Appearance and Reality: The Triumph is on the Horizon

By Charlie Johnston

The feud between Pope Leo and President Trump is dominating a lot of Catholic headlines these days. Many are saying that the Pope has gone completely political and is outside of any legitimate authority he has. Others argue that faithful Catholics must do whatever the Pope says (God forbid he ever starts releasing his March Madness picks!). While I have partial sympathy with many points made, my take is completely different from any I have yet seen. I think all the hubbub is one of many signs that we have entered the Illumination of Conscience and are approaching the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart.

When God moves to cure a long-standing abuse, He usually allows the abuse to degenerate into an absurd parody of itself. He doesn’t have to do much to let it happen. Once a willful person obstinately insists that an absurdity is truth, it takes an ever-cascading flood of absurdities to prop it up. If the person has any humility, he ultimately acknowledges the error and moves on. If he is unconquerably vain, he continues positing greater absurdities to prop it up until even the most childish see that, “the emperor has no clothes.”

Despite the political bent, I have not given up on Pope Leo just yet. On theology and doctrine, if he hasn’t been great yet, he has been pretty good. At least, pretty clear. On uniting the faith, he has been very cautiously and deliberately moving towards real unity. He has dramatically toned down the Curia’s jihad against the Latin Mass. I know advocates of SSPX are irate that the Pope has not allowed them to do whatever they want whenever they want to but those advocates would be well advised to back off the brinksmanship when Pope Leo, to his credit, does not seem eager to target any faction of authentic faith within the Church for attack. It would probably surprise some that I have much sympathy for SSPX. its seeming insistence that it should be the final arbiter of faith and morals cuts a lot of ground out from under it, though. If it does start consecrating its own Bishops this summer, as it has threatened to, while I will still have affection for some of its members, I will have no more regard for the movement, itself. Pope Leo has been pretty clear he wants to work with them to regularize their status. If their only response to this outreach is to prod, poke, and defy the Pope reaching out to them, whatever happens from that point will be on them.

Pope Francis was maddening because he was frequently ambiguous about matters of doctrine – for which he was responsible to man and God – and delighted in pretending that he was the world’s chief politician, a role for which he had no authority or responsibility. He was also an ill-tempered man who could not disagree with anyone inside the Church in good faith: he had to target them for extinction.

Pope Leo does not seem to hate any groups in the Church who disagree with him and he is largely (if slowly) walking back the doctrinal ambiguity with which Francis made such a mess. But Leo has taken the political pretensions to a Monty Pythonesque level of absurdity – and it often seems he thinks that is his prime role. And he does it with all the refinement, prudence, and insight of a Chicago precinct captain.

When Pope Leo said that God does not hear the prayers of those who make war, the best response was this piece from the Babylon Bee, which humorously explained that could be true as long as you don’t count Moses, David, Joshua, Elijah, Saul, Gideon, Samson, or anyone else in the Bible. It was so comically contrary to plain Church history that it was embarrassing. A few weeks later, as a feud between American President Donald Trump and Pope Leo ramped up, Leo pointedly noted that God blesses the peacemakers in a politically pregnant speech. It truly made me wonder if the Pope has such a bad case of TDS that it has unhinged his reason. Trump has forged more permanent peace agreements in seemingly intractable wars around the world in his first year and a half than the Vatican has in two generations. Even worse, the feud escalated after Pope Leo consulted with David Axelrod, a prominent strategist for Barack Obama and the Democrats. The whole thing has made the Church look like the world’s most complex progressive NGO…and is pitifully absurd.

Pope Leo’s other big political emphases are for man-made climate change and forcing the United States to accept all illegal immigration. Never mind that the theory of man-made climate change collapses under the most cursory scientific standards, which increasingly are no longer being suppressed. Man-made climate change posits man as the titan, the architect or, at least, engineer, of the climate. In God’s economy, man is actually called only to be custodian for the nature that God bequeathed him. In this case. Pope Leo has aligned himself (unwittingly, I think) with the “man is his own god” camp.

Much has been made of Leo’s silence or muffled response to serious Muslim atrocities against Christians and against dissidents among their own people. I can’t help but wonder how much of this is a discrete issue and how much is just part of his general attitude that whatever the problem is, never blame the perpetrators; just dump it on America to fix.

Again, I think Pope Leo is actually a better man than he seems or is being given credit for right now. But his feckless political immaturity is bringing disrepute on the Catholic Church – and for something that he lacks both responsibility for and authority over.  The hierarchy of the Church right now appears to be the chief apologist for and enabler of monstrously murderous regimes and actual evil throughout the world. That is a deep scandal within the Church and has opened up old fissures between Catholics – the original Christians – and the rest of Christianity. It bothers me a lot when I read certain anti-Catholic Protestant triumphalists crowing on social media about how the Catholic Church is the source of so much evil in the modern world, using things Pope Leo has said and done – and things he has remained silent on, as supporting evidence. (“I have greatly sinned – in what I have done and in what I have failed to do” – from the Confiteor, said at almost every Mass).

If Donald Trump fully succeeds in bringing actual peace to the Middle East, shifting the burden of defending Western Civilization away from the degenerating European continent to the greater American continents, and enforcing predictable and just rules of migration and citizenship through his policies of decisive, strong action it will be a deep humiliation and repudiation for the entire modernist, relativist faction of the hierarchy – led politically by Pope Leo. If the Trump Derangement Syndrome is transient in Pope Leo, he will see how deadly damaging the fixation on politics and all transient things are for a hierarch, repent, focus on the saving power of Christ, and set things right. He will leave politics to secular leaders, science to laymen, economics to the same, and reserve to himself the proper role of faith and morals. If the TDS is stronger than that, he will be an object lesson to whoever the next Pope will be. No one of good faith and good will wants to be seen as the primary enabler of and apologist for violent evil in the world. But the “hobby” our Pope and many hierarchs have chosen under false color of authority is doing exactly that.

Most see craziness and chaos surrounding us. I see God holding each of us in the docket, giving account of ourselves, that we may know the state of our souls. This is not for our destruction, but for our rehabilitation and reclamation.

It is not just in the hierarchy. I see prominent Catholic commentators I have respected throwing the term, “Magisterial teaching,” around like Democrats throw the term, “Our Democracy,” around – just as a talking point to prop up their latest argument with no serious understanding of what the term means. When you stop using terms for what they actually mean – which is a conduit to finding what is true – and start throwing them up as mere props to give your latest crackpot or hysterical argument a false intellectual, philosophical, and theological veneer, you have lost the narrative entirely.

Too many formerly serious Christians have decided that the proper way to show their piety is to act as God’s enforcers, seeking restlessly for those who must be cast into outer darkness to purify the faith. Much of the burgeoning antisemitism among Catholics (particularly, to my horror, traditional Catholics) is justified by the fact that the Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, so they are lost. Never mind St. Paul’s teaching on God’s plan with the Jews, stated extensively in Romans. The new super-Christians know better than the Apostle to the Gentiles (or so they think). Modernists in the Curia work to cast out all who subscribe to the Latin Mass. Certain Latin Mass supremacists insist that it is the ONLY valid form of Mass – and would cast out any who worship under the Novus Ordo. We have gotten very close to a theological war of all against all.

Sheesh! I lived that for much of my childhood and early youth – and was disgusted by it then. While much of my extended family followed a particular Pentecostal path, some relatives subscribed to other denominations. What so many had in common was that they insisted that only followers of their particular flavor of faith could get to heaven. Their escape clause, when someone they loved of another denomination died, was to assert that he converted in his last breath. My paternal grandfather was one of the best men I have ever known. He was incredibly strong but also gentle and always soothing to those suffering. Alas, he was a Methodist, so I overheard some of my Pentecostal relatives use the “converted in his last breath” dodge. Unexpectedly, it enraged me. I took a big branch and beat the snot out of a tree for about 10 minutes to defray my fury. Papa Johnston was, literally, the best man I had ever known – kind, strong, fearless, brave and true. If it was true that he was damned unless he said the right words, despite living such a noble life and being a comfort to all who were afflicted when he came to them, then religion was just a fixed game and nothing we actually did meant anything. I decided that if I was going to hell, it would be for what I believed – not for pretending to believe what I did not. I broke, internally, with my family’s religion then. I was 17 at the time. I was Christian, but wandered searching without a real home until I became Catholic 18 years later.

I began haunting the library, determined to find the origin of every Christian denomination. I discovered that my family’s denomination was founded in the mid-1800’s in the Carolinas. Bad news for Sts. Peter and Paul, I wryly thought, who could not get into heaven because they could not have been part of a denomination that would not even exist for another 1,800 years after they died. I did find the origin of all the major Christian faiths. It actually was my first real tickle about Catholicism. I found, to my surprise, that the Catholic Church was the only faith with a legitimate historical claim to having been founded by Christ, while fundamentally maintaining unity and liturgy of worship through the ages. It was not enough to make me convert then (in those days fundamentalist Protestants were always death on the Catholic Church). While my parents had many Catholic friends, I had imbibed the cultural animus enough that it prevented me from seriously considering it. But the historical reality was definitely food for thought.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my Dad also hated that sort of triumphalism. After I had converted, during one visit my Dad asked me sharply if I thought only Catholics would go to heaven. I told him that I thought the Catholic Church held the fullness of the Deposit of Faith in trust until Christ comes again. In heaven, we would know all truth. So, if this was true, we would all be Catholic in heaven. But it is our response to Christ (the good) that works out our salvation – so I also thought that many of those heavenly Catholics would have been Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and even atheists while they walked this earth. It was not the answer Dad was expecting. He thought for a bit, then looked at me and grinned and simply said, “Good answer.”

People would do well to look at how Christ dealt with people when He was physically walking among us. He invited all to Himself, Jews, pagans, pantheists…ALL to Himself. If you were of good will, He had compassion on you – and invited you, despite your sins and your failings. The only people He consistently and, sometimes bitterly, denounced were those of His time who had set themselves up as God’s enforcers. You would think the religious scolds of modern times, whatever their flavor, would take warning from that. But such are the perils of vanity, fear, and the need for control. An ever growing cohort of the pious take on the role of enforcer and think themselves righteous for it. I see the Pharisee of Luke 18:11 saying, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men—swindlers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.” Jesus told this story in condemnation of that Pharisee, not in praise of Him.

Around the turn of the millennium, I was given to know that, for over a century prior, the devil’s most fruitful power was that of “seduction,” to persuade men that good was actually evil and that evil was actually good. In the runup to the Storm, the satan’s greatest power would be terror – but that would be mercifully brief. Once we started coming out of the Storm, the satan’s greatest power would be “deception,” for evil to actively mimic what was objectively good. In many ways, that was the most terrifying to me, for it was designed to ensnare as many of the pious as possible through leveraging their flaws, vanity and fears against them. They would sin grievously, all the while thinking it to be righteousness. It makes me ill to watch it unfold in real time.

There was a VERY good aspect to this, though. It would also be a sign that we were coming out of the Storm. God would use this to ultimately show people the real state of their souls. As humiliating as it would ultimately be for those who took on the role of God’s enforcers, it would lead to real humility and repentance for most of them. Tragically, there are some so vested in their own dreams of supremacy, that when they find that God is not as they thought, they will not serve a God who would do things in a way different from their imaginings. Many of us have become Job’s “pious” friends – who so angered God with their defense of Him that He would not hear their prayers. When God reveals Himself, may all these have the humility to go to Job and ask for prayers, that they might be brought back into the fold.

Before you get too excited at the idea that the Storm is coming to a close remember that in thriller novels, 80% of the action occurs in the last 15% of the book. We have a whole lot of shaking yet ahead of us.

We are literally in the midst of the Illumination of Conscience, even though it is not unfolding in the literal way that scolds insist it must. That is not because it is not literally true. It is because things happen in a very different way from the perspective of eternity than they do in temporal time. Any time you attempt to impose the realities of eternity in mere temporal terms, you are headed for a ditch. How many times did Old Testament prophecies and those of Jesus unfold as they were told, but in ways no one expected? God loves to separate the sheep, who walk with the eyes of faith, from the goats, who are mere legalists.

So I say we are in the midst of the Illumination, with the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart and the beginning of the Era of Peace visibly on the horizon. The Triumph will happen, but your actions will help determine when it will happen. It could be just a few years ahead – or several decades away. Here are two specific things you should do to move us closer to the Triumph, rather than to delay it:

• Defend the faith with vigor, but treat all people of good will as brothers – or at least as neighbors. You are not God’s enforcer, nor are you called to be. Remember the lawyer from Luke 10 who, determined to justify his inhospitable attitude, demanded that Jesus tell him who qualifies as his neighbor. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, making clear that the proper question was not, “Who is my neighbor?” but was “Who will I be neighbor to.”
• No faith tradition is a “golden ticket” to heaven. Rather, each is like a toolbox with which you work out your salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). The truer, more refined your faith tradition, the better tools you have to do just that. If you squander the wonderful tools your faith gives you, you will be an object of scorn and derision to the heavenly host. If you use the most defective tools to do the good that you can, you will be celebrated in heaven. Remember that Tiger Woods in his prime, with a set of garage sale golf clubs, would decimate most men despite the elegant refinement of their clubs. It is what you do with the tools at your disposal that is dispositive, not what brand those tools are. I pray that I never squander the most refined tools that the Catholic Church, which I love, gives me.

We have entered a new phase of salvation history, a phase that will lead to the most glorious era in history. Triumphalism and supremacy will not move you closer. It will only make it less likely you will be part of that era at all. Please abandon your need to control and enforce, abandon the vanity that you are not like other men – that your humility and fortitude be pleasing to God and lay the groundwork for the coming Triumph.

 

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim

Donate to CORAC!

Join the Conversation!

The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)

18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552

Dallas, Texas 75252