[Originally posted in the Immaculate Conception Church bulletin on September 29th, 2013]

As Pope Saint Pius X warned in 1907, the Modernists intend to “reform” the Catholic Church by bringing her teachings into line with modern man’s current idea of God. They insist that the Church will die if she and her teachings do not evolve with the modern world, but Saint Pius X said rather that their plan meant death for the Church and the Catholic Faith. In 1960 John XXIII called a council precisely to reform the Church by “aggiornamento” (literally, updating) and the key idea was to make the Church “relevant” to the modern world. Under the guise of this so-called “pastoral” council, Vatican II, a revolution swept over the Church. It was a revolution so radical and so devastating that within just the 15 years of Paul VI (1963-1978), the Church underwent a complete transformation.

With the coming of Francis, the revolution has reached a new level. He told the millions of people gathered for his liturgical parties at World Youth Day that he intended to make a “mess” in the Church. His folksy style draws praise from “modern man,” but his message is that atheists can be saved by doing good and that the Church must stop “obsessing” over abortion, homosexual marriage and contraception and must rather focus on her mission to the poor. This is textbook Modernism. He even warns that the Church must find his “new balance” or “even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to collapse like a house of cards.”

Francis recently received at the Vatican the priest Gustavo Gutierrez, the man known as the Father of Liberation Theology, a form of “process” or evolutionary theology with Marxist undertones and overtones. This event highlighted the disorder in the Vatican. Reports claim that the Gutierrez visit had the recently appointed head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, at odds with the newly-appointed Secretary of State, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani. Since Vatican II, the conflicts in the Vatican resemble more and more a soap opera, more tragedy than comedy.

Predictably, the conservative Modernists now are rushing to put a Catholic “spin” on Francis’ words but even they will eventually weary of this futile exercise. They must admit that there is something seriously wrong when Catholics have to search and stretch for a Catholic interpretation of Francis’ careless and casual pronouncements. Some say that he is creating a new image for the papacy, but he is actually creating a new concept of the papacy. The fact is that now he has no more regard or respect for the real office of the papacy than he did when he was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. And the more he manifests his disdain and contempt for the papacy, the less and less he will resemble a Catholic pope. Of course, as Francis furthers his agenda of making a mess of the Church and the chaos on the Vatican intensifies, the modern world will extol him as the perfect pope, a man who understands and accepts modern man as he is, and a pope who is understood and accepted by modern man as he is – truly a modern man of the modern world. But the Church has long ago learned that there is much to fear from the Man of the World who claims the place of Vicar of Christ on earth.