What Will Be Left for Catholics After Francis?

I’ve spent most of my life defending and advancing the claims of the Catholic Church. In fact, I’ve written nine books doing just that. And my commitment goes back much further. In high school, I risked expulsion by defying, then publicly exposing, the modernist heresies of my libertine, quasi-Marxist religion teachers. I skipped our high school prom to go on retreat with the pious old gents of our Holy Name Society.

At Yale, I became a social leper by defending the Church’s moral teaching about sexuality at the hot beating heart of the burgeoning LGBT movement — telling anyone who would listen that it wasn’t Yuri Andropov’s Soviet Union that really threatened the West so much as these young conformist preppies wearing pink triangle buttons. (Sadly, my prophecy came true.) I published op-eds opposing the Sexual Revolution and defending the unborn.

In grad school I started an alternative to our heretical campus ministry, and through our talks and Bible studies we produced multiple converts and religious vocations. My dissertation was on Catholic author Walker Percy, and back in New York City I helped organize revived celebrations of the traditional Latin Mass.

So it’s with the heaviest of hearts, after years of black agonizing that often nudged me close to depression, that I say now … I simply don’t know what to say. I’m speechless. I don’t have any answers. I don’t even have a theory.

I haven’t come to doubt any tenets of the Catholic faith. I love my parish and pastor. But the character, behavior, and public statements of Pope Francis, and the allies he pushed into power, are more than a scandal or stumbling block. They’re a Berlin Wall, complete with snipers, who stop my thought dead in its tracks.

Dodging a Lightning Bolt

I will try to speak plainly and avoid inside baseball jargon, for the benefit of our non-Catholic readers, about the nature of the grave evil we face. We Catholics believe that when a pope invokes his full authority and teaches in the name of the Church, he has the same protection from heresy as the Council of Nicaea, which clarified the doctrine of the Trinity: that God would stop his mouth, or even his heart, before letting him teach error on such an occasion. See the amusing video I created to explain that doctrine some years ago.

Pope Francis hasn’t forced us to have any doubts on this front directly, since he hasn’t invoked that authority. Indeed, popes have only done so on some seven or eight occasions in 2000 years — most recently in 1958, on the fairly recondite question of the Virgin Mary’s earthly fate.

Pope Francis isn’t teaching “infallibly” that Catholics must back open borders, or prove themselves just as immoral as the abortionists with whom some of them so regularly align. He hasn’t taught “ex cathedra” that same-sex marriage is kosher, global government is best, or conservative populists like Donald Trump are wicked racists. Rather, Francis promotes such outrageous claims using his bully pulpit and vast resources — not his highest religious authority. Why use a nuclear weapon when you can get the job done using tiny, low-cost drones in the form of docile, cowardly bishops and tepid, closeted priests?

Technically, Catholics can still cling to the infallibility claim while defying this leftist pope on all such subjects. We can whistle in the dark while Francis staffs the highest positions in our Church with LGBT advocates and feminist advocates of women in the priesthood, and we still have the escape hatch that he hasn’t technically, officially, taught formal heresy. In theory the papacy could still be the divinely created office passed down from the apostles to safeguard the Church’s ancient teachings … even though in reality Francis has turned the office into the transmission belt for heresy, which hunts down and destroys bishops and religious orders that teach the truth.

Can We Escape Papal Stalinism?

Or do we have an escape hatch? Is there really a loophole after all? Because we’re not just bound by what the pope teaches infallibly. The official teaching of the Catholic Church, in a dogmatic constitution of the Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, demands much more of Catholics. Intended by the bishops who wrote it to try to tamp down the chaos afflicting the Church in the 1960s, this document actually imposes what I have dubbed “Papal Stalinism,” which is servile obedience to even the fallible opinions of any pope … including the globalist, open-borders, quasi-Marxist politics of the present pontiff, Francis. Read it and weep. (I did.)

In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.

Certainly, within official Catholic publications and institutions, it’s increasingly difficult to push back against the pope’s own interpretations, even when they mean standing the Bible and 2,000 years of binding precedent on their head. Our Church is by its nature authoritative, even authoritarian — something we Catholics in happier times used to brag about, in contrast to the chaotic disputations that have afflicted the Protestant world since 1517.

But now? We’re in the very same boat as Protestants embattled by woke, Soros-funded leaders —only worse. We can’t vote out heretical pastors, switch denominations with a clear conscience, or exert any earthly influence to nudge our Church off its wicked path. Indeed, this is the ironic reason that the pro-life movement has long been led and dominated by Catholics: Helpless to change what’s happening to our church, at the mercy of whichever dim-bulb, faithless lavender bishop the distant pope appoints, we put our energy into an arena where laymen aren’t condemned to learned helplessness. If we can’t help save our Church, we think, maybe we can save babies.

The pope is an absolute monarch, whom no one can judge or remove, which not even Church councils can intervene to correct. The papacy is as impervious to internal challenge or reform as the Romanov dynasty was in 1917.

Is it as doomed? I really can’t say. Certainly, Pope Francis has done his level best to make sure that the next pope will echo his views and keep on pushing the Church to the neopagan left, as The Stream reported this week. Francis has appointed an open LGBT activist and numerous other theological radicals to the College of Cardinals that will elect his replacement. A billion faithful Catholics have no say about any of this, and we wonder if God will act.

And what it will mean if He doesn’t.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.