Updated. Cardinals Mueller and Burke on the German Synod and beyond.

“Bishops are accusing brother bishops of schism and heresy — and it’s all over the most fundamental and crucial doctrines of the Church.” Signs of the times.

“Desecration is the act of depriving something of its sacred character, or the disrespectful, contemptuous, or destructive treatment of that which is held to be sacred or holy by a group or individual.”— Wikipedia

Meanwhile, and sadly, history is already assessing this apparently tragic Pontificate… Damian Thompson reports Ross Douthat’s  “devastating verdict on Francis’s 10 years”. 

“Pope Francis’ Decade of Division”

Ross Douthat, NYT: “… there are the grim numbers for the Francis-era church, like the accelerating drop in the number of men studying for the priesthood worldwide, which peaked around the beginning of Francis’ pontificate and has been declining ever since. Or the unhappy financial picture, now bad enough that the Vatican is charging higher rents to cardinals to compensate for years of deficits.”

“[Douthat] mentions the “sinister case of close papal ally Rupnik, accused of grotesque abuse, & the ‘micromanagerial cruelty’ of the Pope’s ‘strangulation’ of Latin Mass communities”

Douthat: “…Seen now at its 10-year milestone, then, this pontificate hasn’t just faced inevitable resistance because of its zeal for reform. It has needlessly multiplied controversies and exacerbated divisions for the sake of an agenda that can still feel vaporous, and its choices at every turn have seemed to design to create the greatest possible alienation between the church’s factions, the widest imaginable gyre… Read in the NYT

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Church’s ultimate trial

675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.

677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.