Imagine you live in some hypothetical state in the segregated, Jim Crow South, circa 1930. Your state has laws against lots of minor offenses such as littering, loitering, and causing a public disturbance — but the penalties for such crimes are harsh and disproportionate: terms of two to five years in a hard-nosed, brutal state prison. Those draconian laws aren’t always enforced; if they were actually applied against the general population, citizen outcry would force their quick repeal.

Rather, the laws are only enforced when the person accused belongs to an unpopular minority: a black man, an immigrant, a Jew, or someone who loudly opposes some political boss. In those cases, justice is swift and certain. Most people, who belong to the majority group and don’t irk the local Democratic party, go through life unaffected by these laws. The police know very well which “criminals” to target.

Imagine further that in such a state you’ve been chosen for a jury. The black defendant standing before the court is undeniably guilty. He has not only littered but loitered, has done so flagrantly and in front of dozens of upstanding, white witnesses. When confronted about those crimes, he has gone even further and caused a public disturbance. The prosecution has proven its case, and now you and your fellow jurors are set to deliberate on the verdict. If convicted, this blatant troublemaker faces five to ten years in the penitentiary.

Should you vote guilty? Should you “follow the law” and “uphold the system,” even though you know it’s fundamentally unjust?

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

Will You Learn to Love Big Brother?

That’s the question every American faces today, as the anarcho-tyranny of the Biden regime grinds its way through a long list of victims. The president and the Homeland Security Secretary blatantly tolerate almost eight million violations of our borders, in defiance of our democratically enacted, race-blind immigration laws. But the White House colludes with local prosecutors to try to imprison Biden’s political opponent on exaggerated, outdated, or outright invented crimes. Democrats defy congressional subpoenas, then go laugh about it on CNN; Republicans who do that go to prison. Rioters who burned our cities during the George Floyd riots get compensation claims from the police who tried to stop them; nonviolent J6 protestors on hunger strikes are denied drinking water.

A similar system of tyranny operates in my own Catholic Church. Jules Gomes documented earlier today the prosecution of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for alleged schism by the Vatican. Viganò is the whistleblower who outed former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick — whom Francis sent to forge his secret alliance with Communist China — as a sexual predator. And since then, he’s gone on to assert that Pope Francis’s repeated public statements of heresy, his persecution of faithful Catholics, and his political support for enemies of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, indicate that Francis is not a Catholic, and therefore no longer the pope.

What If the Pope Has No Clothes?

Viganò has acted on his beliefs, and gone way beyond them, ordaining men without permission, even getting himself reordained by the unhinged Bishop Richard Williamson on the outlandish theory that all mainstream priestly orders since Vatican II were invalid. So, no he’s not perfect.

But schism? Let’s look into that.

Now, in a normal situation, the evidence against Viganò would certainly be enough to merit a guilty verdict. If someone had said such things about Pope Pius XII, for instance, no Catholic would object to that man getting excommunicated. You can’t have an absolute monarchy (which the Catholic Church structurally is — the pope isn’t bound by Canon Law, and can rewrite it at will) and allow the serfs to pelt the emperor with dung. Or perhaps more to the point, to claim that he is naked.

But what about when he is? Should the young man who claims that the emperor wears no clothes be punished for disloyalty, even though what he says is true?

Is truth any defense? It is in libel cases, at least in free countries such as America used to be. And the salvation of souls is meant to be the highest law in the Catholic Church. But to too many Catholics, the Church has become a cult of authority, 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.

Will You Join the Witch Hunt?

Catholics who now are pouncing on Viganò and everyone who ever agreed with him about anything remind me of those Republicans who rushed to microphones on January 7, 2020, and called the unruly protest an “attack on democracy,” then set up a Stalinist show trial in Congress that landed Trump attorney Peter Navarro in prison — and soon will see his advisor Steve Bannon there as well.

So is the emperor naked? Is Pope Francis objectively an enemy of the Church, a persecutor of the faithful and friend to heretics and tyrants? I have argued at length that he is, and many learned Catholics agree, calling for his resignation or removal.

We reported here last Friday that when

the Vatican celebrated World Children’s Day in late May this year — a holiday it created — a male drag performer danced in front of children, who even saw the performer’s posterior deliberately exposed to them.

Is Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the prelate in charge of Catholic doctrine who will be judging Viganò, himself a Catholic — or even a Christian? As we documented here at The Stream, that cardinal preaches an occult sex-mysticism unconnected to marriage that could have been lifted straight from the writings of Satanist Aleister Crowley.

Is the same fair standard of justice being applied to Pope Francis’s critics as to his supporters and close friends? Those friends include the sex abuser priest Rev. Marko Rupnik, who creates primitive murals of Jesus and the saints between molestations of nuns in blasphemous sex rituals. The Vatican intervened to lift Rupnik’s excommunication and return him to priestly service. His crude art is still used at the Vatican and in churches around the world to this day.

Under Pope Francis, same-sex mock “weddings” have been approved in Catholic churches. Cardinal Fernández issued a document equating the deportation of any immigrant, however illegal, with slavery and human trafficking. Francis demanded that every Catholic in the world take an abortion-based “vaccine” during the COVID panic, and removed bishops who resisted him. He minted a Vatican coin celebrating the useless vaccination of children with the untested, experimental mRNA gene therapy.

Is there anything like a real system of impartial justice and due process in place in our Church, any more than there is in the U.S. Department of Justice?

Those are the questions Catholics need to ask. Instead, too many will be acting like “law-abiding” white Southerners in my hypothetical state, sending “uppity” blacks to prison for littering and loitering. They will say, “Well, he seems to have violated the letter of the law. The fact that he’s being selectively prosecuted while far worse criminals walk free isn’t strictly relevant. The man is guilty.”

There’s a biblical term for making that kind of judgment. It’s called “straining at gnats to swallow a camel.”

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. With Jason Jones, he also is coauthor of God, Guns, & the Government.