apostasy itself is nothing new and neither is one of the major causative factors that creates a breeding ground for it: the love of money.  A very early example of this is found in the story of Simon Magus in Acts:8: 9-24.  Simon, as you'll remember, is a self proclaimed great man, sorcerer and worker of religious miracles who amazes all in Samaria with feats that have the crowds proclaiming, "This man is that power of God which is called Great." (Acts 8: 10).  When Philip arrives and Simon witnesses the truly great power of God that is present in the name of Jesus Christ, and sees the signs and wonders so performed, he is baptized.  His ulterior motives come to the surface quickly when Peter and John arrive and begin to convey the power of the Holy Spirit.  This leads to the following exchange with Peter:   

Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money, saying, "Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit."  But Peter said to him, "Your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!  You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God.  Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.  For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity." (Acts 8: 18-23).

It is, of course, from Simon Magus that we get the word "simony," which refers to the buying and selling of spiritual gifts and privileges -- the sacraments.  In our day this has become such a part of our daily church life that we think little about it.  Our parish in Clearwater, and others here in the Diocese of St. Petersburg, and elsewhere I'm sure, have a set fee schedule for various sacramental services including weddings (matrimony), baptism and first communion, and others.  Our parish, Light of Christ, has a published list of "sacramental fees" that includes baptism for $100, first holy communion for $55, confirmation for $85, and weddings at $600 (it's an additional $200 for wedding music).  To be fair, no one is held accountable for these fees if they are unable to pay, but the idea of even listing such charges certainly smacks of obtaining the gift of God with money.  I once asked a priest in Michigan who conducted Mass with, shall we say, a free and liberal liturgical license, just what constituted a valid Mass.  His answer was, "Taking up the collection."  A joke? Perhaps.  But still...

Though it doesn't get the media attention that some other aspects of the crisis in the Church does -- such things as clergy sexual abuse, heretical teaching and liturgical abuses -- we should not be dissuaded for a moment that this crisis is not also about money.  Big money.  Half a century of shrinking parishes and contributions, a clergy abuse scandal involving billions of dollars in payouts to victims, and a vast holding of under utilized, under funded and expensive to maintain real estate, has created a cash flow crunch that has decimated savings accounts and investments, and this has brought, along with the other more publicized crises, a fiscal crisis of unprecedented proportions.  The Church of half a century ago that was busily about the task of tearing down its barns to build bigger ones now finds itself with empty and crumbling barns in which its financial chickens are coming home to roost. 

Into this growing financial breach steps the likes of George Soros, who brags that he is the Pope's boss, and who for years now has been buying and peddling his leftist influence within the Catholic Church for the purpose of making his agenda that of the Catholic hierarchy and Pope Francis -- which it very much is.  You can read all about it in my previous article "What Is Truth?", where you will also learn that Soros' control of the Democratic Party in the US has resulted in a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars to the United States Catholic Bishops in immigrant resettlement funding, which explains why the USCCB so adamantly opposes President Donald Trump when he is actually more supportive of such Catholic moral imperatives as ending abortion, and supporting traditional marriage, than they are.  Simony is alive and well on a vast scale at the national level of the Catholic Church, dwarfing the "nickle and diming" done to parishioners at the local level.           

And speaking of money, as the Filial Correction gets the lion's share of news coverage, the other news story that should not be overlooked is that of the Vatican's former auditor general, Libero Milone, who reports that he was kept away from reporting the financial corruption he saw in the Vatican to the pope.  The following quote is from a September 26 article in Church Militant:

Milone told reporters Saturday that he'd been stymied in performing his role as AG by having the Holy Father isolated from him since April 2016. "I think the pope is a great person, and he began with the best intentions," said Milone. "But I'm afraid he was blocked by the old guard that's still wholly there, which felt threatened when it understood that I could relate to the pope and to [Cdl. Pietro] Parolin what I had seen in the accounts."

Is it really lost on anyone that this "old guard" that is "still wholly there" is precisely that element of the Curia that Jorge Bergoglio was sent to clear out, lock stock and barrel, when he was selected as pope back in 2013?  Wouldn't one think that four and a half years into his papacy he would have had the time to clean up this mess, had he really wanted to?  And, for that matter, wouldn't one think that the AG who reported directly to him might have been summoned directly by him some time within a year and a half, especially if he was being kept from reporting by this very same "old guard"?  And don't these questions pose the old Nixonian question, "What did the pope know and when did he know it?"  The globalist simony hinted at in these questions, and the effort extended to keep the details forever under wraps behind them, speaks of a very small tip protruding from what is surely a very large and dirty iceberg.   

Just who is Jorge Bergoglio/Pope Francis?  That would seem to be a very interesting question at this point, and the answer, at least in part, is available in a current news story that also shouldn't be overshadowed by all the attention the Filial Correction is getting.  Christopher Ferrara, a signatory to said Correction, provides a revealing look into the mind and motivations of Jorge Bergoglio in a review of a column in Italian by noted Vatican observer Antonio Socci titled, "What He Did He Wanted to Do as 'Pope Jesus II', the Demolitionist".  Ferrara's article is called, "Socci on Bergoglio as 'Jesus II'".  In it, Ferrara quotes Socci that we find in Jorge Bergoglio a man of extreme egocentrism, driven by a desire to  "...'re-found' the Church and almost present himself precisely as 'Pope Jesus II'". Pope Jesus II refers to comments that Francis made in a recently released book length interview with Dominque Wilton in which:

Bergoglio jokes that he chose the papal name Francis not as an act of superbia but rather of humility, because then "he would have been able to call himself 'Jesus II'"—a reference to the common description of Saint Francis of Assisi as an alter Christus, "another Christ."

Socci observes that the pope is in the process of changing the Church of Christ entrusted with the above stated mission of saving souls into "... a humanitarian agency which professes an entirely social and political religion, centered on mass immigration as the Summum Bonum, ecological catastrophism and an uncritical embrace of Islam."  Socci remarks that Francis is attempting to destroy the very Church itself (if it were possible) through "... an irreversible transformation of Christianity into atheistic humanism, with the aid of Christians themselves, guided by a concept of charity that will have nothing to do with the Gospel."

Ferrara continues:

And now—here is Socci’s most startling observation—Bergoglio seems intent on finding a way to eliminate or at least decommission the Roman Curia and even the College of Cardinals, both deemed non-essential by his "right-hand man," Archbishop ("the art of kissing") "Tucho" Fernandez, whom Bergoglio made a titular archbishop of a titular see as one of his first acts. This would leave the way open, in "exceptional situations," for Bergoglio to "name his own successor… rendering his revolution truly 'irreversible.'"  Which possibility, believe it or not, Bergoglio "is having studied on the pages of canon law."

This all adds up to a situation in which the bigger picture is seen as much darker and more ominous than anything addressed in "A Filial Correction Concerning the Propagation of Heresies".  If we wish to know the motivation behind the propagation of these heresies, and the general turning away from traditional Catholic practice and belief -- the propagation of the Gospel, the protection of unborn life, the sanctity of marriage, the traditional family structured society, and the vibrant parish community -- we need only follow the money trail.  It leads to a simony filtering down to the local level from national and global Church bodies that have sold the very soul of Christ's Church to the leftist regime of a globalist New World Order.  They have done so to sustain themselves and their illusions in a failing attempt to prop up the crumbling facade of their modernist architecture; quarter filled sanctuaries in which sad and aging congregations drone the uninspired and tepid music of an imagined new Church Age that never materialized. 

The impending death of the traditional Catholic Church has now become so obvious to so many that the traditional source of Church revenues -- the traditional Catholic family -- has become virtually extinct.  Or, more accurately, now stuffs the coffers of the Evangelical Church down the street with the dollars the Catholic Church once took for granted.  Traditional and believing Catholics are, in increasing numbers, no longer buying the propaganda of the brave new world church of Pope Francis that is extolled from the ambo in place of the Gospel of Christ and, so, many drift away.  A faithful remnant find themselves on their knees in front of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, begging for divine deliverance from all of this modernist error, and it is to them Pope Francis points as he proclaims, "Fundamentalists! They are fundamentalists! They are the problem! They have done this!"  And when the leaders of this shocked and offended minority draft a letter accusing the pope of propagating the heresies that have long been visible for all to see, it is they who say among themselves, "There! That will do it!  That will show him!"

This is how deeply the modernist disease of doubt and unbelief has eroded the Church.  This is how the Church looks after a century of the leprosy of modernist error has eaten at the flesh of her once lovely and holy face.  This is what happens when "theologians" put their trust in science and remove it from God.  This is what  happens when Catholic scholars and thinkers pervert the Catholic social teaching of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI into the ungodly socialism of Marx and Engels instead of crediting Christian peoples with the wisdom, inspired in and by Christ, to govern themselves in peace and freedom.  True Catholic social teaching transforms the old world order; it does not dress the Church of Christ in brown shirts, and march it in hobnailed boots, down the cobblestone streets of a new world order shouting, "Heil Soros!"  This is the end result of a Church hierarchy infiltrated and under the control of Freemasons, and it has led to a pope who is enlightened by the illuminati of Lucifer rather than illuminated in the Light of Christ.

Am I saying that Pope Francis is the anti-Christ?  I don't think so.  However, we have gained from Antonio Socci a vision of a deranged and very sick man --  a man in whom the disease of doubt has taken hold and infected him with an advanced and severe case of apostasy: a case so severe he imagines himself Jesus II.  And if this man is truly pursuing how to hand pick his own successor, then we must be concerned that we are indeed this close to the advent of the long anticipated son of perdition.  Whether this is evil or madness is not for us to judge.  But it is surely to our own benefit, as well as the pope's and the whole world's, to pray for him and his deliverance unceasingly.  Pray that God's will be done in him and for him.

As for the Filial Correction, don't get me wrong.  While I harbor no illusions that it will be answered or addressed in any meaningful way, it is surely useful in identifying where one stands, and it is a public statement that recognizes the heresies of Pope Francis for what they are.  I have read it.  It is intelligent, accurate and compassionate to the Holy Father, which I truly wish to be.  Sign me up.

As for the state of the Church, we know that the gates of hell will not prevail against her because that is the Lord's promise in Matthew 16:18.  It appears increasingly that this will be impossible without His divine and direct intervention as promised in Revelation 19.  And so the time has come to pray as Saint Paul taught us in 1 Corinthians 16:22:

Maranatha!  Come Lord Jesus!

All Biblical quotes from The Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1965, 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.