“Is the Pope Catholic?” Since at least the 1950s, that rhetorical question has provided a reply to an equally obvious question. But nowadays, at least for one Catholic bishop, it’s a legitimate question that stands on its own.

On his Substack account in late August, Bishop Joseph Strickland, who served the Diocese of Tyler, Texas until last November, accused Pope Francis and his highest subordinates at the Vatican of apostasy.

In making his case, Strickland mentioned visions a Japanese nun experienced in 1973 “about an apostasy which would begin at the top,” he wrote. The Catholic Church considers those visions legitimate. But Strickland’s case relies on more than 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.”

The Rome-UN Axis

As The Stream previously reported, Francis endorsed the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, which reflects the Vatican’s embrace of the globalist, materialist utopianism that began at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). As The Stream also has often reported, Francis’s papacy prioritizes environmental sustainability, economic redistribution, unlimited immigration, gender ideology over historic teaching against abortion and homosexuality.

Strickland is no friend of Francis. 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 the U.S. House speaker at the time and supports legalized abortion.

In the piece, editor Michael Matt called Francis a “diabolically disordered clown” who “is in opposition to 2,000 years of church teaching.” Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo 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 calling 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 for unspecified complaints.

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;” he also embodies Catholic leadership’s disregard for the fundamentals of the faith it was called to proclaim.

Pervasive Corrosion

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.

Martin was no amateur. Besides writing numerous books, he 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. He also said he was an exorcist, but independent confirmation of that statement is hard to obtain.

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 … as an organization, is in apostasy.”

When the leadership is apostate, the adherents 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.”

So 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.

John Paul the Overrated

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,” he 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.

William Lobdell, a religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was studying to convert from evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism when he decided he could no longer believe in God at all. 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 stunned 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 what are the implications?

Apostasy and Credibility

For the clerical leadership, widespread apostasy destroys the Catholic belief that the Holy Spirit protects the Church’s teaching authority from error and that, consequently, the Church represents the fullness of revealed truth.

Perhaps the dogma most associated with those concepts is papal infallibility, the belief that the Holy Spirit protects the pope from error when he formally teaches on faith and morals in his pastoral role. 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. In practice, however, papal infallibility allows popes to bypass dogmatic limits and promote agendas that directly contradict historic teaching.

As The Stream has often 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, then 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 — first made by the operator of an anti-Catholic blog.

Apostasy and Complacency

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.

 The Stream’s John Zmirak, a lifelong Catholic and author of seven apologetics books, described that complacency with blunt, passionate eloquence:

For 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.

The Devil in the Details

But Martin made a more frightening assertion.

“We have the fact that prelates and priests and nuns, but above all prelates in the church,” he told Janzen, “have become members of covens and worship Satan, and worship Lucifer.”

In one of his books of fiction, Windswept House, Martin describes a satanic ritual involving animal sacrifice and child sexual abuse — a ritual designed to enthrone Satan in the Vatican. The account, Martin maintained, referred to a similar ritual that allegedly took place simultaneously in Rome and Charleston, S.C. in 1957. That ritual involved a young priest, Joseph Bernardin, a serial pedophile who became the archbishop of Chicago and one of the church’s most liberal prelates.

“There was this consecration, this enthronement of Satan within the Vatican, of Lucifer by the way,” Martin told Janzen. “It’s a historical fact. It was done one particular day by a certain group of people representing Luciferians all over the world, especially American Luciferians. Therefore, in a certain sense, Lucifer has power.”

While it seems shocking for any cleric to align with Satan, Martin believed satanism is far more prevalent than people realize, especially in the upper middle class.

“The satanists I know who belong to Luciferian and satanist covens in New York are all lawyers, doctors, architects, nurses, brokers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, and they’re perfectly respectable citizens,” Martin told Janzen. “They pay their taxes. They contribute to the local church. Some of them are Catholic, some of them are Protestant, some of them are Jewish. They’re perfectly respectable as far as civic life goes. They’re models of civic behavior.”

Perhaps more shocking is Windswept House’s main plot point: The story describes how powerful Vatican officials and secularist globalists force a pope to resign. The ensuing election would produce a successor who would implement radical theological change and promote globalist utopianism.

Sounds like Benedict’s resignation and Francis’ election, right? Now consider that Doubleday published the book way back in 1996.

Perhaps this question is more important: Why should any church — especially one proclaiming to preach the fullness of the Gospel — expect any protection from God if it rejects the revelation it was called upon to preach?

 

Joseph D’Hippolito is a freelance writer who has written commentaries for such outlets as The Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, and Front Page Magazine.