The Holy See has become a playground for secular causes and worldly pursuits, keeping Catholicism on a decline that started with the implementation of the liturgical reforms of the Vatican II Council in 1969 and created the new order of the Mass. Many of the bells and smells of the traditional Latin Mass disappeared before the churchgoers, replaced by a Protestantized liturgy and architecture that diminished the physical beauty and majesty of the church. Latin gave way to the vernacular. Priests turned their backs on the crucified Christ to hoist chalices and patens before the congregants. Disposal of the kneeling rails brought priests off the altar and communicants to their feet to receive and manhandle Communion with unclean hands. The solemnity and sanctity of the Gregorian chants gave way to church choirs with modernist hymns and ensembles of drums and guitars that often turned the celebration of Christ into an evangelical hootenanny.

The current pontiff, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who inaugurated the name Francis, has upended liturgy and tradition to bring the struggling Vatican II reforms across the finish line. He has hastened the abolition of the Latin Mass and berated its practitioners in the United States as a “strong reactionary element.”  That rhetoric is catnip to those intent upon targeting religious conservativism, with the FBI reporting that some enclaves of the ancient liturgy harbored anti-Semitic members of the “hard-right nationalist movement.”

Aligning his pontificate with the globalist doctrine, Francis has established the new Synodal Church, giving it an ecumenical shape corresponding with the earthly fixations of climate activism, LGBTQ causes, replacement migration, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This secular idolatry has mocked God’s work and twisted church teachings on morality. Those sitting in the pews can expect overbearing sermons on the evils of fossil fuels, excessive meat consumption, and pleas for almsgiving supporting border immigration policies eliminating national cultures.

Throughout his papacy, Francis has guided the advancement of a fellow Argentinian cleric, longtime ghost writer and theologian Victor Manuel Fernandez. While archbishop, Fernandez penned a controversial chapter within Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love, 2016), a papal exhortation that chipped away at the sanctity of marriage by allowing Communion to divorced and remarried couples without an annulment. Under Francis’s coaching, Fernandez was put on a ten-year fast track from priest to bishop to cardinal.

In 2023, Fernandez received his red hat despite Francis’s foreknowledge of several blasphemous books and articles that brought about a Vatican internal investigation, reiterating a Francis stratagem favoring liberalism and loyalty over adherence to church tradition in ascending the Vatican hierarchy. Appointed as Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith, Fernandez holds the ultimate Vatican position of theological power and influence viewed as a steppingstone for future popes.

Francis and Fernandez are the sophists of the Bergoglian papacy, issuing doctrinal declarations that read like anagrams. The 2023 Christmastime release of Fiduccia Supplecans (Supplicating Trust), penned by Fernandez on behalf of Francis, kicked open the door to the consecration of same-sex couples by dressing up a liturgical blessing as a pastoral act and disregarding the proscribed acts practiced in such relationships.

This magisterial sleight of hand, creating moral ambiguity through distinctions with a difference, has provoked a near-schismatic reaction from prominent cardinals and bishop’s conferences around the world. Curious Vatican journalists began pulling a loose thread on Fernandez’s scarlet cossack, exposing a penchant for soft porn theology (here and here and here) and raising concerns of his influence upon other papal scripts and exhortations, such as Evangelii Gaudium (Joy of the Gospel, 2013), envisioning an outward-looking church holding to latter-day realities rather than orthodoxy by taking on the “smell of the sheep,” Laudato Si (Praised Be, 2015), force-feeding climate activism to Catholics by aligning it with church morality, and Traditionis Custodes (Guardians of Tradition, 2021), opening a campaign against the 1500-year-old Latin Mass by reversing the relaxed policies of his predecessors, Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The influence of Fernandez can be seen throughout these proclamations by their intention to open the windows of the church to the world.

Unholy alliances with atheist organizations and anti-Catholic causes characterize the Francis brand. In preparation for his only visit to the United States in 2015, ideologues bankrolled by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation shuttled to the Vatican, meeting with papal secretaries to frame the trip itinerary. Their Machiavellian intentions were to foment a revolution against American bishops who stood in opposition to LBGTQ and pro-abortion causes.

Francis is relentless in his ad hominem arguments berating American Catholic fundamentalists for their backwardness, projecting onto them his own negligence in safeguarding the faith. He has slowly challenged the conservative domination of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops by appointing a conga line of modernists and apologists to the College of Cardinals: Blasé Cupich of Chicago, Wilton Gregory of Washington, Joseph Tobin of Newark, Robert McElroy of San Diego, and Kevin Farrell, elevated to the Dicastery for the Faith, the Family, and Laity in the Vatican.

Brandishing his credentials as the Peronist Pope, Francis views American Catholics with suspicion while mollycoddling despotic regimes that persecute the faithful. Through a heretical foreign policy, he is setting the stage to send Catholicism back to the catacombs by promoting détente with apostates that torment hundreds of millions of Catholics over the practice of their religion.

In 2018, Francis signed a secret agreement with Xi Jinping that assured consultation with the government before the papal appointment of Chinese bishops. Two months after the agreement was struck, Jinping backstabbed Francis by arresting Vatican-appointed clerics and installing their own bishops without papal approval, thus usurping the pope’s divine authority to appoint the successors of the apostles of the church. Chinese priests and bishops are now forced to split their loyalties between an antichrist and the Almighty. In the face of Vatican reticence, churches are being shut down and the Bible rewritten.  Clerics are being shipped off to indoctrination camps and Catholic houses of worship stripped of deities to make room for portraits of Jinping and Mao Zedong.

God has not been a passive observer of this papacy.

On February 13, 2013, two separate lightning bolts struck the pinnacle on the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. This followed the extraordinary event of Pope Benedict’s unanticipated and shocking resignation from the papacy, bringing about the convention of cardinals and the election of Pope Francis.

On September 18, 2018, Francis presented an apostolic constitution that revealed his plan to replace the old church with the new Synod version. The next day it was observed that the halo surrounding the head on a sculpture of St. Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ and first pope of the church, located on the façade of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary in San Nicolas, Argentina, had inexplicably disappeared. The sanctuary is famous for its recent Marian apparitions in the 1980s to the visionary Gladys Quiroga de Motta, wherein more than 800 messages repeated the End Times prophecies by the Virgin Mary given at Lourdes, France, Fatima, Portugal, Garabandal, Spain, and Akita, Japan.

On December 17, 2023, on Francis’s 87th birthday and the day he told Fernandez to release his declaration on same-sex blessings, lightning struck the same St. Peter’s statue. The bolt avoided the three lightning rods spread across the roof of the sanctuary, instead homing in on the statue tucked into an alcove near the sanctuary entrance. The strike pulverized the two keys symbolizing the spiritual authority of the pope and the hand that held them, leaving the rest of the sculpture unscathed.

From these events, one may argue coincidence or supernatural events, but there is a spiritual message of a fretful God warning a pontiff drawn to politics over piety and humanity over divinity, a Vicar of Christ who is undermining the teachings of the church by erasing the moral differences between an apostolic and an apostatic papacy.

Image: Malacañang Photo Bureau