The Post Pontiff Church Michael Bolerjack
August 19, 2012
It has been four months since I first published the texts written between 2010 and 2012 on the papal antichrist. The issue of the pope’s butler accused in the Vatican leaks scandal and the plight of the American nuns whom the pope is attempting to silence caused me to write the two brief notes I am now adding to the chorus of lay criticism against the catholic hierarchy. In the future I doubt that I will have anything further to say about the pope and instead try my hand at better fictions. I think God condemned the church before it was created, and that as it says in the Book of Daniel, the power of the holy people must be scattered. In the end, to refer to Isaiah, God does not think like we do, His ways are not our ways.
Michael Bolerjack
PRAEMUNIRE In a preparation of a defense of the actions of the butler and the nuns, it is not so much necessary to justify what they have done or are doing, but to call into question the right of their accuser, the Pope. I believe the Pope bases the ultimate authority he has over them on long-standing notions of sovereignty to which the medieval theory of the divine right of kings is not foreign. But in what sense is Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, a “king”? If he claims sovereignty, it is probably in some sense as a kind of king, a monarch, an absolute, unquestioned ruler, reigning by divine right. Let us look at this. The liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church designates the last Sunday of the Church year, just before the Advent season, as the Solemnity of Christ the King. At any one time there can be but one King. That is Christ. It is Christ who is sovereign of the Church, not the Pope. Does Christ need a man to represent Him with say, power of attorney, as His agent, in the see of Peter? The presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, conferred on each member at confirmation, indicates, if one believes, that God is already represented and present and can directly affect persons and events. In the case, also, of each individual in the Church there is the all-important conscience, which as Cardinal Newman said is the “vicar of Christ” in each person. I believe it is this spiritual vicar whom the nuns and the butler are obeying instead of the man on the throne in Rome who is, in contradiction to one of the most important achievements of the Second Vatican Council, the treatise on conscience, produced after centuries of ambiguity and inquisition, forcing their consciences, and this precisely in religious matters, which the Council Fathers said was the area in which the rights of the conscience of the individual are most to be defended. Of course, the Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated under John Paul II and signed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, allows the teaching of Newman on conscience in one place, while later saying that Catholics cannot deliberately set their consciences against the Magisterium. I believe one can deliberately violate one’s conscience, but I do not see how one can deliberately “set” it, as one would set a watch. Rather, it is the conscience that sets us. Since conscience is the vicar of Christ, it is Christ who sets the conscience. The butler said he did what he did in leaking Vatican documents under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit. It was God’s will. The Spirit blows where He will. God is free. The butler has told investigators he saw evil all around him in the Church. This
from a man who has been at the Pope’s side day after day for years. A Vatican psychologist said the butler suffers from a “grave psychological disorder.” From the symptoms described, such as “uneasiness,” it seems to be a matter of an uneasy conscience, a moral dilemma, not a psychological problem. Other matters, such as the planting of a check in his apartment, to make him look like a thief rather than a whistle-blower, make me incredulous. If he asked no money from the press or publishers for the leaked documents, why would he appropriate a check? As an employee or resident of Vatican City State, he may be able to be held accountable in the Pope’s courts for his “crime,” but in terms of the higher law of the theological issues involved, the butler is not guilty. It was not a sin. It was an act of faith in God and an act of love for the Church. The Pope, sometime spiritual leader of a billion people, is now but a temporal ruler, like the popes of old, concerned with money, power, law, politics, keeping secrets, hiding things the Church and the world should know. He seeks to enforce justice on truth-tellers like the butler and the nuns, while at the same time begging for mercy for the sex-abusing priests and the bishops responsible for the cover-up. Only in a totalitarian regime could he get away with this, not in a democracy. There is some sort of dissonance here between Benedict’s roles as temporal ruler and spiritual leader. On the other hand, does the Church then have two Kings, Jesus Christ it’s spiritual sovereign and Benedict it’s temporal? We know the history of the popes and emperors in the middle ages. The pontiff always held the spiritual ruler to be supreme. And so He is. Let us never say we have no king but Caesar. Christ is King. May He come quickly. The sovereignty of Benedict being in dispute and the sovereignty of Christ recognized, let us appeal to English law. The rule of Praemunire applied to those who upheld papal supremacy in legal matters involving the English King. Convicted, those supporting the Pope had to forfeit. A fortiori if Praemunire is applied by analogy to the current question. Christ is King in the Church and in each individual in the Church. One cannot serve two masters, as the Lord said. Benedict must forfeit. Certainly, Christ the King may have a council or counselors, as other kings may have, but he needs no other sovereign. I believe, as in the parable of the vineyard, the King is returning to take it back from the usurpers who beat and killed the men the King sent to them to speak for Him. Benedict, on his accession, claimed to merely be a laborer in the vineyard, but this means one who does not give to God what is God’s. Christ the King has chosen the American nuns and the Pope’s own butler to speak and act on his behalf, to rebuke Peter to his face, which seems to be a time immemorial job for those in the Church. I
call on Cardinals and Bishops to also speak and act, in defense of the butler and the nuns, and in common cause with them and their lay supporters. I thank God that these events are unfolding on the fiftieth anniversary of the convening of the Second Vatican Council, which is still in living memory. Blessed John XXIII said God spoke to him directly and told him to call the council. Across the board, the current Pope and his predecessor have besieged it and attempted to roll-back point by point the high-water mark of the Catholic Church. In matters of “practical theology” such as church administration and the liturgy they have pretty much succeeded, but in terms of what may be called “mystical theology,” that is, the individual, unique relationship of each Catholic with the Holy Trinity, they will not succeed. For the Kingdom of Heaven is indeed within us and cannot be overturned. This relationship is forever, and will outlast even St. Peter’s and the so-called eternal city of Rome.
END OF PROPHECY There have been seventeen encyclicals of the antichrist. Because of the exigency of the number 18 (6+6+6=18, 6x6x6=216 and 2+16=18, and John Paul 2 + Benedict 16 = 18) there must be 18 such letters before the pontificate of Benedict ends. He said previously he was delaying his next one until after he had published the second volume of his best-selling work on Jesus. Now that that has been issued, as well as his book on the “signs of the time,” I think he will soon publish his fourth encyclical, to go with John Paul II’s fourteen, to reach the fateful number. What could this potentially culminating statement be? I think it will be the ex cathedra assertion of the proposed Marian dogma discussed for years of the Blessed Virgin Mary as mediatrix and adjutrix. That is, that she shares equally with Christ the role of both mediator and judge. The infallible declaration of this dogma, long championed by some in the Church, will do several things at once. First, it will permanently destroy the hope of ecumenism that in part gave rise to the Second Vatican Council, the hope of the reconciliation of the Catholic Church with the other Christian
churches. The Vatican in 2011 floated the idea that the real antichrist is the pope to come after Benedict, and that he will be an ecumenist. Immediately on certain Catholic websites the book by the Russian 19th century theologian Vladimir Solovyov, “Tales of the Antichrist,� appeared, which the Vatican suggested supports their contention. As you may suspect, I believe Benedict was merely trying to direct attention away from himself. The prophecies of Malachy are wellknown. There is to be only one pope after the current one. And he well may be ecumenical, which Benedict definitely is not. The foreclosure of the ecumenical movement will isolate the Catholic Church, reinforcing the mystique of exclusivity, which one priest told me is the ideology of the Church today. The faithful will be told that they are the good ones, sure of salvation, on the inside, unlike those without, the heretics, apostates, sinners, and so on. Many people go along with this, unquestioningly, fearing the consequences if they are outside the circle. Perhaps the ecumenical movement was a dream as regards the Catholic Church, because no thinking Christian outside the Church can in any way accept the authority of the Pope, and those in the Church cannot, for the most part, imagine a Church without a
Pope, and are really not allowed to imagine it, as papal infallibility forbids it. The ecumenical impetus at Vatican II nearly gave rise in Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, to the redefining of the role of the bishops vis-Ă -vis the Pope, but Paul VI in 1964 had two notes appended to the Council document instructing how it was to be read, over-ruling the Council, and taking the wind out of the sails of reform in the Church. The proposed permanent council in Rome composed of a group of bishops went on, but was diffused and made ineffective by the Pope and the Curia. The forces of reaction, which had tried to hinder the bishops even before they met first in 1962, by devising a plethora of drafts that had to be completely rejected one and all by the Council so that the real work could begin, turned the corner on the progressives with the “interpretationâ€? Paul gave of the most important document of the Council. It was only a matter of time, after what I think was the coup in 1978, for Wojtyla to step in with an iron hand and begin eliminating voices of opposition, dissent and even dialogue within the Church. The current struggle by the American nuns is a last attempt to stop the complete closure in the Church of the hope for a
freer Catholicism witnessed in part in Rome during the Second Vatican Council. What else will the possible encyclical on Mary do? It will do something I think unprecedented. The dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary, promulgated in 1854 and 1950, respectively, did not contradict scripture. The Bible does not comment on these matters, so the Popes had a free hand, and they had been widely discussed in the Church for years. However, the idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary being both mediator and judge with Christ is different. The apostle Paul said that we have “one sole mediator” with God, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ himself said “scripture cannot be broken.” An infallible papal dogmatic assertion on Mary as it has been discussed since the time of the Marian resurgence in the Church led by John Paul II, would be a flat contradiction of scripture as well as a long-held teaching of the Church, denying both St. Paul’s word as well as Christ’s. But the antichrist could well do such a thing, and I think he will. I believe he has already beatified and ratified the actual worship of the beast in
the Book of Revelation, and set in place the eventual suspension of the sacrifice, which will be made vacant spiritually, not literally. The odd thing about the notorious failed prophecy of May 2011 in “The End of the Church Age” was that it is not literally but spiritually true, and being invisible, may already have happened, almost unnoticed. That prophecy, which frightened many people about the end of the world, said a series of earthquakes would take place, ringing the globe, time zone by time zone, beginning in the Western Pacific Ocean. In fact, such an earthquake took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, devastating the city, but I believe that the prophecy may point to an event that has or will take place in the Catholic Church, connected with the recent changes in the Order of Mass, many of which may not have gone into effect because of the unheard-of innovation in the second half of it of the so-called masses of “reconciliation” which I do not think have as of yet been widely used, if at all. The paragraph of instruction on these all new masses stipulates different occasions for their celebration, such as times of emergency, and other more benign reasons. I believe that on a day now known to the Pope, before his reign ends in 2014, all of the
Catholic dioceses in the world will have one of these masses read and celebrated, and that this will be in conjunction with the assertion of the new Marian dogma, possibly with the insertion of the new titles for the Blessed Virgin into the mass. This may cause the deconsecration of the Roman Catholic Church on that day, time zone by time zone, around the world, from the start of the new day, west of the International Dateline. As it says in Revelation, Babylon falls in the space of one hour, the length of a Sunday mass. The Church will deconsecrate, if it does, because of lese majesty, an offense against the sovereignty of Christ the King, by the Pope, and against the Blessed Virgin Mary, who though seemingly exalted by this act of the Pope, is actually being impugned in her humility as the handmaid of the Lord. For too long the Church has distorted the image of Mary, and now I believe this was done with insidious intent, both to trap Catholics who love her into the coming deconsecration, and to make war on the Woman as the Dragon does in the Book of Revelation. It may be that nothing at this point can be done to stop this from happening. Perhaps all we can do is await the final spiritual vacancy of the Catholic Church, though what external temporal affect this will
have on the World cannot be known, though there are many frightening indications in the Book of Revelation of events prophesied to take place, which I think will be triggered by the voiding of Catholicism. We may look forward to the thousand year reign of Christ when the battles are over, but the road there will be hard for anyone to traverse. On the other hand, there are still one billion Catholics, and they individually, or nationally, by groups, or orders, or en masse, are still free to follow their consciences, to take action against the abuses of the Church already known, and the darker sub-text which has given rise to them. The democratic forces in the world have long been engaged in a struggle with antidemocratic forces, and this is true in the Catholic Church, too. These forces of democracy, nascent at the Second Vatican Council, may still be asserted and the Church taken back, saved, transformed, and the world with it brought to a peaceful and loving end, in which judgment is not necessary. The choice confronting Catholics is simple: a free, democratic Christian Church, or a totalitarian antichristian empire modeled on Caesar. May God forgive all who hold and teach the Catholic faith.