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“Is the Pope Catholic?”
That rhetorical question has traditionally served as a humorous reply to the obvious. Now, at least for one Catholic bishop, it becomes a legitimate query into the previously unthinkable.
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who served the Diocese of Tyler, Texas until November, accused Pope Francis and his highest subordinates at the Vatican of apostasy. Strickland made the charge Aug. 23 on Substack.
In making his case, Strickland mentioned visions from a Japanese nun “about an apostasy which would begin at the top,” he wrote. The Catholic Church considers those visions legitimate. But Strickland’s case goes beyond subjective criteria.
“Our national political system, the Vatican, and too many influential organizations around the world are engaged in a program that is nothing short of a twenty-first century betrayal of Jesus Christ and His Church,” Strickland wrote. “Like the betrayal of Judas Iscariot almost two thousand years ago, this present-day betrayal is emanating even from those at the very heart of the Church and the state.”
As FrontPage Magazine reported, Francis endorses the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, which reflects the Vatican’s embrace of globalist, materialist utopianism that began at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). As FrontPage also reported, Francis’ papacy prioritizes environmental sustainability, economic redistribution, unlimited immigration and gender ideology over the church’s historic teachings against abortion and homosexuality.
Strickland’s criticism has been unrelenting. Two years ago, the bishop linked to a video from The Remnant, a traditionalist Catholic newspaper, that criticized the pope for giving communion to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who served as Speaker of the House and supports legalized abortion.
The piece included comments from Editor Michael Matt, who called Francis a “diabolically disordered clown” who “is in opposition to 2,000 years of church teaching,” he said. Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo, another Catholic, added that “Rome and Pope Francis have lost their teaching authority with this move” which “is worthy of Judas Iscariot,” he said.
In May 2023, Strickland tweeted that he rejects the pope’s “program of undermining the Deposit of Faith” and encouraged Catholics to “follow Jesus.” That October at a conference in Rome, Strickland read a letter that called Francis “a usurper of Peter’s chair” before he said the pope “supported an attack on the sacred.”
One month later, Francis removed Strickland from his episcopal position.
But Francis is no outlier. Not only does he represent the logical consequence of the Vatican’s support for what Pope Benedict XVI called “a true world political authority … with teeth…to manage the global economy.” Francis also embodies Catholic leadership’s disregard for the fundamentals of their own faith.
Malachi Martin, a traditionalist and a former Jesuit priest, went farther than Strickland. During the 1990s, in a series of interviews available on YouTube, Martin described the church’s dire state with Bernard Janzen, another traditionalist.
During his career, Martin studied the Dead Sea Scrolls as a biblical scholar for a pontifical university and served as the secretary for an influential cardinal during the Second Vatican Council. After leaving the Jesuits, he achieved widespread recognition as an author.
For Martin, the rot corrodes far more than the Vatican.
“The organization,” Martin said, “the Roman Catholic Organization, as an organization, that is composed of cardinals, bishops, priests, religious, nuns, with schools and academies, and institutions, parishes and dioceses and everything that goes along with this, that this, as an organization, is in apostasy.”
Where the false shepherds go, the ignorant sheep will follow.
“At the present moment a sizable majority of people are in apostasy, have been led into apostasy, and a sizable minority of cardinals, bishops, priests, and religious (nuns) are in apostasy,” Martin said. “They no longer profess the basic truths of Christianity – forget Catholicism.”
If such authorities no longer profess those basic truths, then what do those authorities believe?
“They want to completely de-supernaturalize Roman Catholic teaching so that we become good unsupernaturally motivated human beings,” Martin said. “The assault is very simple: Just be like the rest of men. Adore a general God. Be good. Be compassionate men. Be humanitarian. Join man in building man’s earthly habitation in this world.”
That certainly sounds like Francis. It also sounds like Agenda 2030.
Martin’s interviews took place during the reign of John Paul II, arguably the most revered and beloved pope of modern times. But Martin offered an indictment in his 1990 book, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order.
“John Paul’s concentration and febrile activity were directed almost exclusively to the geopolitical issue in human affairs,” Martin wrote. “Apart from now and again repeating traditional doctrines, he did nothing and is doing nothing to halt that deterioration. Isolated words not followed by concrete applications have done nothing effective to correct it.
“John Paul has, in sum, not even attempted to reform the very obvious deformations affecting and finally liquidating his churchly institution. At one early moment, he even asserted that his Church structure could not be reformed.”
That assertion cost one would-be Catholic his faith in God.
As the Los Angeles Times’ religion reporter two decades ago, William Lobdell was studying to convert from evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism. But the day before making his final decision, Lobdell decided he could no longer believe in God. Years of covering religious corruption — including the Catholic sex-abuse crisis — overwhelmed him.
In 2007, Lobdell wrote a column explaining his transition to atheism. One response he received astonished him.
“I got an e-mail from someone deep inside the Vatican,” Lobdell said, “who says there are many people in the Vatican who don’t believe any of this stuff, not surprisingly.”
So if Martin’s indictment is correct, it reflects a situation that has lasted at least for decades, if not longer. But if the Catholic Church is apostate, what does that mean?
For the clerical leadership, widespread apostasy destroys the credibility of a fundamental element of Catholic belief: God protects the church’s teaching authority from error and, consequently, the church represents the fullness of revealed truth.
Perhaps the dogma most associated with those concepts is papal infallibility, the belief that God protects the pope from error when he formally teaches on faith and morals in his pastoral role to the world at large. When the pope makes such an announcement, Catholics consider him to be acting “ex cathedra,” Latin for “from the chair,” or throne.
In theory, papal infallibility is limited. Pius XII made the last technically infallible declaration in 1950 concerning the bodily assumption of Mary, Jesus’ mother. In practice, however, papal infallibility allows popes to bypass dogmatic limits and promote agendas that directly contradict historic teaching.
As FrontPage reported, Francis does just that through stealth and rhetorical subterfuge. John Paul II used the same techniques to change Catholic teaching on capital punishment for murder, and revised the catechism in 1997 to open the possibility for an abolitionist position that contradicts Scripture. In 2018, Francis took John Paul’s position to its logical extent by calling capital punishment “morally inadmissible,” thereby formalizing abolitionism in the catechism.
Papal infallibility also creates a cult of papal personality that distorts Catholic teaching and reinforces the Catholic tendency to offer blind deference to clerical authorities.
“Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants, because he is ‘free from disordered attachments,’ ” the Rev. Thomas Rosica, the English-language attache in the Vatican’s press office, wrote in 2018. “Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”
Ironically, Rosica was so sycophantic that he plagiarized those comments from an anti-Catholic blog.
For the laity, widespread apostasy exposes a complacency that relies too much on clerical authority, which cults of papal personality exploit, as Rosica demonstrated. Reinforcing that complacency is a popular interpretation of Matthew 16, which assumes that no matter how bad things get, the “gates of Hell will not prevail” against the Catholic Church as an ecclesiastical institution.
John Zmirak, a Catholic author and editor for The Stream, described that complacency with blunt, passionate eloquence:
“(T)o too many Catholics, the Church has become a cult of authority,” Zmirak wrote, “as if God became man, died on a cross, and rose from the dead for the sake of creating the institution of the papacy — and giving us some infallible authority that would spare us the effort of thinking. Just color within the lines, get your card punched every Sunday, don’t question your betters, and God will contractually owe you an eternity in the great bingo hall in the sky.”
If Francis’ election accelerated a long-standing trend toward apostasy – and if complacency reinforces that apostasy – should Catholics realistically expect the divine protection Matthew 16 implies?
Consider how the Old Testament portrays the Israelites. Despite being commissioned as God’s oracle to the world, the Israelites disregarded that role for increasingly intense idolatry. As a result, Assyria and Babylonia destroyed the Israelites’ political independence and took them into captive exile.
Given such a portrayal, can Catholics truly afford to be silent about a wholesale rejection of the faith?