The Curtain Rises

By Charlie Johnston

Well, for the last couple of weeks I have had sporadic bouts with that cyclospora outbreak around the country. I haven’t been eating lettuce, but I do eat a lot of fresh fruit. I think maybe God has been jesting with me a bit, saying, “Hey Charlie, when did I ever tell you to start eating healthy?” So, maybe I’ll start eating the “new healthy;” Oreos and Sour Crème and Onion Potato Chips.

*********

I am trying something new today. Usually I boil things down to what I think. There is a meandering quality to today’s column because I have included a glimpse of HOW I think in it. Don’t expect many repeats, but it may be useful to some.

*********

Almost a decade ago I had a relationship with a woman online. Nah…not that kind of relationship. She was a gifted thinker and penetrating attorney who had a knack for getting at the heart of a problem without getting tangled up in the scrub of ancillary issues. I often sought her take on issues I was working on and, God bless her, she would, on occasion, seek mine on things that she was wrestling with. Like me, she was Catholic. During the heart of the papacy of Francis, whoa, did we have a lot of issues to wrestle with!

There came a time when I was guest at a big banquet in her state. The head of the organization hosting the banquet knew we loved to kick ideas around, so he seated me next to her and her husband. It was an absolute delight! For a while, we were almost oblivious to everything else going on, enthusiastically chattering away. But then, she got a guilty look and, embarrassedly, told me there was something she needed to tell me. All you men know it is ominous when a woman says that. But since this was the first time we had even met in person – and her husband was right there – I got a disorienting sense of vertigo wondering what this could possibly be about. After some hemming and hawing, she finally told me she had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. In the way that women often do after a difficult confession, she immediately started listing all the reasons that she just couldn’t do it anymore.

It always catches me off guard when I realize that a lot of people regard me as, “Mr. Catholic.” When I first came to Colorado, it mildly irritated me that in the time of kneeling at prayer before Mass, everyone there seemed to prolong it beyond reason. No one wants to be the first to rise in that situation. Then it dawned on me: while I was waiting for one of them to get up, they were all waiting for me to do the same. No one wanted to rise before I did. Realizing this, I started making my pre-Mass private prayers very focused and rose as soon as they were done. Everybody around me breathed a sigh of relief – and so did I. In many ways, I guess I am “Mr. Catholic” (though plenty of more conventionally minded critics would dispute that). But I don’t seek to impose my will on anyone and I am always delighted to converse with people of good will, wherever they’re coming from.

Recovering my balance, I told her that, while I will never leave the faith and think it is good to stand firm in rough times, I understood why her very logical and precise mind would be so offended by some of theological musings of Francis. His abuse of papal authority to unilaterally change actual Catholic doctrine (which no Pope can do) led her to question the very underpinnings. For me, if a hierarch does something that he is not authorized to do I just regard it as invalid. If people are generally following it, I know that the time will come when it is cast down as the tripe it is.

A pope may refine doctrine, but even on this he must do it in union with the Bishops of the world. There is the very rare situation where he can, by explicitly stating that he is speaking from the chair of Peter for the whole Church, act unilaterally. But he must explicitly state that he is speaking ex cathedra, that is, infallibly. It is MUCH more infrequent than most Catholics – and all Protestants – imagine. The last Pope to issue an ex cathedra pronouncement was Pope Pius XII who, in 1950 (six years before I was born), formally defined the Assumption of Mary. Even this, though it was not formally defined before then, had long been believed by almost all serious Catholics.

A pope may NOT contradict defined doctrine, even with the assent of the Bishops of the world. I would not have the crisis of faith my friend did unless a pope tried to contradict defined doctrine ex cathedra or a solemn council of the Church did the same. Yes, Popes and Bishops sometimes speak out of their nether regions like most people do. While it annoys me, I know enough history and Church history to know it has been happening since the beginning. As frothy as such waves of error are, they lack the primeval potency and coherence of actual defined doctrine. That is the tide that drives the Church – and primary evidence of its Divine Institution. When I was first studying the history of the Church as I was considering coming in, I looked for the catch, the flaw that would make it foundationally untenable. I was stunned when I found that, over some 2,000 years, there was none. Oh, there were plenty of frothy waves of controversy and dispute, but those were usually just the trappings that accompanied doctrinal refinement and advance. I know of no other institution where the foundational principles stayed solid for even a hundred years. It was a profound sign of divine guidance to me, though I knew people could rarely see it in the midst of the froth and roar of the transient waves that always accompany it.

I told my friend that, though I would never leave, I certainly understood and sympathized with what was irreconcilable to her. I was very glad that she had handled it all in a way that preserved her Christian faith, rather than abandoning it altogether. I have complete confidence that, through all the tumbling troubles we are going through, God is moving us towards unity. The person who disagrees with me 20 percent of the time is my 80 percent friend, not my 20 percent enemy. Add to that my conviction that God will gather ALL people of good will to Himself in His own time and it is my duty (and a delightful one, at that) to treat all people of good will as true brothers and neighbors. I know where I stand with steel conviction, but enjoy the company of many who stand differently than I do.

These thoughts have been running through my mind since some traditionalist friends and members of SSPX thought I had, perhaps, written them off because of the order’s disobedience to a lawful Papal order.  No, I was just reacting as I did with my friend earlier.

Obedience to lawful orders, lawfully given, is critical to me. The biggest problem on that score is that a lot of Catholics do not really know the difference between a legitimate order and an illegitimate one. But disobeying legitimate orders is every bit the breach that embracing heretical doctrine is.  

One might concede that, okay, but why don’t I object as vociferously to heretical doctrine being pushed from pulpit – and particularly from Bishops. Of course, I do, and publicly so. I will agree, though, that I do not object to it as constantly and obsessively as those who think that is the only evil that we must grapple with. When those who object most forcefully to heretical doctrine decide to showcase their objections by disobedience of lawful commands I do not think they bolster their argument, but undermine their credibility. The objection is that preaching obvious heresy is a breach in our relationship with God. Yet disobedience to the lawful authority He set over us constitutes a breach in that relationship, as well. So deciding that I am going to counter your breach with my own is less than circular logic: it is downright incoherent.

Even so, I certainly understand why some people get close to despair at the serious abuses that abound these days. I am grateful that, rather than chucking their faith altogether, they find ways to preserve it, even if they are disordered. If I were to go all Dante’s Circles of Hell on the matter, I think that those prelates who have mutilated the faith to try to form it to the world will occupy a very deep spot of torment. Those who have fled the abuse on a lifeboat rather than trust that the Lord will not suffer what is insufferable on His Barque will be saved in the end, but only after purification for their lack of trust in His justice. So, though I would not ever follow the SSPX into disobedience, I think they are in MUCH better shape than Bishops who preach that active homosexuality and transgender ideology are no sins at all – and that abortion is barely worth mentioning – and then, only pro forma. “Every one to whom much has been given, of him much will be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more.” (Luke 12:48). ‘Tis an awesome – and terrible – blessing to be cloaked with Holy Orders. You are invited to preserve and protect God’s Holy Word. Those who do so worthily will rank high in heaven. Those who try to remake it in their own image…well…Matthew 18:5,6 describes the millstones that await them.

I get particularly irritated at those who, in their zeal for the Lord, seek to find those they can condemn – what I often call those who think themselves God’s enforcers. Yet I also know that God knows men’s hearts. He knows whose zeal is real, if disordered, such as Saul of Tarsus or Job’s pious friends. These will be saved after being blinded for a time – and their true repentance after realizing their longstanding spiritual blindness. But many among them are just using God to justify their own malice and envy. They will perish – for they will not serve a God who does not do things the way they want.

On occasion, I have jested with my angels that most people who say they speak with the Divine only ever have Him confirming what they already believe, while my heavenly visitors frequently contradict and correct my errant thinking. On one occasion I think it came out as a complaint, and my angel told me sternly, “We really do speak with you and so you will be held to account for what you say and do…but do not think that those silly men who use the Lord’s name in vain to justify their passions will not have anything to answer for. Speak true.”

I have occasionally wished that God and His angels would speak directly to all, that all might see what a fearsome thing it is to be in the hand of God – and so conform themselves to His yoke rather than trying to conform everyone else to theirs. But I have been shown how such intensity would crush most men. So, I have to console myself with the knowledge that God does, indeed, will the salvation of all men and devises all things in the best way to secure it, even though I cannot quite understand His methods.

I know that most people think the carnal sins of appetite and weakness are the sins that kill – but they are actually the most easily forgiven. God knows what weak and fallible creatures we are.  It is the angelic sins, vanity and pride and envy that destroy souls. In Matthew 21:31, Jesus tells religious leaders that tax collectors and prostitutes were going into the Kingdom before them, for the former had the wit to repent and believe when confronted with the truth, while the preachers and religious leaders just doubled down angrily on their own disorders. Yet we look with contempt on garden variety sinners and often admire the vainest, most self-righteous among us. We have many things backwards.

Yet again, I come back to the reality that God wills all men to salvation. Since He will not direct our wills, He uses all manner of devices to show us the path of true righteousness – including    letting us get a taste of the consequences of sin. It is a harsh method, but one of the only methods that does not compromise our free will – that vital aspect of the moral agency that makes us in His own image. Despite all His efforts, how many of us will not repent or even see the beam in our own eyes! I remember how starkly Jesus’ painful lament from Matthew 23:37 struck me when I first read it as a child: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but you would not!” I remember feeling physically slapped by those last four words – and still feel it as I remember it viscerally in the potent language of King James, even if garbled a bit in my memory.

And yet, I take some comfort that I see Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic playing out in Christendom. (I have to make a bit of a lengthy aside here. Hegel’s dialectic posits that progress in human wisdom comes from the conflict between a flawed thesis and a flawed antithesis which, in time, gives rise to synthesis – preserving what is true in each while jettisoning some of the flaws. Ultimately the synthesis becomes the new thesis and the process begins again. It was a profound insight, but not quite the sum total of how progress happens that Hegel imagined it to be. It is NOT to be confused with the perversion of the concept that Karl Marx and later communists brought to bear on the subject. Marx was a midwit who had truly one profound insight – that economics was a prime driver of historical currents. But typical of the man, he botched this, too, as he insisted it was the ONLY driver of historical currents. He was a man who would confidently assure you that 2+2 = 22 and angrily tell you, “It’s science!” if you demurred. So if anyone speaks of a “dialectic,” make sure that they are speaking of Hegel and not Marx or Lenin. It’s the difference between a chestnut horse and a horse chestnut.)

Right now, a flawed modernist thesis is striving with an often errant traditionalist antithesis. God wills that they collide, that a great synthesis may emerge – a theology that is truer to Christ, Sacred Scripture, and Apostolic Tradition that builds up rather than tears down. As a practical political strategist, I see that the excommunication of some SSPX leaders enables the same disciplinary means to be credibly wielded against modernist abuses. I am watching closely what happens with the Synodal Heresy as it lumbers toward the scheduled ecclesial assembly in the fall of 2028. Many of the German Bishops are in far greater revolt against Catholic Doctrine than Martin Luther ever dreamed of. The ecclesial gnats wearing mitres who champion LGBT nonsense are more nuisance than threat, but they are fitting themselves for millstones as you read this, for the damage they do to the faithful.  How often Christ would have gathered them under His wing – but they would not.

Though the appointment of Bishops of questionable Christian credentials continues, I am heartened that the estimable Abp. Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco has been newly appointed to the Apostolic Signatura by Pope Leo XIV. The members of this office are charged with helping the Pope in the administration of justice in the whole Church.

So, what I see is the curtain visibly rising on a great battle in the Church, one that rivals the great controversies of the ages in Salvation History. I am disappointed that so many of our own  Bishops have taken on the role of Pontius Pilate, cynically asking, “What is truth?” while defying the clear commands of Christ. I am disappointed that some, such as SSPX, have chosen the breach of disobedience to lawful authority as the only stand they can imagine making against the internal abuses of the hierarchy, while blind to their own abuses. Yet I see each playing their role on the great stage which will result in a synthesis. SSPX and some others are not just dissidents, but spiritual lifeboats, as well. Modernist Bishops are trying to welcome the sinner (which is all of us) but have wrongly thought that welcoming the sin is the effective means for that.

I don’t much believe that God punishes us for sin. Rather, sin is debilitating and destructive in itself. He tries to warn against it because He knows it will destroy us if given free rein. If I tell you not to stab yourself, if you do so anyway and suffer great damage or death, it is not because I am punishing you for doing what I warned against. It is the consequence of foolishly doing to yourself what I tried to protect you from. Ah, but the devil makes stabbing ourselves look so attractive that we do not realize what we have done until we are bleeding out. God forbid I should ever betray my duty to God and to all by joining the devil in telling you that stabbing yourself is just fine if you do it right!

The ultimate synthesis will undoubtedly be flawed, too, but will be closer to the path of truth that leads to God. And the Divine Pageant will continue in the mud and the blood of human hubris striving for supremacy and dominance. It is enough to drive one mad unless he knew, with absolute certainty, that God wills all men to salvation. And though not all, many of us will finally suffer ourselves to be gathered under His wing. Some would not…but some of us will.                                                                                                                                                         

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